About That Debate

Plus, another assassination attempt.

Events move fast, but this newsletter doesn’t. I will spend more time on last Tuesday’s debate than on Trump’s assassination attempt, as you will see below.

Now that post-debate coverage has shaken out into a discernible narrative and everyone knows what they think about it, we can dispense with it relatively easily and get on to what it means for the race and American politics more broadly.

Kamala Harris won the debate. That’s the conventional wisdom. Sometimes, the conventional wisdom is right, as in this case. She won it by being a reasonably competent adult human being and letting Donald Trump cram both feet into his mouth on multiple occasions.

Folks on the right are upset that the moderators were unfair to Trump. I agree that they were unfair, but find it very difficult to feel any great sympathy for Trump here. Since when has the mainstream media been fair to a Republican presidential candidate? 1904? If Trump went into the debate unprepared for the fact that the moderators would predictably take Harris’ side, that’s his fault. For all his flaws, Newt Gingrich took the fight to the moderators quite well in 2012 and even many of his critics cheered. George H. W. Bush skewered Dan Rather on live television for his unfair reporting. Trump has been in Republican politics for almost a decade. If he isn’t ready for biased debate moderation by now, that’s on him.

I agree with Charlie Cooke that Americans should be outraged at the scandal that is our mainstream media openly taking the side of the left every single time. But Americans are outraged – seven out of ten Americans don’t trust the media to report everything honestly. They’ve been outraged. The entire reason Fox News exists is that people were tired of one-sided coverage of every issue. Say what you like about Fox News, it’s at least managed to break the stranglehold the left had for decades on media narrative.

I also agree with Jonah Goldberg that right-wingers should grow thick skins and quit whining about media bias. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were able to win landslide victories in eras when media coverage was far more biased towards the Democrats, and outside of National Review, Commentary, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, right-wing media didn’t exist. I thought the rationale for Donald Trump’s third candidacy was that, unlike other Republicans, “he fights.” Maybe if Nixon or Reagan were still around, they could teach Donald Trump a thing or two about “fighting.”

What would unbiased moderation have looked like?

“Mr. President, would you like more time to explain to the American people how illegal aliens are eating housecats in Springfield?”

“Mr. President, would you care to elaborate on your ‘concepts of plans?’”

“Mr. President, please tell us more about how you have ‘the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics?’”

Trump supporters need to face the truth. Donald Trump didn’t lose the debate because of the moderators. He lost the debate because of himself. Every single time Donald Trump does something stupid and costs himself supporters, the right blames Democrats and the media. But they don’t make him act like a fool. He does that to himself.

Media Bias

Cooke is right that it is a scandal. Too many institutions, when faced with public distrust, blame unfair criticism or their enemies or a noxious climate of anti-institutionalism for that distrust. But, in every case, they are mistaking cause and effect. If nearly seventy percent of Americans don’t trust the media, that’s the fault of the media. Those journalists who are willing to take responsibility for this situation realize that decades of prominent media failures have created this lack of trust, and that trust will have to be earned back the hard way, by doing a good job and providing fair coverage.

When faced with a poor public reputation, strong leaders take ownership and work to change that reputation, often by correcting past errors. Across the board, the anti-institutional climate in American politics is due to the high-profile failures of businesses, churches, charitable organizations, media outlets, and governing bodies. The Catholic Church. The SBC. Wall Street. The New York Times. Boeing. CBS. General Motors. Hollywood. Harvard. Yale. Penn. I could go on. The utter lack of accountability for coverups, sexual abuse, corruption, bias, the financial collapse, etc. has created this climate of distrust. Yes, there are anti-institutional voices out there who delight in every screwup by a major corporation or military branch. Yes, some of them are funded by our enemies. But that doesn’t absolve any institution of taking responsibility for mistakes.

Yes, many in the media want to stop Trump. But, if that’s the case, they should drop the pretense of objectivity and stop pretending there isn’t media bias. If the goal is stopping Trump, that’s a bias. Rather than pretending to be neutral, outlets whose main goal is stopping Trump should admit that is their goal and make the positive case for why it’s a more important goal than objectivity.

Even genuine Marxists recognize that every media institution which isn’t explicitly conservative is biased in favor of the Democrats. As Robert Conquest noted, every organization which isn’t explicitly right-wing will eventually become left-wing. Since neutrality is exceedingly rare, I would rather have journalistic outlets be honest about their biases and explain to readers why they interpret events the way they do. Instead, we get a silly argument that media bias is a right-wing myth and that the debate moderators weren’t really unfair to Trump.

Most Americans know about media bias. They know Fox is biased towards the Republicans. They know The Washington Post is trying to help Harris get elected. Media bias may help Kamala at the margins, but like so many other things in this election, it’s mostly baked in. Voters know what they think of Donald Trump. If they were surprised by anything in last week’s debate, it’s that Kamala Harris sounded reasonably coherent and intelligent. All she had to do to win the debate was maintain that perception, and she succeeded.

