Excuses Week

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, September 13, 2024

 

There will be no more presidential debates this year, we learned on Thursday. Everyone except me has the same theory as to why.

 

Donald Trump got his clock cleaned on Tuesday, he knows it, and he doesn’t want it to happen again now that undecided voters are beginning to make up their minds. He’s chicken. That’s the consensus explanation for why he’s ruled out further debates with Kamala Harris.

 

I don’t buy it. It gives him too much credit for being in touch with reality.

 

Three sources told the New York Times this week that Trump was “jubilant” about his performance Tuesday. In private conversations, the paper reported, numerous cronies reassured him that he’d done great, as cronies are wont to do.

 

Whether he’s capable of distinguishing what’s true from what he wishes were true is an open question, as it’s always been. My guess is that he’s lost interest in additional debates because he’s already begun to pivot psychologically away from campaigning and toward how the election is supposedly being stolen from him. He must be the only candidate in American history whose operation is more focused on “election integrity” than on turnout.

 

He’ll go on tossing out occasional slop about ending income tax on overtime pay or whatever in hopes of bribing swing voters, but his heart’s not in persuasion. It’s in sniffing out the “rigging” to come.

 

It’s his advisers who recognize that a second debate is likely to do more harm than good, I suspect.

 

What they said to him to encourage him not to meet Harris again is known only to them. (“You beat her so bad, there’s nowhere to go but down in a rematch,” probably.) But, per the Times, his “allies” were quietly clear-eyed about how terribly things had gone on Tuesday. Trump can get away with sounding nutty, disjointed, and strategically unmoored when Joe Biden is standing at the other podium in a stupor. When it’s Harris, not so.

 

And while they’d never admit it, I suspect many MAGA influencers quietly agree.

 

Their preoccupations since Tuesday’s debate betray anxiety about Trump’s ability to successfully prosecute the case against his opponent. Watching him get pantsed in a battle of wits with supposed halfwit Kamala Harris may have shaken the faith of even some of the faithful. The more crankish, incoherent, and undisciplined their man seems, they might be thinking, the more energetically they need to rationalize reelecting him.

 

“Do Americans realize how radical Trump’s operation has become?” I asked on Thursday. That question is set up to get readers to say “no” but maybe a better answer is “his biggest fans sure do, and they’re worried after the debate that undecideds are about to figure it out.”

 

Something must be done, urgently. And so it’s Excuses Week in MAGA media.

 

Excuse 1: media bias.

 

In 2008, on the eve of the GOP’s descent into populism, George Will presciently lamented the grassroots right’s habit of dismissing every press criticism of Sarah Palin as prejudice against “real Americans.” Media bias against conservatives is real but rarely decisive, he warned them.

 

We can argue over whether it’s rare or not. But if your candidate is debating Kamala Harris and it takes him until his closing argument to ask why she still hasn’t implemented her supposedly wonderful agenda after three and a half years, that’s not a media bias problem. It’s a “your candidate is lazy, stupid, and childish” problem.

 

And that’s a big problem at a moment when swing voters are starting to pay attention. The solution: Blame perceptions of Trump’s lousy performance on ABC News’ bias and dial up the hysteria until you have one of the most over-the-top freakouts in the history of right-wing media.

 

“It is difficult to overstate how utterly unhinged the right’s reaction to Tuesday night’s presidential debate has been,” writer Berny Belvedere tweeted afterward. At his site, The UnPopulist, he brought receipts. As tends to happen with every major outrage du jour, grumbling among activists quickly took on the trappings of a competition with each eager to prove they were The Angriest Of All.

 

Complaints about the moderators fact-checking Trump more aggressively than Harris spiraled into demands that the network lose its broadcast license as punishment, which is not a thing but which predictably became a talking point for the man who had walked away from the debate “jubilant.” Conspiracy theories followed, also predictably, courtesy of little-known “news” outlets alleging that ABC News gave Democrats the questions beforehand. At least one Republican senator dutifully picked that up and demanded that the network explain itself.

 

The conspiracy claim has also become a Trump talking point, needless to say. Left unexplained is why Harris would have wanted or needed the questions in advance given that she didn’t actually answer any of them. Repeatedly, she ignored the moderators and used her speaking time to recite scripted points she wanted viewers to hear.

 

Her opponent could have done the same. Instead he preferred to talk about the size of his crowds and whether immigrants in Ohio are eating their neighbors’ pets.

