A failing nation

Donald Trump was absolutely right about one thing during last week’s debate with Kamala Harris. The former president repeatedly called the United States a failing nation, and his very candidacy is evidence of the degree to which the world’s most crucial democracy has, indeed, fallen on hard times.
It is difficult to imagine a healthy America in which the nominee from one of the two major parties could be so utterly detached from reality. The mainstream news media regularly accuses Trump of lying, but his statements (while clearly false) aren’t actually lies if he is delusional enough to believe them. The evidence increasingly suggests delusion, fueled by his increasing isolation from objective sources of information.
At last week’s debate, Trump demonstrated more clearly than ever before the degree to which he marinates in the alternative reality of the far-right media universe in which immigrants eat our pets, babies are executed after birth in blue states, and dictators like Vladimir Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban are considered character references. Call it “Trump World,” a magical place where other world leaders fawn in awe at the great man’s strength and wisdom, and where all his rallies are attended by adoring throngs who hang on his every word.
Reality, of course, is vastly different.
Indeed, the split screen of last week’s debate presented what was certainly the starkest contrast in any presidential debate in U.S. history, between an angry and intellectually lazy old man and a much younger, much sharper, and far more disciplined opponent in Vice President Kamala Harris. As much as Joe Biden erred in his decision to challenge Trump to debate last June, Trump erred in ever agreeing to walk on the same stage as Kamala Harris.
Within the first few minutes, she exposed Trump’s lack of preparation. With Trump, it was like watching one of those young, dumb sunfish hanging out at the end of a Minnesota dock, waiting to rise to any crumb one might toss its way on the end of a hook. Harris just had to dangle the bait and Trump would be off, down some rightwing rabbit hole spewing nonsense, the meaning of which was unintelligible to those of us not steeped in the daily excretions of NewsMax, Breitbart, or the Fox News knuckle-draggers.
As Trump gyrated on stage, virtually at Harris’s command, his suggestion that the vice president would be a pushover for foreign leaders was exposed as just another Trump delusion. In “Trump World,” Harris is just some lightweight (Trump calls her “dumb as a rock”) with a funny laugh. Yet last week, she demonstrated exactly the opposite, live on American television, as she took control of the debate and quickly exposed Trump for the weak and ignorant blowhard that he is. Harris’s experience as a prosecutor certainly wasn’t wasted.
As Harris got under his skin, he became increasingly flustered, resorting to his usual huffing and puffing, repeating “the same old, tired playbook” as Harris has described it. Harris just looked at him, clearly amused, knowing that she was in complete command of the evening.
In a healthy democracy, last week’s debate would be all most Americans would need to see to recognize that Trump is unfit for the office of the presidency, and that Harris is a far superior choice. As later fact-checking confirmed, the bulk of Trump’s claims were, as usual, exaggerated or outright false. He is either dishonest or unable to distinguish fact from fiction, either one of which should be disqualifying. But it was Trump’s lack of discipline that stood out most of all. Someone with the impulse control of a sunnie is a clear and present danger as the commander of America’s military.
None of this, of course, is news. What we witnessed last week was simply Trump being Trump. What is astonishing is that one of America’s major parties could ever nominate such a man, and that, if polls are to be believed, that the race for the White House remains neck and neck.
Despite his many shortcomings, Trump has proven remarkably effective at one thing, and that’s convincing large numbers of ill-informed Americans that virtually everything about our country is corrupt. In doing so, he has left our nation badly divided, between Americans who live on a more-or-less reality-based planet and those who live in the walled-off silo of make-believe known as “Trump World.” It’s a divide that could well end America’s 248-year experiment in democratic rule.
Hopefully, events like last week’s debate can begin the process of bringing some of Trump’s victims back to reality and begin to repair the tattered fabric of the nation.