(Actually, the most surprising thing we learned in the debate was that Kamala Harris owns a gun.)

Will the Debate Matter?

If Harris had lost the debate, that could have mattered. If she had gone up there and sounded totally unprepared, by muttering strings of unintelligible sentences about coconut trees and being unburdened by the shadow of a feeling of a sensation of what might have, you know, been, she could very well have seen enough of a drop in the polls to affect the election. She didn’t do that.

As Sarah Isgur points out, before the debate, Harris was losing momentum. Her performance kept Trump from gaining momentum and it kept her in the same place in the polls, and that’s what she needed to do. As with her interview with Dana Bash, she went in hoping to hold the ball and run the clock out and succeeded.

But it’s possible to win most of the battles and still lose the war. Hillary Clinton won the debates in 2016. We probably won’t fully know until Election Day just how this debate mattered. Events are best understood (only understood) in retrospect, and if Harris ends up winning the election, we may be talking about how Donald Trump did himself in by muttering about Haitians eating dogs when he could have been discussing the disaster at our southern border.^[1]

And if Harris loses, we may be talking about how this debate failed to move the needle, or about how Harris’s caution ended up serving her poorly. If only she’d gone in for the kill, we’ll say, maybe Trump would have lost the election, and so on.

We’ll probably also be talking about the massive education divide in our politics. The BBC interviewed several undecided voters after the debate, and many were leaning towards Trump. All lacked a college education. Ruy Texeira has been writing for years about how Democrats are losing the working class, including especially the nonwhite working class. I wonder whether my interpretation of the debate in part reflects the fact that I went to college. Many voters without a college education saw something very different in Donald Trump’s performance than I did. I thought now and still think that Kid Rock’s performance at the Republican National Convention was disgraceful and embarrassing. But perhaps that reflects my elitism.^[2]

Only in November will we really understand what happened at the debate last Tuesday, and perhaps not even then.

Harris’s Interview

Late last week, Harris did a solo interview, which slipped under many people’s radar. It was bad, but I didn’t think it was as terrible as Jeff Blehar did. She doesn’t sound good, but she still sounds better than Trump and Biden do nine-tenths of the time.

I doubt this will matter. As far as I can tell, most people missed it. Even if they had watched it, I doubt it could have changed many opinions.

Another Assassination Attempt

While the latest assassination attempt on Trump is all anyone wants to talk about right now, it is still early and there are things we don’t know about it. Assassination attempts fall into the category of event where wild rumors and speculation overtake good reporting in the immediate aftermath, and it takes weeks sometimes for the true story to shake out. I’d rather avoid any hot takes which go out of date as soon as new information comes to light.

Briefly, I’ll state that this is bad news. I was hoping that July’s shooting was a one-off, but it may turn out to be the beginning of a trend. We can pray that there won’t be any more political violence or attempted violence on either side.

Perhaps it’s gratuitous on my part to say this, but there will be those who claim Donald Trump is “brave” for having faced a second assassination attempt. Given that he was never in any real danger, that’s silly. He’s as craven as he always was, but now he has another unearned notch in his belt to make him look strong. If it wasn’t for his enemies, he’d never win anything.

In Closing – Democratic Patriotism

I’ve been pleased that the Democrats have continued to put out a message of pride in America. During the debate, Harris once again reiterated what a great privilege it is to live in the United States. Similarly, I was pleased to see Trump express pride in his country in a social media post thanking the Secret Service following the latest attempt on his life.

Perhaps the best part of the Democrats’ move to the center on patriotism is just how much it annoys their hard-left flank. Most of them will hold their noses and vote Democrat anyway. But many centrists will be encouraged by this rhetoric, and they may just be swayed by it.

Is it a façade? I don’t know. I am more sure in the case of Donald Trump that he has never loved his country. But I still like to hear him pretend he does anyway.

I’m not fooled into thinking that the Democrats are the new party of patriotism. But I’d rather have an election where both parties emphasized what they love about America than what they hate. We could use some patriotism around here.

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[1] Some people think it’s racist and anti-immigrant to say that unchecked illegal immigration is a crisis. Well, some polling shows Donald Trump winning handily right now with Hispanic legal immigrants. Most people don’t like lawbreaking and line-cutting and all-around chaos.

[2] Like many educated conservatives, I feel as though I have a foot in both camps. I don’t feel quite at home on either side of the urban-rural, or educated-uneducated divide. On some matters of taste, I’m more comfortable in a red state, and in other matters, I’m more comfortable in a blue state. I suspect many readers will feel similarly.

Ben Connelly is a writer, long-distance runner, former engineer, and author of “Grit: A Practical Guide to Developing Physical and Mental Toughness.” He publishes short stories and essays at Hardihood Books. @benconnelly6712