Eating Dogs and Cats

And other tasty morsels from the Harris-Trump Debate.

First of all, are you embarrassed yet? 

We Americans have given a lying, racist buffoon the most powerful job in the world once, and we appear to be willing to do it again. 

There he was on television, again, a spectacle in a red tie within sight of retaking that position because a significant percentage of American voters are willing to believe immigrants are pouring out of the world’s jails and coming to America to feast on people’s pets; that mad doctors are performing transgender operations on aliens in prisons and on schoolchildren; that pro-choice Americans execute newborns. 

We are the richest, most advanced, armed and dangerous nation on the planet, the last empire, the world’s cop, and this is the best we can produce? Vice President Kamala Harris was on the money at the convention last month when she said of Trump, “he’s not a serious person.” 

Last night, she “certainly seemed to win” the debate, per the New York Times’ bet-hedging morning political newsletter. I, the people I watched with, and most pundits on both sides agree. But does it matter? Does one debate refocusing our attention on the madness of Trump in a forum where “sane-washing” by journalists is impossible to accomplish in real time, make any difference?

Before I answer that, a few observations. 

Resting Felon Face 

Since breezy JFK bared his perfect white teeth at sweating Nixon in the first televised debate two generations ago, we know that in these contests, policy barely matters. What sticks are a few zingers and the flavor of the theatrics. The real adversaries are the camera and the lights versus face, gestures, blinks, and gulps. 

In the first five minutes, Harris had Trump on the back foot by pinning him to Project 2025. About ten minutes later, she lobbed the zinger of the night. Looking into the camera, not at him, she said: “I'm going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump's rallies because it's a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about how windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

On the split screen, Trump’s jaw twitched. A junkyard dog at the chainlink fence. His turn to speak came. Muir wanted him to talk about the border — Trump’s go-to issue. Throughout the debate, one could imagine the ghoulish face of Stephen Miller on his shoulder reminding him to talk about the “invading migrants” anytime his thoughts ran astray — but for the moment, he was having none of that. 

“She said people start leaving,” he fumed. “People don't go to her rallies. There's no reason to go. And the people that do go, she's busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can't talk about that. People don't leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

From that point on, when he wasn’t speaking, and the screen split between the two, his face was frozen into an expression we’ve seen before, everywhere: the mug shot moment, the scowling, slit-eyed visage on the T-shirts of his fans. 

The RFF. His Resting Felon Face.

“Our nation’s history”

“Probably the worst in our nation’s history,” he said of the Biden economy. 

“I created one of the greatest economies in the history of our country.”

Exiting Afghanistan was “the worst withdrawal and in my opinion the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country.”

“This is the most divisive presidency in the history of our country.”

“I built one of the greatest economies in the history of the world.”

We know from ghostwriter Tony Schwartz and many others in his orbit over the years that Trump doesn’t read very much — if at all. He might have had an untreated learning disability as a boy (a subject I cover in my book chapter on his mother). His one-time economic advisor Gary Cohn told Michael Wolff, “it’s worse than you can imagine…Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not brief policy papers, nothing.” 

How does a man who, for whatever reason, has almost never cracked a book in his life know so much about “our nation’s history?” The answer is, of course, he doesn’t know anything. Trump just loves the grandiose sound of the phrase, the way it rolls off the tongue. By my count he repeated it, non sequitur and nonsensically, at least a dozen times last night, inserting it into almost every response. 

Whipped on Wharton

Related to his essential ignorance of American — or any — history: Trump likes to brag about his degree from Wharton, the storied Ivy League business school in Philly. But he has steadfastly refused to allow the school to release his records or his grades. 

An admissions officer recalled to the Washington Post how Trump got in, first his brother Fred Jr called and asked him to let his younger brother in, then Donald showed up with his dad Fred Sr “who sought to ingratiate himself” the admissions officer remembered. 

Trump has called himself a “super genius” but has never released records showing how he got into the school — or how he performed once he was there. The admissions officer told the Post that in the 1960s, Wharton’s acceptance rate was close to 50 percent (it is now, like all the Ivies, extremely competitive.) 