 

Belvedere’s theory for the post-debate hysteria is that the disparity by ABC News in fact-checking hit a nerve with the populist faithful. Trump’s enablers “believe they are entitled to put forward a congenitally dishonest candidate without receiving a correspondingly higher degree of scrutiny,” he wrote. “That’s MAGA privilege, and there is no reason that the media should oblige it.” ABC News didn’t oblige it, undermining the central political fiction of this era—that Donald Trump and his opponents are equally trustworthy and therefore should be equally viable as political leaders.

 

But you don’t need to go as far as that to explain the magnitude of the uproar. The debate was a momentous, potentially game-changing inflection point in the campaign; the right spent months preparing the battlespace by telling everyone who would listen that Harris is a moron and a communist; Trump performed horribly despite having had every reason to know how she would try to bait him; and now his fans are understandably panicked that if they don’t come up with a way to explain what Americans saw, persuadables are going to start peeling off.

 

The explanation is media bias—“record-shattering” media bias, no less. Trump looked bad only because ABC News wanted him to look bad. If you find yourself doubting his fitness for the job based on what you saw on Tuesday, don’t trust your lying eyes. That’s just what the jackals in the press want you to do.

 

Excuse 2: Loomerization.

 

The best evidence of how badly Trump did on Tuesday is that media bias, the sturdiest pillar in the right’s persecution complex, was not enough to carry the full weight of the damage control.

 

Every now and then he’ll screw up so egregiously that the blame for it can’t credibly be shifted entirely to enemies outside the right-wing tent. A degree of introspection and accountability is called for.

 

But not by Trump, of course, whose image as a hypercompetent presidential candidate must be protected at all costs. The refrain from partisan Republicans whenever he bungles something horribly is “Trump should fire whoever advised him to do that!” The more obvious it is that he’s the idiot who’s responsible for the miscue, the more urgent it becomes to pass the blame to his aides instead. “Who is advising this man?”

 

When the screw-up is especially bad, you might even see the aide or aides in question accused of being left-wing infiltrators who are sabotaging him deliberately, not incompetently.

 

Playing the part of sinister svengali in this week’s fiasco is MAGA nut-cutlet Laura Loomer.

 

I wrote a bit about the post-debate scapegoating of Loomer in Thursday’s newsletter but Republican angst about her proximity to Trump is still growing. She accompanied him to the debate on Tuesday and then to various 9/11 commemorations on Wednesday (after calling the attacks an “inside job” last year), and Republicans ranging from Lindsey Graham to Marjorie Taylor Greene are unnerved by it. What sort of “unhelpful” influence might she be exerting on our hero?

 

“His debate performance and overly broad messaging show that he’s listening to the wrong people and Laura Loomer is the wrong person,” one former Trump campaign staffer complained to Mediaite. Republican Sen. Thom Tillis went further, not quite accusing Loomer of being a Democratic saboteur but claiming that she might as well be. “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans,” he wrote. “A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning re-election. Enough.”

 

A conspiracy theorist at the highest levels of the party uttering disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans? Who could imagine such a thing?

 

Contra Mediaite’s source, there’s no evidence that Trump is “listening” to Loomer’s political advice. Everything he said at the debate was as likely to have come from his own running mate as from her. And contra Tillis, there’s no evidence that Loomer is doing anything against Trump’s will to hurt his election chances, as his odd formulation implies. It’s not like she’s elbowing her way into the former president’s photo ops despite strict orders to stay away from him.

 

Loomer is part of Trump’s entourage this week because Trump wants her to be, full stop. She’s a fulsome sycophant even by MAGA standards and the two share a passion for conspiracy theories about cultural enemies conniving illicitly against them and their tribe. He likes her. I would bet several of my internal organs that no one at the top of the campaign, not even Corey Lewandowski, is jazzed about having Loomer tagging along and driving negative coverage—except for one person.

 

She’s there because, and only because, Trump himself sees her as a pugnaciously crankish kindred spirit. When he lavishes praise on her from the podium at his events, there’s no diabolical RINO instructing him through an earpiece to do so.

 

That’s a hard pill for Republicans to swallow. Every minute of the last nine years of the right’s political project has been devoted to convincing American voters through lies, spin, and propaganda that Donald Trump is as fit for the presidency as any Democrat, if not more so. He sabotaged that project with his debate performance. And now here he is, less than two months out from Election Day, sabotaging himself again by parading one of the most notorious kooks in right-wing media on the campaign trail like she’s some sort of spiritual sherpa.

