Sundown In America
Notes on the First Presidential Debate: Well, That Happened
“Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don’t fall out of the sky. They don’t pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do, folks. This is what we have to offer. It’s what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.
If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you’re going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain’t going to do any good; you’re just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There’s a nice campaign slogan for somebody: ‘The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.’”
The United States of America: Honestly, who even knows anymore?
In the immediate aftermath of the First Presidential Debate, CNN’s resident RBF Jake Tapper snarked, “That was a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck.” Judging from the overbearing reactions from internet-poisoned tweeters, the general sentiment around this bleak shitshow is that it was, in fact, a bleak shitshow. I’m not sure what people were expecting out of a wretched incontinent-off featuring two demented, fossilized mutants repping the catty nonsense boomers have been slurping out of the cable news gravy hose for decades. It’s not as if MAGA chuds support Donald Trump because they double-checked Politifact to verify his plans to erect a 2000-mile-long rape-defense barrier and finagle the Mexican government to pay for it. And what normal people call Joe Biden’s visible senility is what Democrats call electability. Maybe the dream was something finally fracturing the edifice, like Biden’s teeth falling out or one of them soiling themselves on air.
This debate was acidic satirical performance art: MAGA versus C’mon, Man! It was destined to degenerate into an unrelenting volley of irate, sundowning jibberish between a psychotic melting creamsicle and a doddering husk who has the oratory style of a slinky you have to keep pushing down the stairs.
Questions about a Supreme Court Justice nomination plunged into tendentious soliloquies about our busted healthcare system, each interrupting one another before the previous half-answer sputtered to completion. Trump did his best to primate-stomp on the debate format, answering COVID-related inquiries with bluff and bluster and spittle and sozzle, swaying oddly and doing strange accordion things with his hands. He’d go on the rest of the night bloviating and lying and picking weird food fights. This president is incapable of expressing anything other than whatever urge or anxiety is currently troubling his damp, roiling essence. Trump did, however, dial back the Bannon-scented comic-book-villain dada of his inaugural address and instead leaned into the kind of freewheeling racism you’d see if Rush Limbaugh never got hooked on hillbilly heroin. Biden deftly called out his opponent’s rat-a-tat-tat unsubtle dogwhistles, insisting they won’t work because it’s no longer the 1950s. (Apparently, the former veep hasn’t gandered at Tucker Carlson’s ratings.)
It is not BREAKING NEWS, at this juncture, to point out that Trump is constitutionally incapable of doing any of the important and urgent things required of him as president. There is no leadership of any kind from the apex of government, and while it’s hard to say what the Democrats are doing, exactly, “leadership” surely isn’t the right word. Biden froze and stammered when asked about packing the courts or eliminating the filibuster, and wouldn’t commit to either, or really anything other than uttering the five talking points recorded into the Teddy Ruxpin cassette tape lodged inside his pudding brain. As the federal government lurches further toward entrenched GOP minority rule, the best Joe Biden can muster is simulating gravitas and vaguely gesturing at more tactical retreats, all while calling himself “the reasonable one.” Get out and vote! Call your Senator! Democratic governance is an ongoing sludge of grim pragmatism that has proven wholly insufficient in addressing America’s manifold disasters in normal times, so instead, they opt for decadent, abstract symbolism with a wholly antiseptic presentation.
There is no depth to Donald Trump’s character. He has spent the last four years showing America he’s every bit as selfish, shameless, ignorant, dyspeptic, bellicose, and self-aggrandizing as he was when he launched his opening salvos about Mexican rapists and playing drone-strike whack-a-mole at wherever the Radical Islamic Terrorism P.O. box is. In both unsurprising and queasily jarring fashion, a sitting president who once offered a mealy-mouthed condemnation of literal Nazis also froze and equivocated and told a violent far-right street gang to “stand back and stand by” when he was asked in no uncertain terms to renounce white supremacy. And after a long, strange campaign against mail-in ballots, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. He’s up to his eyes in balls. So what the president has done, and will continue to do until November, is bring his few blunt tools — unflagging hyperaggression, shoving others into traffic, a blank and wild antipathy for anyone who is not Donald J. Trump— to bear when defending his record, hoping that it results in compelling enough television to keep him in power. Biden is just a guy who TiVos shows just so he can rewatch the commercials.
