The America that Donald Trump described in his debate with Joe Biden last Thursday night is a strangely destructible place—one that might, in a blink, disappear. In an exchange about covid-19, Trump said, “We can’t close up our nation, or you’re not going to have a nation.” After a few minutes, he repeated that warning, saying, “We have to open our country—we’re not going to have a country.” This is not a new move for Trump: the list of things without which, he has previously said, Americans won’t have a country includes a border wall, steel, petroleum, eminent domain, and his reëlection. Later in the debate, he noted that, if a President Biden secured a public option for health care, “this whole country will come down.”
Whether Trump wins or loses on November 3rd, Thursday night was almost certainly the last time that he will appear on a debate stage. He used the occasion to present a bitter, vainglorious fantasy of America, with triumphs invented and disasters ignored. As always, he added a dose of conspiracy theories—“All of the e-mails, the e-mails, the horrible e-mails!”—in an attempt to leave people perplexed about the truth. In contrast with the first Presidential debate, he more or less obeyed the time limits (enforced by microphone muting) and didn’t try to shout down Biden or the moderator, Kristen Welker, which mainly showed that he can prevaricate calmly. One of his bigger lies was that many of America’s greatest common problems are due to what he called “badly run, high-crime, Democrat—all run by Democrat—cities and states.”
Biden’s challenge, which he navigated fairly well, was that Trump lies in a manner that is so unanchored to reality that it becomes disorienting. Never mind, for example, that the Trump Administration’s lawyers are heading to the Supreme Court in two weeks to argue that the entire Affordable Care Act, including its protections for people with preëxisting conditions, should be thrown out, and that Trump has articulated no plan for what would replace it. When asked what he would do, he replied, simply, that “preëxisting conditions will always stay.” As for the more than five hundred children taken from their families at the border whose parents the government now can’t find, he said that their plight was the fault of “coyotes,” “cartels,” and “gangs.” On the subject of race, he repeated that he had done more for Black Americans than anybody with the “possible exception” of Abraham Lincoln.
Trump’s falsehoods are always harmful, but distinctly so when it comes to the pandemic. The coronavirus, as it is often said, does not respect party or state lines, and because it is so highly infectious confronting it requires a unified community effort. Cases are rising in a majority of states; the official toll of dead Americans is approaching a quarter of a million, and will perhaps reach four hundred thousand by the end of the year—numbers that Biden said should, by themselves, disqualify Trump for the Presidency. Welker noted that the pandemic is entering “a dangerous new phase.” Not in Trump’s view. He insisted that any spikes will soon dissipate—“It’s going away”—and added that anyone who has doubts about his timeline for distributing a vaccine by the end of the year just doesn’t share his faith in the capabilities of the American military to get the job done.
The President used the debate almost as an infomercial to encourage people to court infection. “I got better very fast,” he said. “And now they say I’m immune.” (One of his key pandemic advisers, Scott Atlas, has reportedly pushed what amounts to a pursuit of natural herd immunity, at the likely cost of hundreds of thousands of lives.) Trump claimed that “ninety-nine per cent” of Americans would likewise survive the virus, as if vulnerable Americans were a rounding error, and covid-19 didn’t have long-term effects on many survivors. Some of Biden’s best moments came in confronting Trump’s attempts to divide and marginalize, as when, speaking about the sites of recent spikes, the former Vice-President said, “They’re the red states, they’re the states in the Midwest, they’re the states in the upper Midwest. . . . But they’re all Americans.” In response, Trump mocked New York’s high death toll.
New York City, by the way, Trump informed the audience, is “a ghost town.” Drawing another dire picture, he told Biden, “Take a look at what’s happening with your friend in Michigan, where her husband’s the only one allowed to do anything. It’s been like a prison.” Trump was referring to the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who, according to the F.B.I., was recently the target of a kidnapping plot hatched by members of a militia group—a development that has occasioned no self-reflection on Trump’s part about his personal attacks or his failure to denounce far-right extremists. And although Whitmer’s husband was criticized for mentioning her when trying to get a boat company to expedite some work, he is not the only one allowed to do anything in Michigan. The penal colony on the Great Lakes, like the zombie metropolis on the Hudson, is a place that exists only in Trump’s imagination.
The brittleness that pervades America’s political culture comes, in part, from four years of Trump responding to every problem by deriding someone else. One of his main targets on Thursday was Biden’s son Hunter and his business dealings in Ukraine and China; in recent days, Trump has seized on unverified e-mails that his lawyer Rudy Giuliani says fell into his hands. (Whatever else the e-mails are, they are not, as Trump maintains, a “smoking gun” that shows wrongdoing by the elder Biden.) The resulting exchange was dizzying, despite Biden’s ripostes about the President’s own dodgy finances. In addition to microphone muting, the debate might have benefitted from subtitles; Trump increasingly speaks in a patois of catchphrases—“eighteen angry Democrats,” “another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax,” “the laptop from hell”—that are hard to decipher.
A plain translation is that Trump is attacking Biden, his family, and any Democrat he sees because he is behind in the polls and is getting desperate. That same impulse underlies his frenetic prophecies of American doom. During the debate, Trump said of Biden, “If he’s elected, the stock market will crash!” But the polls don’t seem to have sparked any fall; Wall Street apparently doesn’t think that America will disappear. Indeed, if Biden wins, some of the country’s values may reëmerge. And Trump is the one who will be gone. ♦