 

The obvious way to reassure voters who worry (correctly) that he’s nuttier than squirrel turds is to cast Loomer as some sort of MAGA Rasputin who’s manipulating him. We don’t need to defeat Trump at the polls in order to protect America, it turns out; all we need to do is exile Rasputin to Siberia and he’ll return in her absence to his allegedly serious-minded self. In a party in which it’s forbidden to criticize the leader, “Who is advising this man?” is the best Republicans can do to straighten him out.

 

It’s the closest they’re going to get to admitting that he’s a crank who should get his head examined. Imagine telling a guy who attempted a coup after brain-poisoning himself with lies about vote-rigging, “Sir, your new companion is making you seem a tiny bit unbalanced.”

 

Excuse 3: the Haitian menace.

 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the smears about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, broke big after the debate.

 

That’s a result of Trump himself spreading the smear during one of his answers, of course. But had he performed better on Tuesday and kept Harris on the defensive about her record, right-wing media this week would have been heavy on stories about her being an empty suit who’s not ready for the big chair and light on migrants supposedly fricasseeing felines.

 

The Haitian menace is what you lean into when your candidate left you with nothing stronger to run with.

 

Partly it’s an exercise in morale-building. My former colleague Andrew Egger reminded readers today at The Bulwark that every MAGA tale needs a villain within (in this case, the elected officials of Springfield who have supposedly enabled the cat-napping) and anyone who disputes the truth of that tale will be treated as a tribal enemy—even the father of the boy who was killed by a Haitian immigrant in a car accident last year. Go figure that after an enormous debate disappointment, at a moment when Trump seems vulnerable, populists would want to cheer themselves up with an old-fashioned immigrant-stomp.

 

The frenzy over Springfield serves another important purpose, though. It functions implicitly as an argument to voters to look past Trump’s age, temperament, intellect, gullibility, authoritarianism, rape-y tendencies, and other flaws and to choose him over Harris anyway. Why? Because the migrant threat has reached previously unmatched levels of barbarian insanity.

 

Republicans don’t need smears to make that point. Millions of immigrants have entered the U.S. on dubious pretenses during Biden’s presidency; some have committed murder. But Trump and his party have spent years pointing that out and trying to rally the public around him as a solution and all it’s gotten them is the same ol’ 47 percent in the polls that he received in the 2020 election.

 

To persuade reluctant Americans to set aside their misgivings and reelect him anyway, they need to offer voters a more potent excuse to do so. That’s where the Haitians come in. If the immigrant savages among us have now stooped to treating their neighbors’ cats and dogs as dinner, why, there’s no limit to how depraved they might become.

 

It’s working, too—maybe not on swing voters but certainly on some of America’s more excitable so-called patriots. “On Thursday, bomb threats led to the evacuation of Springfield City Hall, two schools and the state motor vehicle agency’s local facility,” the Times reported yesterday. More bomb threats caused Springfield schools to close again on Friday. Some local Haitian families are keeping their children home out of fear; one activist told the Haitian Times that “people are afraid for their very lives.”

 

Trump emphatically doesn’t care. He claimed again on Thursday, falsely, that immigrants are “walking off” with other people’s pets. J.D. Vance doesn’t care either. He’s inched away from the smears about cat-eating lately but is encouraging Americans to continue to hype the humanitarian disaster the Haitians have caused in Springfield “every single day.”

 

It’s possible to call voters’ attention to America’s too-porous border without egging on a race riot in a small town based on an outrageous lie. But I expect Trump and Vance would regard violence there as a political victory in its own right, the same way Trump had it both ways when he egged on his fanatics to treat the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago in 2022 as some sort of assault on democracy. Once he’d gotten them good and fiery, he turned around and magnanimously offered his assistance to the attorney general in lowering the heat before “terrible things” happened. Hint hint.

 

That’s him all over. He goes around starting fires, then treats them as evidence that America needs a very strong fire chief to put them out. The uglier Springfield gets, the more he’ll cite it as a lesson in how dangerous cultural tensions driven by mass immigration are becoming and why we need a law-and-order president to deal with it. In a country as civically corrupted as ours, that’s good for 47 percent. Maybe more.

 

Needless to say, the “leaders” in his party can’t scrape together an ounce of courage among them to oppose the demagoguery he and Vance are engaged in. They wouldn’t dare. After Tuesday’s debate disaster, it’s an all-hands-on-deck effort to convince wary voters—and maybe even themselves—that Trump remains the better of the two choices in November notwithstanding his performance. Loomer, the ABC moderates, the Haitians: Any excuse will do.