By The Time Harris Was Done Trump Needed Ketchup. LOTS Of Ketchup!

I watched last night’s debate and stayed up later than I should have to watch initial pundit reaction. I know what I saw and sure as hell don’t need THEM to tell me what I saw but it’s important to see how they will be ‘framing’ what happened for those who didn’t tune in and watch the thing for themselves. There are two parts to that. The initial reaction, and then what gets said by the chattering class (not to mention each candidate and/or their people) the next day. For all those reasons I wanted to wait before weighing in with my own thoughts.  Let it all simmer so the speak.

Well, it’s been 24 hours since the candidates took the stage. And, as much has been made of Trump tried to avoid Harris. Instead of the traditional meet and greet in the middle to shake hands he went straight for the duck behind his podium move. So Harris confidently walked up, invaded his precious space and held out her hand and introduced herself. Speaking her name she put him on the spot because it was audible and if Trump tried mispronouncing it during the debate he (he IS media savvy) know how bad it would look. From then on he was on defense. Trump’s fat old ass couldn’t make a layup using a kiddie hoop in the driveway. Playing defense against a skilled opponent, especially with lifts in his shoes?  No way.

Much was made of the fact Harris and Trump had never actually met. Given how the night went, I’m not so sure.  I think more than once Trump’s mind might have flashed back to a long ago photo shoot.  And over and over he mentally (and his facial expressions sometimes seemed to show it) flashed back to this:

I agree that the night started badly for Trump with that opening handshake and went downhill from there. Trump had to over and over feel like that eagle was lunging after him!  I’m sure he was furious that the outtakes, the ‘B roll’ of that photo shoot made it out and onto the internet. Maybe Lincoln Project can mix this footage with Harris’ jabs at Trump complete with that same type of music. Trump can’t STAND being laughed at.

Anyway to say Trump’s night couldn’t have been much worse is something of an understatement so predictably the blame game got started as this article from The Hill indicates.  However, starting last night right after the debate and for much of this day news outlets and “talent” have been pretty clear that Trump lost. Bigly. Even Fox News had a panel that right after the debate had them all saying openly it was a bad night for Trump and/or a good one for Harris. FOX NEWS!  Hannity was in the Spin room but the other two members of what I call their weekday evening ‘Three Hour White Power Hour’ were on set and when Jesse Waters and Laura Inghahm say Trump lost you know how bad his night truly was.

Pick a word or phrase that carries a negative meaning. There are so, sooooo many to choose from. Toast. Sucked. Angry. Incoherent. Defensive. Petulant. UN-Presidential. Lied like hell. Chewed up and spit out. Got his ass handed to  him. Got filleted. Disemboweled. Cut out his heart and handed it to him. Thrown into the wood chipper. Steamrolled.  That’s just off the top of my head. I could come up with plenty more (I omitted several I feared were too ‘colorful’ to put in there) and you can too.

And of course long before it was over with even MAGAs were imagining Trump painting the walls with ketchup!  Tell me you weren’t thinking if there was a bottle or two next to the water on the shelf in his podium he wouldn’t have cut loose and smashed them.  Harris I think showed remarkable restraint by not, as the moderators were saying goodnight and thanks for tuning in calling out loudly enough to be heard ‘I’ve got some ketchup here Donald if you need it!’  Hence the title pic.

Harris toyed with Trump like… well a cat with a mouse.  She just chose not to complete the kill on the stage. Anyone who’s ever watched a mouse that’s been cornered by a cat knows how it will end. The late great George Carlin had a routine about cats that some cat lovers probably find bothersome if not offensive. He talks about them being so cute that simply calling them cats isn’t good enough, that instead if was ‘kitty cat.’ But the big part was when he talked about cute cat behavior (and hey, I’m a dog lover but cats CAN but cute) and brought up the mouse. Carlin said people say ‘Awe. Look at the kitty cat playing with the mouse. BULL SHIT! The mouse don’t see it that way!’ Last night Trump was the mouse.

How bad was it? Trump himself decided HE had to go into the spin room. I’m in my later sixties and I don’t ever recall a candidate doing that before. He told more lies and spouted more made up crap of course, then found his buddy Hannity to stroke him.  Meanwhile the blame game was getting underway. There seem to be two tracks that have emerged:

Trump and his allies hammered the moderators at host network ABC News, accusing the outlet of disproportionately fact-checking his responses compared to his political rival.

“It was three to one. It was a rigged deal as I assumed it would be,” Trump told Fox News on Wednesday.

