The Witness Chronicles, September 9, 2024
Debate speculation
Trump vs Trump or Trump vs Harris?
Harris won’t lose her cool. Trump? Not so much
I wrote a piece over the weekend about the debate, but decided to scrap it this morning and start over. For one thing, all the speculation out there is just that, speculation. For me the real question is the one in my title.
We know Trump has serious self-control issues. And that, so far, Harris has refused to sling mud back at him. This debate is a pretty controlled set up and, unlike Trump’s ‘press conferences’ where he doesn’t take questions, his team won’t control the event. And they have no control over their candidate.
The big story ahead of the debate this Monday is once again the seesawing polls. Now Trump appears to be gaining ground whereas a few days ago it was Harris. The only takeaway I have, and I don’t like it at all, is that this is a dead heat, which reflects the shameful behavior of the press in their coverage and the equally shameful blind acceptance of pure propaganda by many voters.
And propaganda is exactly what the right is dishing out over and over again. We found out this past week what many have suspected for years, that Putin’s Russia is once again funneling money and conspiracy theories into right wing media outlets.
And they have been scooping it up willingly and spreading the fake news. After the DOJ announced they were shutting down 32 of these propaganda sites, their hosts announced that they were shocked, just shocked, that they had been taken advantage of by the Russkies.
After all, isn’t it normal to start a web site devoted to crazy theories and get paid hundreds of thousands a month to post them? The unfortunate thing in this is that these ‘sources’ are often the only news sources many voters pay any attention to.
This is the background of tomorrow’s debate, a fabric of lies, fear mongering, outright hate, and endless lowbrow insults from not just right wing nutcases, but the entire Republican Party.
My question, one of many, is does Donald Trump believe his own lies? If he does we will most likely see the out of control Trump. Even as I write these words I really think that the word salad we have seen come out of his mouth is actually how his brain works. Facts have no place in it.
Instead of laying the groundwork for us seeing a semi-normal version of Trump, he has been doubling down on the threats of retribution against all those who he sees as enemies, a list that is growing at an alarming pace.
We hear a lot of mentions of Adolph Hitler in today’s politics, most from grandstanders on the right trying to sell a revisionist history of the worst human in modern history, the murderer of 6 million Jews, Poles, disabled people, and others. But I’m not going to join the narrative implying Trump could be his descendant.
I have a different dictator in mind, Benito Mussolini of Italy before and during WWII, another narcissist who tried to emulate Hitler but was simply too inept to reach that peak of evil. A man who loved fancy uniforms covered with made-up medals but lost every fight he engaged in during the war and eventually was hung by his own people.
Trump is a caricature like Mussolini, which does not mean he can’t do a lot of damage. Mussolini attracted the same kind of thugs we see around Trump, and Mussolini held onto power for 25 years until the war showed his people that he was a hollow man.
I’m putting this out there because it is the picture of Trump I see after combing through news, transcripts, and competing opinions about the real man. But because mainstream media chooses to only cover snippets of what he says and how he acts and shamefully compares them to Harris and the Democrats as though there is parity, most Americans have not seen Trump in all his crazed glory.
But we might tomorrow and it is going to be hard to miss as the debate will be broadcast all over television and streaming including all the major networks. There will be a lot of fact checking going on. Real fact checking, something Trump has not really faced on a stage that large.
He campaigns in a bubble of his MAGA diehards, hearing what he wants and seeing what he wants. But tomorrow night will be different and his live audience will be a prosecutor, a woman, a person close to power for years, and, perhaps most important, a person who can laugh at Donald Trump.
Faced with that reality, it is going to be interesting to see what Trump we will see and whether he can maintain the illusion of normalcy or will lose control and go way off script.
Who knows? I don’t.
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