The UnPopulist's Post-Debate Analysis: Shikha Dalmia on Trump's populist demagoguery and Berny Belvedere on the right-wing meltdown over the moderators
>>> 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.”
“he regales his audience with stories about Central American countries emptying their prisons and mental institutions”
But this isn’t the wording he uses is it? He always says ‘insane asylum’s’ and if you listen to him saying this in context it becomes clear over time that he honestly thinks ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘people seeking asylum’ is related to insane asylum’s
This isn’t even a hot take, just listen to his word salads on foreign insane asylum’s when he goes off script and it’s clear he really thinks that is what Asylum Seekers means
Thank God Harris doesn’t listen to you guys on abortion messaging
Yes I agree on the dark view of humanity stuff, but you know what kind of people are open to voting for Trump? People with a dark view of their fellow man
If you can’t see the negative ads that would be run from an answer like that then I’m glad you’re in political commentary and not Democratic political strategy
If you cannot see that there was a clear lack of objectivity and neutrality on the part of the moderators, then you are simply being incredulous. As Charles C.W. Cooke (who is not voting for Trump) pointed out at National Review, that is a completely separate topic from Trump's boorishness and lies. These are just two examples that stick out in my mind. The first was David Muir "fact-checking" Trump on whether or not the crime rate is going down as if that is a simple question with a singular yes or no answer according to one source and not a complex and highly debated topic across multiple disciplines involving many different variables.
The second was neither moderator fact-checking Harris when she claimed no American troops are currently deployed in active combat zones. That claim is even being contested now in liberal media outlets like Vox. Unlike the crime rate correction, that statement is easily verifiably true or untrue, and it is clearly the latter when there are American troops still deployed in Syria. It was also widely reported and common knowledge that several Navy SEALs died earlier this year fighting the Houthis in Yemen and the Red Sea. An "active combat zone" does not presumably mean only countries with which the United States is formally at war.
Even if you defend Muir and Davis by arguing that Trump's lies are more significant and harmful or that it is an unreasonable expectation for the moderators to correct everything, that raises the question of why bother doing it at all. The charitable answer is that the network believes the audience needs to be told they are being deceived, which is contemptuous and assumes voters are stupid. The less charitable interpretation is that they feel morally obliged to disadvantage one candidate, in which case the entire thing is a sham. None of that even goes into the bias of the questions or the amount of time dedicated to particular topics, which were both objectionable in and of themselves.
As if they needed to do anything to disadvantage Trump.
When Trump claims that the crime rate is going up he is not arguing a nuanced and complex issue. When he claims millions of crimes are being caused by illegal immigrants he is not trading in facts.
To be fair though not fact checked they were persistent in trying to get Harris to give direct answers to some questions.. A task that would be silly in the face of Trumps persistent and constant lying. Harris still hedged a lot. The one that sticks out to me was her change in positions on issues in just four years. Her consistent values defense was rather weak.explanation
He was not making a nuanced point, but that does not mean the moderator should dismiss a generalized claim on very flimsy grounds. Again, regardless of how Trump performed or harmed himself with poor debate skills, lack of knowledge, lying, hyperbole, and so on, it is indicative of a very serious lack of integrity among the moderators and their network and a large amount of apathy on the part of mainstream commentators whose partiality to one candidate outweighs what should be simple and agreeable values like fairness and neutrality. My impression from reading articles like this one and their comments is that people defending the moderators will make a weak case that Muir and Davis were being neutral and impartial. When pushed on this, they will move the goalposts to the commentators were not unbiased, but that's fine because Trump and his supporters are loathsome and have a persecution complex anyway so trying to be impartial doesn't matter one way or another.
There has never been another politician in my lifetime so egregiously indifferent to the true/false distinction as Trump. It's a pathological level of dishonesty. I recognized it first when he said "Nobody reads the Bible more than me."
Among his more recent whoppers is the patently absurd claim that everybody wanted Roe to be overturned. Then there are his incessant claims that if he loses an election, it's because the other side cheated - which resulted in the attack on the Capitol, ongoing threats against election workers, and hostility to our institutions among the political right.
Trump has actually told associates -- Michael Cohen and Stephania Grisham, certainly - that it doesn't matter if what they say is true; they just need to say it often so people will believe it. A gusher of lies is his normal debate tactic.
MAGAs call him "honest" because he's boorish and cruel. But he is extraordinarily, habitually mendacious - which is why he needs to be fact-checked more often than others.
