Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Knock, knock! “Who’s there?” says Donald Trump.
“Karma.”
“Karma who?”
“Karmala Harris.”
They say “what goes around comes around” and that surely happened at the presidential debate when Donald Trump got a huge helping of “comes around” served up by Vice President Kamala Harris who, surprise, surprise, isn’t Joe Biden.
It couldn’t happen to a more deserving person than the former president who mercilessly pounded President Joe Biden for his age and failing mental acuity. Trump’s endless insults of Biden ran the gamut of “couldn’t put two sentences together” to “has to be helped off the stage” with never a moment’s thought that he, too, was suffering from the very same common signs of old age.
But safe to say after pounding his chest about Biden’s disastrous performance at their July debate, he’s now attempting to spin his own similarly disastrous performance against the much younger, far more articulate, better informed, and imminently presentable Kamala Harris at the podium.
No need to go back through it all, but despite his instant and undeniably false claim of his own greatness and victory in the debate, it’s time to add “delusional” to what’s left of Trump’s crumbling mind. And therein lies the rub.
How are you going to promise to “Make America Great Again” with a leader who can’t tell the difference between truth and right-wing racist tropes about immigrants eating cats and dogs in Ohio because he “saw it on television”?
Or how about his pre-debate insults that Harris was “low intellect” — only to have his butt handed to him by a calm, articulate, and highly intelligent former prosecutor, U.S. senator, and Vice-President over and over again?
One might be tempted to say this is not the kind of judgment 332 million Americans would want to see in the Oval Office again — especially having given him “the hook” offstage only four years ago and handing him the reality and insult of a one-term presidency.
The MAGAs can make memes with his head on the body of comic book super heroes, or Rambo, or any of the inane concoctions they have come up with. But the fact is if they really put their “Superman” in tights and a cape it would elicit nothing but laughter — and perhaps a tad of pity. Not only can’t he “fly faster than a speeding bullet,” he has to take a golf cart to get around because he can’t or won’t walk the course.
Likewise, his former insult that foreign leaders were laughing at Biden came back to bite him when Germany’s leader actually did laugh at him, saying “we also don’t eat dogs and cats.”
But the Republicans are now so hobbled by their embrace of MAGA-ism they can’t even tell or handle the blatant reality, which was witnessed by 67 million Americans. As the Washington Post noted:“Republicans do not feel free to be that critical of Trump out of the fear that, even if he loses, he will continue to use his influence over base voters to extract revenge in primaries against the wayward lawmakers.”
My, what brave and visionary leaders we should trust with our future.
But not everyone on the GOP side is afraid of being bitten by their own mad dog candidate. As veteran Republican pollsters Frank Luntz, concluded: “I think that he loses because of this debate performance.”
Karma happens. And on his way out the door, yet another insult came back when Taylor Swift, with her half billion followers, clawed him to shreds by endorsing Harris-Walz signing her post: “Childless Cat Lady.”
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