On Donald Trump and the Perils of Being Far, Far Too Online

Cats and dogs, dogs and cats

I’m supposed to be on a break but I can’t resist a quick take on last night’s debate. Also, there are still some tickets left for two events I’m doing in Chicago at hilariously different sorts of venues: I’m interviewing Richard Dawkins at a big theater September 21 and doing $oyboyz, a new comedy/politics show with Jeff Maurer, at a small comedy venue on September 22 that is pretty likely to sell out. Buy tickets now! (Please.)

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I thought Kamala Harris crushed Donald Trump. This could be wishcasting on my part, but for what it’s worth, registered voters who watched the debate appear to agree with me by an almost 2 to 1 margin. This does not mean Harris will win or even improve in the polls, and of course a million people on Twitter disagree with me vehemently, but that’s what I saw, and that’s what a lot of other people saw. Had Harris flopped last night — and to be honest, going in I was a bit worried because I was unconvinced of her ability to excel in a dynamic, sometimes adversarial speaking situation — I would have gladly said so. No one who saw what I wrote about Joe Biden as his campaign was collapsing can accuse me of being a partisan during my rare forays into this type of political analysis.

Part of the reason Trump performed so badly is that he is Trump. Now, he is, loath as I am to admit it, gifted in certain ways. He has the ability to fire up certain types of people and to rally them around him with great enthusiasm. But his gifts are fairly limited. Because he is incapable of staying on script, and because he so frequently says things that are quite weird or off-putting or both, he has a lot of trouble expanding his base of support.

Last night, his specific failings had to do with his being too online. Most insanely, he spread a grossly exaggerated rumor about migrants eating dogs and cats, which emerged from a genuinely difficult situation in Springfield, Ohio, where an estimated 20,000 Haitian migrants have settled in a town that previously had a population of about 58,000. We’ll return to that situation momentarily, but for now I guess the most important point is that — and boy did I not ever expect to be typing something like this — the migrants are not eating the local cats and dogs.