It's true that Trump got away with saying that millions of immigrants are criminals. Seriously? Does he know how to study data?
There are at least 2 things, though, on which the questioners owed a fact check on Kamala: (1) her claim that he was tried for rape, and (2) her repeating the "very good people" line about Charlottesville.
She didn't claim he was tried for "rape." She said that Trump "has been found liable for sexual assault," which is accurate. But even the word "rape" fits, to be honest.
Here's how a WaPo piece on this matter starts off:
"After Donald Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, his legal team and his defenders lodged a frequent talking point.
Despite Carroll’s claims that Trump had raped her, they noted, the jury stopped short of saying he committed that particular offense. Instead, jurors opted for a second option: sexual abuse.
“This was a rape claim, this was a rape case all along, and the jury rejected that — made other findings,” his lawyer, Joe Tacopina, said outside the courthouse.
A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood."
Her critique about Trump's "very fine people on both sides" line is, in fact, correct. The context was Charlottesville. His supporters insist that all he tried to say was that there exist good people on both sides of the ideological divide, but with Charlottesville as the background context, this sanitized reading is untenable. Snopes' infamous fact check merely contended that Trump didn't explicitly say there are very fine white nationalists or neo-Nazis, and that he instead conveyed that there were very fine people on both sides of the surrounding Charlottesville divide. That's of course not the least bit exculpatory. Commenting about our civic divisions, with Charlottesville as the backdrop, an incident in which neo-Nazis marched and counterprotesters opposed the Nazis, and both-sides-ing like he did is indefensible.
Not at all. There were exactly zero "very fine people" marching in Charlottesville on behalf of the statues. Wanting a Robert E. Lee statue to remain up is morally abhorrent.
David I hope we are not going down some Talmudic rabbit hole here about those two statements which are roughly accurate. Your charctherization of his statements is quite charitable. If he had simply said millions of immigrants are criminals there would be no need for a fact check even that would have been utterly false. He said Haitians are eating dogs and Walz wants to execute new borns. This is not a place for false equivalence or whataboutery. There are plenty of other platforms where that would be welcome.
It's charitable for me to say that he's absolutely wrong in claiming that millions of immigrants are criminals? I don't get it. That strikes me as way more serious than a claim about a few immigrants eating dogs.
Also, I don't think it's a small issue to say that someone was on trial for rape when he was actually on trial for libel. Pretty big difference.
I wish that term "false equivalence" could be relegated to the dustbin of history. When someone says that A is true and B is true, he is not necessarily equating A to B.
It's kind of a mess and very difficult to fact check in a meaningful way in a brief statement.
The underlying conduct about which the slander, libel or defamation gave rise was his alleged sexual assault. He said it did not happen and said she was lying. In this civil matter the jury was left with the preponderance of evidence that the underlying conduct was probably true and therefore indeed he had slandered her.
It was the judge who after the trial said that New York statutes defined sexual assault differently but that Ms. Carroll was indeed raped by any common notion of the word.
So calling him a rapist (and this apparently is not the only case) is not altogether without a factual basis.
This is what I mean when I said such statements were designed to go down the Talmudic rabbit hole and deflect attention from the main issue. There is nothing she or anyone said that is remotely equivalent to what he regularly spews. This is not a demand for fairness, it’s a demand for sanitizing Trump’s noxiousness by pretending that she does it too, not surprising given that David believes Harris is more dangerous than Trump
When somebody claims that their side is always right, and the other side is stupid and evil, you barely need read. You know they're just another propagandist.
Can we all agree, this country doesn't need more propagandists?
And speaking of lies and fear-mongering, there's this:
If that's your view, then it is mystifying why you'd come here and not just bother to read but also comment. You have your own platform, it seems, where you can tell it as you see it as we do with ours. We don't go to your platform to promote our views and I'd request you not do that here. We can also agree to respect etiquitte.
Isn't that the point? Communication? Doing all your talking (and listening) inside the echo chamber serves no real purpose except to assuage your ego and make you feel warm and toasty. I question myself all the time. I invite anyone else to question me all they want. If I can't make and intelligent, informed response, that's on me, not them.
No you are trying to hijack our platform with your nonsense. Build your own readership rather than piggy backing on ours. We reserve the right to take action in future
But the authors did not claim that Harris was “always right.” Rather, they said her performance was not flawless. Nor did they say that the “other side” is stupid or evil. Be radically individualistic enough to give a fair and honest reading to these authors, without reducing their argument to caricature.
