Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

It's amazing to realize in retrospect that in the five presidential debates since 2016, the Debate Commission only found just before the fifth and final one the remote control and the mute button on it. Maybe it was under the couch cushions and a thick blanket of pet dander with a long-forgotten Gummi bear attached to it but, better late than never, right?

     Donald Trump's performance at last night's debate in Nashville was comparable to Rudy Giuliani's little law partner in the new Borat movie- Flaccid.

     As Keith Olbermann said in today's Worst Person in the World video, he simply ran out of bullshit. He trotted out a rancid rehash of the 2016 lies and conspiracy theories that washed him into the White House in a tide of orange Koolaid and sleaze. He interspersed the flat Trump brew from four years ago with a fresher vintage brewed up by Giuliani and the Russian GRU. And, to anyone who'd ever been dumb enough to freshen up a flat beer with beer from a new bottle can tell you, all that gives you is a semi-flat glass of beer.

     And it needs to be reiterated that only a megalomaniacal, delusional blowhard like Donald Trump can make a stammering, semi-senile man a decade past his shelf life look like the 1960 Kennedy by conspicuous relief. 

     But, just to be fair to the former vice president, Biden, an old policy wonk from way back, seemed prepared to not only debate policy positions but also to push back against Trump's predictable if sluggish tsunami of bullshit. Biden took a half a billion dollars from the Chinese for... something. Hunter got three and a half million from China for... something. You and Obama spied on my campaign.

 

     He also knows more about wind than Biden, obviously through personal experience.

     A presidential prerequisite is that the Chief Executive show some empathy, especially in the wake of a disaster. Clinton had it. Obama had it. Bush at least did a creditable job faking it. Trump has no empathy for anybody but himself. In the opening seconds of the Lesley Stahl 60 Minutes interview that Trump shat on after knocking all over the chess pieces and strutting around as if he won like the proverbial pigeon, the debate quickly devolved into a grievance session.

     The media are unfair to him, the IRS that's cut him tens of millions of dollars in dodgy tax breaks that would get the rest of us audited had treated him "very badly." But when asked to respond to questions that required even a semblance of empathy, Trump blew it. Because, as we all know, Trump doesn't do empathy. That's not to say he does it poorly. He doesn't do empathy at all. Being expected to express it, much less fake it as Bush admirably did after Katrina, is an intolerable expectation that he simply will not fulfill.

     When invited by Kristen Welker to address minority families' anxieties, Trump responded in typical fashion: "I've done more for the black community than any president since maybe Abraham Lincoln." When Biden's turn came, he said it wasn't "about my family or his family, it's about your family." He perfectly summoned an image of a worried minority family at the proverbial kitchen table worrying about making the mortgage or buying new tires or sending their kid back to community college.

     That show of empathy was openly sneered at by Trump, who seemed insulted by the very image.

     That's because Trump doesn't give a shit about Middle America any more than he gives a shit about Erie, Pennsylvania. He sees the Keystone State not as one filled with working class Americans who have serious and legitimate fears that keep them up at night but as a battleground to be won, a patch of real estate with 20 electoral votes.

    At the end of the debate, Trump was asked by Welker what his thoughts were on minority communities living near petroleum and chemical plants. Once again, Trump predictably defaulted to money, bragging about how unspecified people were making more money than ever working for these companies (despite 40,000,000 being out of work).

     Joe Biden responded by relating a story from his youth about, how when he was growing up in Claymont, Delaware, which has an oil refinery in it, and his mother would turn on the wipers before driving him to school in the morning and seeing oil slicks on the windshield. You don't need to be a writer or even a very sophisticated reader to appreciate Biden's vivid use of imagery, something that can be readily understood by anyone who'd grown up near an oil refinery, steel plant or paper mill.

     Trump was barely human, barely tolerable, barely restraining his taut leash feral junk yard dog rage only when he was told his mic would be shut off if he'd repeated his debate performance the first time (he did and had his mic muted only once that I could see). 

     But it was like watching the sad spectacle of the dancing bears in New Hampshire or, dare I say it, Russia, in which a lumbering beast is coerced into performing for a peanut-crunching crowd agreeing to remain on its hind legs in a grisly simulacrum of human posture as long as it's fed a steady diet of soft service ice cream or, in Trump's case, attention.