But some Republicans took issue with Trump’s advisers, arguing he was ill-prepared for the showdown, while others said it was the candidate himself who failed to aggressively tie Harris to President Biden until the closing moments of the debate.

Let’s talk about that first part. Two things jumped out at me about the Moderators. First was their INFURIATING insistence to, from the beginning address Trump as “President Trump.” He’s not. We only have one President at a time in this country and both of those moderators knew damn well the President is JOE BIDEN. Trump should have been addressed as ‘Former President Trump’ if he insisted on some type of title. Harris made it a point to refer to him that way, just another way of getting under his skin. Alas, ‘Twice Impeached, Criminally convicted on 34 counts, Indicted and facing felony charges in three other jurisdictions Former President was a bit much to say every time she referred to him. Still, she managed to get all that in (and the civil stuff too) at one point when talking about Trump.

However a huge gripe from Republicans is that the moderators did something that moderators SHOULD have always done with Trump – fact check him right there on the spot in real time.  He lied with every answer of course and they didn’t fact check him as often as the could (and should) have but it was more than I think has ever happened with him. NO FAIR conservatives are saying. They are whining Harris didn’t get fact checked. Well, if a candidate doesn’t have a history of a fire hose of lies including during debates, much less tell the kinds of whoppers Trump has almost always gotten away with with impunity.  Not last night. Which proves moderators with some guts COULD rein in Trump at least somewhat. There should be a Hall of Shame for all the moderators who didn’t do what we saw last night.

How at times he managed to keep himself from stomping off the stage we’ll never know. (the promise of a Russian hooker who was a dead ringer for Ivanka if he gutted it out till the end?) Well, I for one don’t think Trump deserves any credit or kudos for sticking it out. THAT doesn’t get any points at all from me, much less indicate he did anything good.  Lot’s of people who are messed up and/or f**k up find themselves called on the carpet so to speak. Back when I was in the Corps we called it having stand there with your heels locked. (Stand at attention while being dressed down) And anyone who’s played team sports has experienced AND witnessed the ‘getting chewed out/humiliated in front of others’ feeling.  Trump hasn’t had to go through anything like it since his dad started losing his sh*t. And he sure as hell didn’t have his dad reaming him out in front of a crowd, much less a national audience!

The other blame game theme is that Trump was badly prepared for the debate.  I’m sure some tried to get him to do a proper preparation. There are some folks in his circle who’ve drunk the Kool Aid but not so much as to have lost all contact with reality.  They surely tried to warn him, show him clips of her as a Senator dismantling people smarter than Trump although they had to be careful about saying the likes of SCOTUS nominees or Bill Barr were smarter than their boss. Not that it would have mattered. Trump always thinks he’s the smartest person on any subject. No one was going to tell him, much less convince him that some “uppity black woman’ might get the better of him. Despite all evidence to the contrary Trump thought he nailed it with those three black women at that conference last month!  A single black woman would be a piece of cake. Or so he thought. Still, that’s the line (or one of them) being trotted out today. Trump will grab that lifeline in a second. Again, for Trump NOTHING is ever HIS fault.

So in the end Trump got a whuppin last night. That it came from a WOMAN, and worse a BLACK woman makes it all the more humiliating for him. Especially that it took place live in front of a national audience. Gaslighting his MAGAs might still work, at least to some degree but for everyone else? We saw what we saw. And those who didn’t see it live can find plenty of clips if they watched any news today, or go online and see it for themselves.

The real question that’s being asked is if it will move the polling needle. Conventional wisdom has been even kick-ass debate performances tend not to matter much. If there is a “bump” it tends to be short lived. Of course in the era of Trump riles and norms are being re-written on the fly so who knows? Personally I don’t think there will be that much of a bump in the polls but something else just as important came out of last night.

Monday polling results indicated just a bit of ‘slippage’ for Harris. And after the middle of last week she did if not disappear retreated to a large degree for traditional style debate prep. The energy her campaign has generated can be a fragile thing. I think it’s safe to say it’s back. And we’re now near mid September. Early voting is about to start. We will have a VP debate. Maybe even another Presidential debate although I wouldn’t bet on it. That’s another story.  Last night was an adrenaline shot to the arm of the Harris/Walz campaign.  And the rest of us. This ain’t over until the last vote is cast and counted so suck it up folks. As Walz said ‘We can sleep when we’re dead.’

As a close I ask you to take another look at the title picture.  Wouldn’t a real life version of that been the perfect ending to the debate?