Did you even read TFA? Literally the second and third sentences:
"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."
ask yourself: would they be raging like this if donald had performed well & handled incoming fact checks as a comedian might w/a heckler? obviously not.
this isn't about the moderators. this is the rage of narcissistic injury. these people are in a rage because seeing their guy yelling about eating dogs on live TV made them look like absolute fools in front of the other half of the country.
"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."
Which is what Trumpists would otherwise decry as the doctrine "equity" - seeking equal results, rather than applying equal standards,
I noticed some hedging on Harris' part but I am not sure there is any way that she could address the Israeli/Palestinian problem (please remember that Israel is also carrying out a quieter war in the West Bank and not just Gaza) any differently than all other politicians before her because the whole American position is having it both ways. The trajectory of American policy has always been and will always be having it both ways. In the end the problem is Netanyahu and the extreme right upon whom he relies for power. But to say that out loud amounts to interfering with democracy in Israel. To actually bring real pressure on Netanyahu would compromise the actual security of Israel. The saddest part is that politicians still cling to, and fall back on, the two state solution. The Palestinians crossed the Rubicon on that decades ago and Israel's political right which has become too demographically large to control and will only accept a one state solution where Palestinians, if they choose to stay, will be second class citizens forever. Harris, as the only serious politician on the stage, generally gave the only answer an American administration can, or will, give. Anything Trump could or would say on the subject would be nonsense.
I thought I also heard her allude to no woman would willingly carry a child to 9 months and decide to have an abortion. I may have misunderstood. The 9 month abortion canard of the Republicans has always been a lie. And necessary late term abortions still need to be a medical decision and not under the control of the state.
As to the fact checking. The simple solution is for Trump to stop telling alternative facts. Second it would behoove him to actually seriously prepare for his debates. But Trump is first and foremost an unserious person.
But he is an unserious genius who has organized an entire political party for the sole purpose of keeping his ass out of prison and stash as much cash into his own pockets as he can in the process. He will fight on as long as he has access to other people's money.
>>> 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/
“he regales his audience with stories about Central American countries emptying their prisons and mental institutions”
But this isn’t the wording he uses is it? He always says ‘insane asylum’s’ and if you listen to him saying this in context it becomes clear over time that he honestly thinks ‘asylum seekers’ or ‘people seeking asylum’ is related to insane asylum’s
This isn’t even a hot take, just listen to his word salads on foreign insane asylum’s when he goes off script and it’s clear he really thinks that is what Asylum Seekers means
Thank God Harris doesn’t listen to you guys on abortion messaging
Yes I agree on the dark view of humanity stuff, but you know what kind of people are open to voting for Trump? People with a dark view of their fellow man
If you can’t see the negative ads that would be run from an answer like that then I’m glad you’re in political commentary and not Democratic political strategy
If you cannot see that there was a clear lack of objectivity and neutrality on the part of the moderators, then you are simply being incredulous. As Charles C.W. Cooke (who is not voting for Trump) pointed out at National Review, that is a completely separate topic from Trump's boorishness and lies. These are just two examples that stick out in my mind. The first was David Muir "fact-checking" Trump on whether or not the crime rate is going down as if that is a simple question with a singular yes or no answer according to one source and not a complex and highly debated topic across multiple disciplines involving many different variables.
The second was neither moderator fact-checking Harris when she claimed no American troops are currently deployed in active combat zones. That claim is even being contested now in liberal media outlets like Vox. Unlike the crime rate correction, that statement is easily verifiably true or untrue, and it is clearly the latter when there are American troops still deployed in Syria. It was also widely reported and common knowledge that several Navy SEALs died earlier this year fighting the Houthis in Yemen and the Red Sea. An "active combat zone" does not presumably mean only countries with which the United States is formally at war.
Even if you defend Muir and Davis by arguing that Trump's lies are more significant and harmful or that it is an unreasonable expectation for the moderators to correct everything, that raises the question of why bother doing it at all. The charitable answer is that the network believes the audience needs to be told they are being deceived, which is contemptuous and assumes voters are stupid. The less charitable interpretation is that they feel morally obliged to disadvantage one candidate, in which case the entire thing is a sham. None of that even goes into the bias of the questions or the amount of time dedicated to particular topics, which were both objectionable in and of themselves.
As if they needed to do anything to disadvantage Trump.
When Trump claims that the crime rate is going up he is not arguing a nuanced and complex issue. When he claims millions of crimes are being caused by illegal immigrants he is not trading in facts.