“It was not very difficult,” Nolan said of the time Trump applied in 1966, adding: “I certainly was not struck by any sense that I’m sitting before a genius. Certainly not a super genius.” 

Harris needled him by referencing how his alma mater has slammed him for his tariff-heavy, billionaire-loving economic plan: “So, Donald Trump has no plan for you. And when you look at his economic plan, it's all about tax breaks for the richest people…what the Wharton School has said is Donald Trump's plan would actually explode the deficit.”

“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.”

This bit of racist dog-whistling is the latest iteration of the “shithole countries” and “Mexican rapist” fear-mongering that Fox helps him disseminate and that his curdled fans, looking for a scapegoat, eat up. It’s laughable (Harris did laugh on split screen) and ridiculous (“see my snack, see my snack, made from real dog and cat. See this cheddar, goes much better, with authentic Irish Setter,” was among the hundreds of bon mots Reddit wags posted.)

David Muir corrected that and other lies in real time. MAGAs went nuts over the fact checking, of course. But in fact, the debate moderators could not — as usual — keep up with the firehose. They pushed back on immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Democrats executing babies. But when Trump said 168 countries saw their crime rates go down because all their criminals are inside America now, viewers were left to Google that on their own. 

In the post debate “spin room,” where reporters traditionally wait for the campaign strategists (not the candidates) to shape narratives and commentary, Trump himself took the unusual step of lumbering out to complain that “it was three against one.” 

Executing Babies 

Trump is and will continue to be completely flummoxed by abortion. “Everyone wanted it” Trump likes to say of his nominating the three Supreme Court Justices who in one move ripped away modern health care for tens of millions of American women. Of course, this is a lie. The Americans who wanted to overturn Roe were and are a tiny sliver of fanatical religious extremists hellbent on saving zygotes with no concern at all for post-birth humanity — especially not the women who are now bleeding out at home or in their cars because health care providers afraid of criminal charges won’t touch a miscarriage. 

Harris is right to keep hammering at this issue. Trump’s instinct that he will lose the election on abortion (per the New York Times) is on target too. 

He’s boxed in by his pandering to the fanatics and by his own misogyny. He can spew lies but there is no way around it. The moderators, to their credit, immediately fact-checked him on the outrageous but popular claim that Democrats want to “execute” babies after they're born. 

Swifties for the Win?

Harris won the debate and then got a champagne pop afterward when Taylor Swift endorsed her. Signing herself “childless cat lady,” Swift wrote that the Vice President “fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them." Harris “is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.” 

In just the first 20 minutes her Instagram post had 2 million likes. As of this morning, she’s racked up 8 million. That’s Black Mirror power. 

The question now is, does last night — Trump’s bad showing, Harris’ superior clarity and charisma, and the Swift endorsement — predict anything for November? 

The MAGA fan base is an ossified bloc, impervious and unreachable. And Trump clearly could care less about expanding the base — even if his strategists wish he would.

Who are they fighting over? First, they need to penetrate that sliver of Americans who aren’t paying attention, who might lean away from the chaos and divisiveness of another four years of Trump. Harris and Trump can also try to expand their own numbers among Americans who haven’t voted before. Only 66 percent of Americans voted in 2020 — the highest turnout in history, but still only two-thirds of the population. Are the other 30 percent reachable? And critically, can they be lured out to vote out in the “battleground states”?

The most important distinction between the two candidates — and the factor that will make or break the election — is gender. Kamala Harris has not played up her identity — a wise move in a country where even many progressives are weary of all the slicing and dicing. But in a political discourse still weighted on the male side, the role of women in deciding who leads the country is habitually underestimated or ignored. The first Trump election was a slap in the face to American women. The eight years since have been characterized by an appalling rise in toxic masculinity — from the popularity of accused rapist Andrew Tate, the presence in and around Trumpworld of out and proud misogynists, the scornful anti-female politics of pronatalists in Silicon Valley, Trump’s own history and conviction in the E. Jean Carroll case, and finally, the legalized abuse of women in the form of withholding medical care that Harris so forcefully called out last night. 

Whether or not “Swifties” register to vote for her in huge numbers or not, the debate last night made clear that this election is American women’s to win or lose.