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Monday
Here’s hoping that Democrats have had a chance to recover from their panic over Joe Biden’s dismal debate performance against Donald Trump. I recall seeing similar panic following Bill Clinton’s first debate against George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama’s first debate against Mitt Romney and they did just fine in November. In other words, debates don’t determine who wins, and Biden already is showing some ability to bounce back.
I’m also persuaded by comments from people who have a deep understanding of what is involved in a presidential race, figures like Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Bouzy, Allan Lichtman, and Simon Rosenberg. All point to the futility of longing for a candidate on a white horse riding in to save the day. Bouzy, one of our most accurate prognosticators, says replacing Biden at this stage would lead to a red wave for sure in November.
Others say that the only replacement plan that would have any chance of working is Biden making a full-throated endorsement of Kamala Harris, who is the only figure who would inherit his funds (since the money raised is for the two of them). O’Donnell warns that a late replacement could be a rerun of Humphrey vs. Nixon, Humphrey having been a convention-time replacement who later said he lacked the time needed to catch up (he almost did).
The Aesop story of the mice deciding that the cat should be belled also comes to mind. None of the editorials and columns I’ve seen saying that Biden should step down suggest who should replace him and all the obstacles that person would face.
In his play Galileo, Bertolt Brecht has his protagonist lament, “Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.” If the only way to defeat a pathological liar and convicted felon who tried to overthrow the government is by fielding someone with the charisma of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama—well, then we are indeed uphappy as there are only so many people with those credentials. Biden’s doing a good job of running the government—maybe the best I’ve seen since Lyndon Johnson (if you ignore Vietnam)—and he has built a good organization. Brecht says we need collective action, not heroes, to prevail, and the Democrats have plenty of people willing to work hard to defeat Trump. Perhaps they should stop looking for a hero.
Returning to the debate, the best explanations I’ve heard about what happened Thursday night come from historian Heather Cox Richardson and authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Richardson says that Trump used a rhetorical technique known as “the Gish gallop,” which involves throwing out
a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.
Ben-Ghiat, meanwhile, says that Biden faced a “firehose of falsehoods” comprised of
a stream of lies, half-truths, and insinuations, all delivered at high volume (thus the firehose). It’s a Kremlin tactic but practiced by authoritarians around the world. Trump’s one of world’s most skilled practitioners of this dark art, as is the Murdoch family, who deliver a tsunami of lies and smears daily.
At the end of today’s post I provide Richardson’s summation of Trump’s tsunami of lies but you probably know what they are already.
The ultimate aim of such a tsunami, Ben-Ghiat says, is
to destroy the idea that we can know the truth, creating situations of dependence on leaders’ fake versions of reality, and ultimately encouraging nihilism —if you distrust everything, you believe in nothing. Then you are far less likely to engage in resistance to uphold ideals like justice and freedom.
Political scientist John Stoehr looks at the psychological effectiveness of the tactic:
[A]s someone who recognizes in the president a variety of neurodivergence – he stutters; I have ADHD – I also saw in him what happens when lies come at you like a torrent. It’s paralyzing. I mean that literally. You don’t know what to do. And while your brain is firing in all directions simultaneously, you look like someone, as my friend Hussein Ibish said, who “couldn’t keep his train of thought together most of the time and had difficulty forming coherent sentences.”
This talk about firehoses and Gish gallops brings to mind Jonathan Swift’s “Description of a City Shower.” In that poem, a shower starts off quietly but assumes apocalyptic dimensions by the end. Early on, Swift compares the looming clouds to a drunkard about to vomit up everything within, which certainly describes Trump’s verbal torrent:
Meanwhile the South, rising with dabbled wings,
A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings,
That swilled more liquor than it could contain,
And, like a drunkard, gives it up again.
Once the storm really gets going, Swift gets to describe the filthiness of London. In the last line, the chaos has become so overwhelming that the rhyming iambic couplets break down and we are given a line that is virtually impossible to scan:
Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow,
And bear their trophies with them as they go:
Filth of all hues and odors seem to tell
What street they sailed from, by their sight and smell.
They, as each torrent drives with rapid force,
From Smithfield or St. Pulchre’s shape their course,
And in huge confluence joined at Snow Hill ridge,
Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn Bridge.
Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip tops, come tumbling down the flood.
Swift is not only writing about London in this poem but the way that modern urban life is disrupting the quieter and more genteel traditions of the landed gentry. In other words, this is an early attack on the modern world, one that England will see repeated in the works of Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens, and others. In Trump’s case, he has found ways to disrupt the orderly process of debate, just as he has disrupted so many of our society’s institutions. Last Thursday we saw his dead cats and turnip tops come tumbling down the flood.
Yet all we seem to be talking about is whether Joe Biden is up to the job of being president.
Trump’s swelling kennels:
Trump’s string of lies were so overwhelming, Richardson notes, that it took CNN’s fact checker Daniel Dale almost three minutes, quickly speaking, to get through the list. She continues,
Trump said that some Democratic states allow people to execute babies after they’re born and that every legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned—both fantastical lies. He said that the deficit is at its highest level ever and that the U.S. trade deficit is at its highest ever: both of those things happened during his administration. He lied that there were no terrorist attacks during his presidency; there were many. He said that Biden wants to quadruple people’s taxes—this is “pure fiction,” according to Dale—and lied that his tax cuts paid for themselves; they have, in fact, added trillions of dollars to the national debt.
Dale went on: Trump lied that the U.S. has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe has when it’s the other way around, and he was off by close to $100 billion when he named the amount the U.S. has provided to Ukraine. He was off by millions when he talked about how many migrants have crossed the border under Biden, and falsely claimed that some of Biden’s policies—like funding historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and reducing the price of insulin to $35 a month—were his own accomplishments.
There is no point in going on, because virtually everything he said was a lie.
Perhaps Biden should have been better prepared for Trump’s Gish gallop, so I suppose one could blame him or his team for that. Apparently, in his debate prep he was drilled on policy positions, but policy becomes irrelevant when you’re debating a non-stop liar. The real judgement of his competency, however, should be how well he’s doing as president. And what a catastrophe Trump was.