To be fair though not fact checked they were persistent in trying to get Harris to give direct answers to some questions.. A task that would be silly in the face of Trumps persistent and constant lying. Harris still hedged a lot. The one that sticks out to me was her change in positions on issues in just four years. Her consistent values defense was rather weak.explanation
He was not making a nuanced point, but that does not mean the moderator should dismiss a generalized claim on very flimsy grounds. Again, regardless of how Trump performed or harmed himself with poor debate skills, lack of knowledge, lying, hyperbole, and so on, it is indicative of a very serious lack of integrity among the moderators and their network and a large amount of apathy on the part of mainstream commentators whose partiality to one candidate outweighs what should be simple and agreeable values like fairness and neutrality. My impression from reading articles like this one and their comments is that people defending the moderators will make a weak case that Muir and Davis were being neutral and impartial. When pushed on this, they will move the goalposts to the commentators were not unbiased, but that's fine because Trump and his supporters are loathsome and have a persecution complex anyway so trying to be impartial doesn't matter one way or another.
There has never been another politician in my lifetime so egregiously indifferent to the true/false distinction as Trump. It's a pathological level of dishonesty. I recognized it first when he said "Nobody reads the Bible more than me."
Among his more recent whoppers is the patently absurd claim that everybody wanted Roe to be overturned. Then there are his incessant claims that if he loses an election, it's because the other side cheated - which resulted in the attack on the Capitol, ongoing threats against election workers, and hostility to our institutions among the political right.
Trump has actually told associates -- Michael Cohen and Stephania Grisham, certainly - that it doesn't matter if what they say is true; they just need to say it often so people will believe it. A gusher of lies is his normal debate tactic.
MAGAs call him "honest" because he's boorish and cruel. But he is extraordinarily, habitually mendacious - which is why he needs to be fact-checked more often than others.
It's true that Trump got away with saying that millions of immigrants are criminals. Seriously? Does he know how to study data?
There are at least 2 things, though, on which the questioners owed a fact check on Kamala: (1) her claim that he was tried for rape, and (2) her repeating the "very good people" line about Charlottesville.
She didn't claim he was tried for "rape." She said that Trump "has been found liable for sexual assault," which is accurate. But even the word "rape" fits, to be honest.
Here's how a WaPo piece on this matter starts off:
"After Donald Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming E. Jean Carroll, his legal team and his defenders lodged a frequent talking point.
Despite Carroll’s claims that Trump had raped her, they noted, the jury stopped short of saying he committed that particular offense. Instead, jurors opted for a second option: sexual abuse.
“This was a rape claim, this was a rape case all along, and the jury rejected that — made other findings,” his lawyer, Joe Tacopina, said outside the courthouse.
A judge has now clarified that this is basically a legal distinction without a real-world difference. He says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood."
Her critique about Trump's "very fine people on both sides" line is, in fact, correct. The context was Charlottesville. His supporters insist that all he tried to say was that there exist good people on both sides of the ideological divide, but with Charlottesville as the background context, this sanitized reading is untenable. Snopes' infamous fact check merely contended that Trump didn't explicitly say there are very fine white nationalists or neo-Nazis, and that he instead conveyed that there were very fine people on both sides of the surrounding Charlottesville divide. That's of course not the least bit exculpatory. Commenting about our civic divisions, with Charlottesville as the backdrop, an incident in which neo-Nazis marched and counterprotesters opposed the Nazis, and both-sides-ing like he did is indefensible.
At least we agree on the facts. He said there were fine people who wanted to keep the statues. That's quite exculpatory.
Not at all. There were exactly zero "very fine people" marching in Charlottesville on behalf of the statues. Wanting a Robert E. Lee statue to remain up is morally abhorrent.
Let’s also agree that the animating drive here is to exculpate Trump despite the overdetermined case against him!
David I hope we are not going down some Talmudic rabbit hole here about those two statements which are roughly accurate. Your charctherization of his statements is quite charitable. If he had simply said millions of immigrants are criminals there would be no need for a fact check even that would have been utterly false. He said Haitians are eating dogs and Walz wants to execute new borns. This is not a place for false equivalence or whataboutery. There are plenty of other platforms where that would be welcome.
It's charitable for me to say that he's absolutely wrong in claiming that millions of immigrants are criminals? I don't get it. That strikes me as way more serious than a claim about a few immigrants eating dogs.
