With the first and likely only Harris-Trump presidential “debate” only hours away, it’s a good time to revisit the extreme, almost farcical (if the stakes weren’t so serious) difference between the two candidates who will be on the stage. One is a career politician, with a long record in public service that is certainly subject to criticisms, but that falls well within the mainstream of American politics. The other is the only president in American history who has tried to stage a coup and overturn American democracy, who has demonstrably lied so often and without remorse that we cannot trust a single word that comes out of his mouth, and who has threatened violence as both a campaign tactic and as a means of governing should he return to office.
This incredible gulf between the candidates means, in the first place, that the debate inevitably provides an unwarranted legitimization of Donald Trump. Ideally, the Democratic candidate should not be granting Trump the legitimacy he gains from appearing as an equal on the debate stage. President Biden did so in part because he had no choice; he had to quell fears about his age, which turned out to be well-placed. In that respect, Biden’s age-related problem took the focus away from necessary questions about whether he should even have debated Trump in the first place. And in the case of Harris, the idiosyncratic process of her ascension, the compressed campaign schedule that’s resulted, and polls showing a tight race make a televised confrontation with Trump more or less unavoidable for her.
But this doesn’t change the reality that at the debate, Trump should be subject to an entirely different type of questioning, and standard, than Harris. Donald Trump has never adequately answered the question of why he tried to overthrow American democracy following the 2020 election, and it is not a spoiler for me to say that he will never be able to provide an answer. Yet what he did, and questions of it, should structure every question ever asked to him, whether at press conferences or at tonight’s debate. To set such disqualifying actions aside is to assume a premise about his candidacy that simply does not exist — that Donald Trump, if he gained power, would protect the Constitution and American democracy. His incriminating behavior around January 6 — documented, irrefutable, often conducted in the plain view of the public — means that questions put to him about policy and actions in a second term must always be contextualized within his hatred of American democracy.
In a crucial way, this renders debates between the two candidates about policy more or less absurd. Who cares what Trump’s tax policies might be in comparison to the fact that he might well take it into his head to order the IRS to go after his political opponents? Who cares what Trump’s views on monetary policy are when he’s promising to put his political opponents in jail? Who cares what his views on the deficit are when he’s promising “bloody” removal of millions of undocumented immigrants, which in addition to being a humanitarian nightmare would inflict severe damage on a U.S. economy that depends on these people’s labor? In other words, any lines of questioning that ask Harris and Trump to submit their policy ideas for discussion rest on a false premise — that Donald Trump can actually be trusted to hold power in the first place.
Every time the media chooses to put aside Trump’s insurrectionism, mendacity, and violence past and present, it hands him an unearned advantage. This omerta in his favor will surely be on display tonight — we just don’t know how full-on it will be. One of Harris’s challenges will be to consistently hit Trump’s unfitness for office based on the reasons I’ve outlined, whatever the particular questions turn out to be. As I wrote the other day, at base, he’s a true alien in our midst, unable and unwilling to comprehend the basic reciprocal obligations of society, immune to the appeal of peaceable living, and contemptuous of equality between different ethnicities or sexes. He can’t understand equality or democracy or freedom because he’s singularly obsessed with himself. When he tries to appear otherwise, rest assured that he is faking it, ever eager to hide his freakshow self and the emptiness it ultimately conceals. To the degree that Harris can expose his hideousness and move some Americans out from his thrall, she will be continuing her record of public service.