#david frum

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Vice President Kamala Harris walked onto the ABC News debate stage with a mission: trigger a Trump meltdown.

She succeeded.

Former President Donald Trump had a mission too: control yourself.

He failed.

Trump lost his cool over and over. Goaded by predictable provocations, he succumbed again and again.

Trump was pushed into broken-sentence monologues—and even an all-out attack on the 2020 election outcome. He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, and was backwards-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible.

Harris hit pain point after pain point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who had served with him, the boredom and early exits of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Every hit was followed by an ouch. Trump’s counterpunches flailed and missed. Harris met them with smiling mockery and cool amusement. The debate was often a battle of eyelids: Harris’s opened wide, Trump’s squinting and tightening.

Harris’s debate prep seemed to have concentrated on psychology as much as on policy. She drove Trump and trapped him and baited him—and it worked every time.

Trump exited the stage leaving uncertain voters still uncertain about whether or not he’d sign a national abortion ban. He left them certain that he did not want Ukraine to win its war of self-defense. He accused Harris of hating Israel but then never bothered to say any words of his own in support of the Jewish state’s war of self-defense against Hamas terrorism. In his confusion and reactiveness, he seemed to have forgotten any debate strategy he might have had.

Something every woman watching the debate probably noticed: Trump could not bring himself to say the name of the serving vice president, his opponent for the presidency. For him, Harris was just a pronoun: a nameless, identity-less “she,” “her,” “you.” It’s said that narcissists cope with ego injury by refusing to acknowledge the existence of the person who inflicted the hurt. If so, that might explain Trump’s behavior. Harris bruised his feelings, and Trump reacted by shutting his eyes and pretending that Harris had no existence of her own independent of President Joe Biden, whose name Trump was somehow able to speak.

Hemmed, harried, and humiliated, Trump lost his footing and his grip. He never got around to making an affirmative case for himself. If any viewer was nostalgic for the early Trump economy before its collapse in his final year in office, that viewer must have been disappointed. If a viewer wanted a conservative policy message, any conservative policy message, that viewer must have been disappointed. When asked whether he had yet developed a health-care plan after a decade in politics, Trump could reply only that he had “concepts of a plan.”

Almost from the start, Harris was in control. She had better moments and worse ones, but she was human where Trump was feral. She had warm words for political opponents such as John McCain and Dick Cheney; Trump had warm words for nobody other than Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian strongman whom Trump praised for praising Trump. It was an all-points beatdown, and no less a beating because Trump inflicted so much of it on himself.

At a minimum, this display will put an end to the Trump claim that Harris is a witless nonentity unqualified to engage in debate. Harris met Trump face-to-face before tens of millions of witnesses. She dominated and crushed him, using as her principal tools her self-command and her shrewd insight into the ex-president’s psychic, moral, and intellectual weaknesses.

Will it matter that Harris so decisively won? How can it not? But it may matter more that Trump so abjectly lost to a competitor for whom he could not utter a syllable of respect.

David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

[porterdavis]

Kow-towing. Poor Mika. She and Joe are letting presumptive fear of Trump reprisals censor their speech, and the speech of all who come on their air.

Appeasement and anticipatory obedience is the fuel of tyrants.

[tomorrowusa]

« Rarely, if ever, has a presidential campaign collapsed from seeming assurance into utter chaos as Trump-Vance has. The campaign seems to have stumbled into a strange unintended message: “Let’s go to war with Taylor Swift to stop Haitians from eating dogs.” The VP candidate wants to raise tariffs on toasters and worries that with Roe v. Wade overturned, George Soros may every day fill a 747 airliner with abortion-seeking pregnant Black women.

The stink of impending defeat fills the air—and so much of the defeat would be self-inflicted. »

— Political writer David Frum at The Atlantic. (archived)

IF Trump loses, and it's still far from a sure thing, most of the blame will go to him. A convincing Trump loss would cause a civil war to break out inside the Republican Party between the true believers and the folks who went along with Trump just to save their own political butts. Do you need any more incentive to get out the vote? 🙂

[oldguardleatherdog]

"We believe in America."

David Frum, "No One Has an Alibi" The Atlantic online, earlier today, November 3, 2024, two days before Election Day

[ALT text follows:]

"Over the succeeding four years of Trump’s term, I lived almost every day in a state of dread. Perhaps you did, too. Yet the American people proved equal to the work required of them. The guardrails shook, and in some places they cracked, yet when the ultimate test came, in January 2021, brave Americans of both great parties joined to beat back Trump’s violent attempted seizure of power.

"Now here we are again. You are needed once more. Perhaps you feel wearier than you did seven years ago. Perhaps you feel more afraid today than you did then. Yet you must still find the strength to answer your country’s call. You can do it. We can do it. We believe in America."

[fallensapphires]

Foods: Cakes

So if I have two pieces of cake, do I have twice as good an experience as the first piece of cake? One of the things I've found in life is that the first piece of cake is the best.

[alanfromrochester]

also, some MAGA types act like voting for a woman / on a female's behalf / etc is pathetic simping

a lot of prolifers see abortion as killing to enable sexual irresponsibility, so they see men voting for prochoicers as doubling down on that

[originalleftist]

"If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury." - David Frum.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Tom Tomorrow

+

“You want to believe that there must be intelligent and honest people somewhere inside the Trump economic policy trying to limit the damage ... but as with the existence of leprechauns, there is no empirical basis for this belief.” — David Frum

[porterdavis]

Stop panicking

[cynicalclassicist]

Trump should have been in jail for his treason.

But no, he's a POTUS, we need to protect the dignity of the office or whatever.

[egbertoofftherecord]

Conservative David Frum nails tariffs: A shift of the cost of government from the rich to the poor.

David Frum, in a near-perfect analysis, rips Trump’s tariffs for forcing the poor to pay for the government, continuing the wealthy’s parasitic nature. Conservative David Frum nails tariffs. Watch Politics Done Right T.V. here. Podcasts (Video — Audio) Summary In this compelling segment, conservative commentator David Frum incisively criticizes Trump’s tariff policy, exposing it as a…

[lenbryant]

Hate to platform the “Axis of Evil” guy, but even Frum knows the danger of Trump.

[eltristanexplicitcontent]

David Frum: (The Atlantic)

[incrediblyfastfilms]

Threat Assessment: Trump's Cabinet Picks! Mayhem in Canada! (w/ David Fr...