MAGA Wants to Evade Accountability for Trump's Campaign of Lies and Fear Mongering
The UnPopulist's Post-Debate Analysis: Shikha Dalmia on Trump's populist demagoguery and Berny Belvedere on the right-wing meltdown over the moderators
Shikha Dalmia:
The widespread consensus in the pundit class—including among the right wingers on Fox News—is that Kamala Harris handily won the debate against Donald Trump last night. I agree, although Harris’s performance was hardly flawless. Just like Trump, she ducked and vacillated on a whole host of issues, most notably abortion. Although her treatment of the issue was strong, emphasizing how women should be able to make their own reproductive decisions—not have them made for them by the government or Donald Trump—she studiously refused to answer the question about whether she would allow late-term abortions for fear of looking “extreme.” Yet it would have been easy—and politically smart—to say yes and explain that when mothers make that tragic choice at that stage, it is either because their own health is on the line or the fetus is diagnosed with severe birth defects that would make for a painful and short life. It takes a very dark view of moms, she could have said, to believe that after carrying a baby nearly to term, they’d choose to abort it simply to avoid the inconvenience of raising a child.
She also refused to take responsibility for her administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. And while airily declaring that Americans “actually need a leader who engages in solutions, who actually addresses the problems at hand,” she offered barely a hint of a plan for tackling any of them. And she wanted to have it both ways on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Trump did the same: He refused to take responsibility for his manifold blunders in office—from his own failure to withdraw from Afghanistan, his mismanagement of Covid, his economically ruinous trade wars, his cut-taxes-and-spend-wildly fiscal policies that led to the largest peacetime increases in the national debt, his horrific calls to execute the black teenagers accused of the 1989 Central Park rape, his disgraceful and cruel immigration policies, and his refusal to acknowledge that he instigated the violent Jan. 6 coup attempt.
All of this is of course politics as usual and both candidates indulged in it. But where Trump truly distinguished himself was by doubling down on his demagogic, mendacious fear mongering, particularly against immigrants. He came prepared to foist his American Carnage 2.0 campaign on the country—and, on that, he delivered.
The term “American carnage” is Trump’s own—not someone else’s exaggerated description of his political thinking. He first invoked it during his 2017 inaugural address when he depicted a country that was allegedly descending into poverty and lawlessness and losing its traditional ways, thanks to an out-of-touch elite. And, since then, he has never let up.
The chief villain in his story are immigrants whom Democrats, in cahoots with the woke left, are eagerly ushering into the country to replace native whites.
Right from get go, he characterized undocumented immigrants from Mexico as rapists, murderers, and criminals—never mind that the crime rate of immigrants in general and undocumented immigrants in particular is lower than that of natives. And once in the White House, he escalated his rhetoric, narrating horror stories about immigrant crime in sanctuary jurisdictions (that had the temerity to refuse to cooperate in enforcing his draconian immigration policies). Lurid tales of brutality by MS-13, an El Salvadoran gang based in Los Angeles, were part of his rhetorical staple.
At his rallies this time, he regales his audience with stories about Central American countries emptying their prisons and mental institutions into America. But his strategy of anti-immigrant fear mongering reached a new level of brazenness last night when he peddled debunked stories about immigrant crime in two small American towns before a national audience that was in no position to judge the accuracy of his obscure claims (which is why it was so vital, as Berny Belvedere notes below, for the moderators to fact check him in real time, MAGA outrage nothwithstanding).
He seized upon rumors floating in MAGAverse about buildings in Aurora, Colorado, being taken over by Venezuelan gangs—after city officials and residents whom the gangs were allegedly extorting held a press conference noting that nothing like that was happening. More colorfully and absurdly, he accused Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of killing and eating dogs and cats of locals, even though local officials have had no such complaints. In fact, the Haitians aren’t illegals. They have duly approved legal status and the town, which has been in demographic decline, was sorely in need of a population boost.
None of that of course matters to Trump, or, for that matter, his running mate, JD Vance, who, when confronted regarding these lies by NBC News last night, pulled out another perennial nativist trope and accused Haitians of bringing communicable diseases.
Why do Trump and Vance continue to slip ever deeper into the gutter? Vance is, after all, married to the daughter of Indian immigrants and has two beautiful, mixed-race children and the nativist genie he is uncorking could well come back to bite his own family.
The simple answer is that a campaign built on populist demagoguery has nowhere else to go especially when slipping in the polls. It is based on an “us versus them” binary where the “us” has to constantly be rallied and riled against the “them.” Fear mongering and resentment—American carnage—is baked into the cake. And it will be served up nonstop between now and November—and perhaps beyond.