Also, I don't think it's a small issue to say that someone was on trial for rape when he was actually on trial for libel. Pretty big difference.
I wish that term "false equivalence" could be relegated to the dustbin of history. When someone says that A is true and B is true, he is not necessarily equating A to B.
It's kind of a mess and very difficult to fact check in a meaningful way in a brief statement.
The underlying conduct about which the slander, libel or defamation gave rise was his alleged sexual assault. He said it did not happen and said she was lying. In this civil matter the jury was left with the preponderance of evidence that the underlying conduct was probably true and therefore indeed he had slandered her.
It was the judge who after the trial said that New York statutes defined sexual assault differently but that Ms. Carroll was indeed raped by any common notion of the word.
So calling him a rapist (and this apparently is not the only case) is not altogether without a factual basis.
This is what I mean when I said such statements were designed to go down the Talmudic rabbit hole and deflect attention from the main issue. There is nothing she or anyone said that is remotely equivalent to what he regularly spews. This is not a demand for fairness, it’s a demand for sanitizing Trump’s noxiousness by pretending that she does it too, not surprising given that David believes Harris is more dangerous than Trump
When somebody claims that their side is always right, and the other side is stupid and evil, you barely need read. You know they're just another propagandist.
Can we all agree, this country doesn't need more propagandists?
And speaking of lies and fear-mongering, there's this:
https://garyvarvel.substack.com/p/gary-varvel-trump-debates-abcs-moderators?utm_source=cross-post&publication_id=1288182&post_id=148756025&utm_campaign=1623562&isFreemail=true&r=2nywoi&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
If that's your view, then it is mystifying why you'd come here and not just bother to read but also comment. You have your own platform, it seems, where you can tell it as you see it as we do with ours. We don't go to your platform to promote our views and I'd request you not do that here. We can also agree to respect etiquitte.
Go ahead and go to my platform.
Isn't that the point? Communication? Doing all your talking (and listening) inside the echo chamber serves no real purpose except to assuage your ego and make you feel warm and toasty. I question myself all the time. I invite anyone else to question me all they want. If I can't make and intelligent, informed response, that's on me, not them.
No you are trying to hijack our platform with your nonsense. Build your own readership rather than piggy backing on ours. We reserve the right to take action in future
Thank you!
But the authors did not claim that Harris was “always right.” Rather, they said her performance was not flawless. Nor did they say that the “other side” is stupid or evil. Be radically individualistic enough to give a fair and honest reading to these authors, without reducing their argument to caricature.
Did you even read TFA? Literally the second and third sentences:
"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."
ask yourself: would they be raging like this if donald had performed well & handled incoming fact checks as a comedian might w/a heckler? obviously not.
this isn't about the moderators. this is the rage of narcissistic injury. these people are in a rage because seeing their guy yelling about eating dogs on live TV made them look like absolute fools in front of the other half of the country.
"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."
Which is what Trumpists would otherwise decry as the doctrine "equity" - seeking equal results, rather than applying equal standards,
I noticed some hedging on Harris' part but I am not sure there is any way that she could address the Israeli/Palestinian problem (please remember that Israel is also carrying out a quieter war in the West Bank and not just Gaza) any differently than all other politicians before her because the whole American position is having it both ways. The trajectory of American policy has always been and will always be having it both ways. In the end the problem is Netanyahu and the extreme right upon whom he relies for power. But to say that out loud amounts to interfering with democracy in Israel. To actually bring real pressure on Netanyahu would compromise the actual security of Israel. The saddest part is that politicians still cling to, and fall back on, the two state solution. The Palestinians crossed the Rubicon on that decades ago and Israel's political right which has become too demographically large to control and will only accept a one state solution where Palestinians, if they choose to stay, will be second class citizens forever. Harris, as the only serious politician on the stage, generally gave the only answer an American administration can, or will, give. Anything Trump could or would say on the subject would be nonsense.
I thought I also heard her allude to no woman would willingly carry a child to 9 months and decide to have an abortion. I may have misunderstood. The 9 month abortion canard of the Republicans has always been a lie. And necessary late term abortions still need to be a medical decision and not under the control of the state.
As to the fact checking. The simple solution is for Trump to stop telling alternative facts. Second it would behoove him to actually seriously prepare for his debates. But Trump is first and foremost an unserious person.
But he is an unserious genius who has organized an entire political party for the sole purpose of keeping his ass out of prison and stash as much cash into his own pockets as he can in the process. He will fight on as long as he has access to other people's money.