In a perverse way, Trump is the perfect businessman to run the flubby end-stage of the American empire: He doesn’t make anything, he doesn’t generate revenue, but he’s worth billions because he says so. Three days ago, the New York Times revealed that the faux-rich-guy “had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.” Turns out, a man who has spent his entire life stiffing people also worms his way through tax loopholes. Conversely, Biden is the ideal griever-in-chief as both Pax Americana and his fizzing brain reach their sad collapse. His candidacy is a fond reflection on all the good times while Democrats slowly shift from denial to acceptance in the Kübler-Ross cycle in regards to this nation’s destiny. Of course, neither option involves rationally assessing our problems and offering sober, commensurate solutions.
America is a sales culture and we want a salesman to peddle obtuse agitprop that semi-articulates why they’re best suited to be the protagonist of this decaying society. After decades of news flurries including titillating half-truth bombshells and compulsive warnings and panic-switch flips, this country may be deeply partisan enough where none of last night’s crankfest actually matters outside of treacherous spectacle value and running through the motions of pretending America still operates as a superficial democracy. Our horizons have been beaten away by hegemonic propaganda, hurtling with anodyne and sanitized phrasings that justify this high-mass death machine, that prevents people from reconsidering how the present order is insane and bloodthirsty and cruel in ways it doesn’t have to be. Whether out of instinct or inertia, we keep eating it up.
Moderator Chris Wallace said he wouldn’t assume the role of fact-checker prior to the debate, as if the Orange One would be vanquished if a third-party called out his incoherent riffraff under the national gaze. Republicans have reached the point of pure mental surrender to the will of Trump because they monomaniacally want Roe v. Wade overturned, no matter how debased or shameless the cost. Winning Democalypse 2020 will be based on the strength and plausibility of each candidate’s falsities, or at least their confidence in bullshitting their base. Everything in politics these days is euphemistic and focused-tested into meaninglessness. Biden fibs about his progressive credentials — in the final primary showdown between him and Bernie Sanders, he flatly lied about not wanting to slash Social Security and still cruised to an overwhelming victory. Trump does the kind of lying that Republicans love because it pisses off the libs. Biden stans admire his lying because it makes the effort of trying to sound honest. Running Joe Biden in 2020 is the political equivalent of paying $750 in federal taxes.
In the overwhelming bummer gravity of this moment, it is apparently cynical to articulate the very empirical and observable reality that America is broken and soul pulverizing and pyrotechnically fucked , and both parties are either too blatantly corrupt or too manifestly incompetent to alter this trajectory. I understand the importance of booting Trump from office, that ineffectual liberalism is preferable to the dimestore Julius Streichers Republicans trot out. Last night, though, has only reinforced my suspicion that the real nihilism lies in the belief that America’s political possibilities are limited to conventional Democratic electoralism, where the pool of voters is fixed and the only thing the Blue Team can do is draft an army of snake oil salesmen who otherwise consult for Dracula Associates, and they narrowly cast tiny fragments of suburban, white, upper-middle-class normies to win wafer-thin majorities that’ll hold for a few years until they’re overthrown by rampaging reactionaries, thus leading to continued grinding immiseration. That is a view that offers no hope or possibility for any sort of change other than America succumbing to casual Nazism—but instead of Hugo Boss, it’ll be with Bonobos.
Maybe, in a way, the edifice was fractured. Neither emperor has any clothes, or even knows how to dress themselves. Last night was a confused, random ejaculation of circular words and stutters around nothing because both candidates are at the stage of most people’s lives where they’re hopped up on prescription drugs and wander into traffic. They are the figureheads of unsettled psychic energy and placeholders for the profoundly rotten systems around them. The great hope is that such a grotesque burlesque is alarming enough to catalyze some positive change. This is what an apocalyptic moment is, provoking a visceral disgust, absolutely and always as gruesome as it is permitted to become.