Berny Belvedere:
About half an hour into last night’s first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee asked on X, “Who else is annoyed with ABC’s one-sided fact checking?” Two hours later, Lee ran a poll that, as of this writing, records a 93% disapproval rate for ABC’s debate moderators from about 6,700 respondents. Of course, social media polls run by ideologically self-segregated hardliners will always suffer from insuperable selection bias. But one thing the poll does is capture the right’s widespread contempt for the debate moderators. In fact, a case could be made that since the start of the debate, no one, not even Kamala Harris, has attracted more scorn from conservatives than ABC.
“KAMBUSH!,” read the front page of the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post today, “Trump rattled as Harris and ABC hosts gang up on him during debate.” Last night, Megyn Kelly fumed: “The absolute gall of ABC to keep ‘fact checking’ ONLY Trump while letting her lie in every answer is infuriating.” Ben Shapiro, 11 of whose last 18 posts on X have been about the moderators, said that ABC proved the media is “so far up Kamala Harris's ass that they're doing active colonoscopies with their eyeballs." Shapiro’s Daily Wire colleague, Matt Walsh, claimed: “The moderators are not attempting to even feign objectivity. This is three against one.” Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy made the same point: “This is an interesting debate format: 3-on-1.” Dilbert creator Scott Adams went further, “This was not a debate. It was organized crime.” Conservative influencer Charlie Kirk found a way to top even that, describing the debate as a “public show trial where the judge, jury, and executioner is ABC News.” MAGA evangelical author Megan Basham agreed with the assessment that this is the “worst moderated presidential debate” of all time and, channeling FDR’s reaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor, predicted that “it will live in infamy.” Pizzagate pioneer Mike Cernovich, never one to shy away from a conspiracy, claimed that it’s obvious “ABC gave Harris the questions in advance.” And earlier today, with total disregard for the First Amendment, Trump himself called for ABC to lose its broadcast license over how its hosts handled the debate.
The right’s collective hysteria over the performance of ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis is remarkable—but not in the least bit surprising. The conservative persecution complex, which takes many forms but is always powered by the dogmatic conviction that the right is forever doomed to face unfair structural disadvantages, was in full swing last night in light of Trump’s struggles against a far more formidable debate opponent than the version of Joe Biden he faced off against in late June. And you can understand why: In a race that is now neck and neck, the right needs Trump to come across as competent and coherent to whatever number of persuadable voters remain. But that can’t happen when moderators upset the apple cart by dispensing with the idea—one that so many of their peers have uncritically adopted in the past—that Trump’s overwhelmingly higher falsehood count shouldn’t correspondingly attract a higher measure of journalistic scrutiny.
From that perspective, the collective flip-out among conservatives over the moderators’ performance makes a certain amount of sense: withholding preferential treatment for Trump represents an existential challenge to his candidacy. That’s why, to Trumpists, even the mildest forms of factual accountability feel deeply unjust. They have come to expect special treatment for Trump, and in fact depend on it to help obscure how catastrophically unhinged he is. Trump needs special treatment from the media in order to clear even a minimal threshold of presidential fitness. When moderators challenge his assertions more than those of his opponent, he is denied the special privileges he relies on to stay electorally competitive.
But the reason it feels to Trumpists that the debate moderators were biased is because they operate under a self-serving notion that fairness can only be achieved by pre-committing to an equal number of fact checks for both candidates. Proper journalistic scrutiny, however, is not served by any such rule. Indeed, to the extent that it would require assuming that both candidates are equally dishonest, it would undercut the journalistic commitment to the truth. If one candidate tells 100 falsehoods and the other 10, for the moderators to settle on an equal number of interventions would show contempt for reality in the name of a false objectivity.
The reality is that Trump brings with him to every debate—to every conversation, really—a monumental falsehood disparity in which the sheer number of lies he spews overwhelms whatever slip-ups anyone else commits. In fact, the moderators took it easy on him, relative to the number of falsehoods he uttered. A CNN tally found that Trump uttered over 30 false claims to Harris’s one. As The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta put it, “One way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times and Harris zero times. Another way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times instead of 500 times.”
The real TDS—Trump Denialist Syndrome—was on full display last night among Trump’s enablers and supporters who believe they are entitled to put forward a congenitally dishonest candidate without receiving a correspondingly higher degree of scrutiny. That’s MAGA privilege, and there is no reason that the media should oblige it.
© The UnPopulist, 2024
>>> As The Atlantic’s Tim Alberta put it, “One way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times and Harris zero times. Another way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times instead of 500 times.”
FTW.
I’m under the impression that it’s not actually true that elective late-term abortions don’t exist: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/yes-there-is-such-a-thing-as-elective-late-term-abortion/