By Kevin D. Williamson
Wednesday, September 30, 2020
The debate was a remarkable example of the fact that
Donald Trump, the most self-serving man in America, doesn’t know how to do
himself any favors.
For the first ten or twelve minutes of the debate, he was
walking away with it—Trumpy, sure, but in control and surprisingly
reasonable-sounding. If he had kept that up for the whole night as Joe Biden
dodged questions about court-packing schemes, couldn’t figure out whether he
supported or opposed the Green New Deal, and attempted to brazen his way
through the undisputed facts about his son’s business dealings, Trump might have
been able to make a plausible case that his administration delivered a strong
economy (that’s presidential superstition, but this is how we talk about these
things now) that was producing some pretty impressive numbers until the
epidemic, and that his administration responded strongly to the coronavirus by
halting flights from China, for which he was called a hysterical xenophobe.
(Which, of course, he is.) There would be a lot of bull in that, of course, but
it would be a basically defensible case, and one that would have been
relatively easy to sell with the economy making a faster recovery than most had
expected.
Trump’s goal seems to have been something different: to
establish that Biden is too diminished and weak to do the job. Hence the
schoolyard antics. It probably doesn’t matter (because debates rarely change
anybody’s mind), but Trump didn’t need to do that: Biden was always going to do
it for him. But if we assume that there are some genuine on-the-fence and
persuadable voters, this was the wrong way to reach them—because people who are
going to be snookered by that kind of dumb, posturing bluster already are
voting for Trump. The people who think Biden is senescent and doddering, and
who are voting based on that, already are Trump voters.
Even the softball question about white supremacists he
couldn’t quite get right: “Stand by”? If
Trump had a lick of wit about him, he might have said: “White nationalism and
anti-Semitism? You know I live in New York, right? I live there on purpose, and
it’s a terrible way to surround yourself with conservative white Protestants.
Proud Boys? What do I have do to with these low-rent nobodies?”
And who is advising Trump on health care? When Biden
knocked him for his lack of a “comprehensive plan,” he insisted that he has
one, which, of course, he doesn’t. He should have acted like the businessman he
plays on television and run with it: “You’re right, Joe, we’re not pursuing any
sweeping, national health-care legislation. There won’t be any Rose Garden
signing ceremony for ‘Trumpcare.’ We have a divided government and no real
consensus on the issue, and trying to remake the health-care system at large
without consensus and buy-in doesn’t work, as you, of all people, should know.
That’s why Obamacare has failed. Most of your own party today disagrees with
you about health-care policy, and most Democrats are closer to Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders on this than they are to you. And that’s why
your comprehensive plan isn’t going to amount to squat. Instead of something
like that, my administration is making discrete reforms when and where we
can—the individual mandate, veterans’ care, and drug prices—which may not have
the allure of a grand scheme but which might actually make life a little better
for a few million Americans, especially the elderly and veterans.”
But, derka-derka worked for him in 2016. So, who
knows?
The problem for Joe Biden, emphasized last night, is that
there is a difference between the candidate he has been for most of this race—“Not Donald Trump”—and the one he has to
be for the last part of it.
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