First Trump-Biden Debate: 'Is it midnight yet?'
The first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden only reinforces the reality that, regardless of whoever wins in November, things are going to get worse.
Welcome to Terminally Chill—a newsletter that discusses politics, sports, and other issues from a left perspective—by Aaron Mayorga, an award-winning photojournalist.
Have you ever seen the Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino?
For the film’s about-two-hour runtime, Eastwood is the protagonist Walt — a retired, recently-widowed autoworker and Korean War veteran with a penchant for vintage Ford cars and anti-Asian racism, embodied by his prejudice against Japanese-made cars and his predominantly Hmong-American neighbors. Walt becomes the unlikely father-figure to the teenaged Thao and protects him from the film’s antagonist: a Hmong gang, led by Thao’s cousin, terrorizing the neighborhood.
At its core, the film is little more than just another entry in Hollywood’s long-running ‘white savior canon,’ but it’s interspersed with scenes of Eastwood acting out the power-tripping fantasies of geriatrics all over the internet; like, for example, successfully threatening someone off your front lawn with a service-issue M1 Garand, which is something that actually happens in this movie.
Ultimately, Walt instigates a final public confrontation with the gang and baits its members into killing him by pretending to be armed. With the neighborhood as witness, the gang is arrested and imprisoned, and the film ends with Walt bequeathing Thao the titular Torino — a Hollywood happy ending, as it were!
So, you might be wondering, why is this important?
Well, I’ll admit, it isn’t—but, people swear by this movie and it released in the after-glow of Barack Obama’s election in December 2008 to critical acclaim. The New York Times, for one, declared, ‘Dirty Harry is back.’ And, if you go on YouTube and search ‘Gran Torino Clint Eastwood song,’ you’ll find scores of faceless tearjerking commenters convinced that the actor-director’s gravelly, grunting singing of the film’s main theme—originally performed capably by Jamie Cullum—is something worthy of a regular listen. They’re wrong, but in this case, the consequences here are anodyne.
Another thing people swear by is the continued existence of the presidential debate, of which there was one—that I’m retroactively referring to as the ‘first Gran Torino debate’—last night in Cleveland, between President Donald Trump and former vice president and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
It was not anodyne. And at least Gran Torino leaves you with this odd sense of racially-paternalistic optimism at its end; this debate couldn’t even manage that.
For almost as long as Gran Torino actually, the pair of septuagenarian luminaries were slated to discuss six key issues: COVID-19; the U.S. economy; election integrity; the Supreme Court; ‘race and violence in cities’; and the candidates’ records, respectively. On my own debate night stream, I quipped moments before it began, ‘My guess is, somehow they’ll only talk about none of those,’ and… yeah.
After an introductory segment on Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, the crosstalk shifted to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic—whereupon, for roughly 15 minutes, the three men failed to discuss any further virus economic relief, particularly for the unemployed, those soon facing eviction and those already evicted from their homes. In fact, moderator Chris Wallace later in the night prefaced a question with ‘the economy is, I think it’s fair to say, is recovering faster than expected,’ evidencing a consensus between the three that the economic crisis lay largely behind us. (It’s not.)
It was a conversation that, at times, was only tangentially tied to the reality being endured by millions of Americans.
The relief bill passed by the House in May—the so-called HEROES Act—only received a passing mention, and Biden failed to offer anything beyond a vague remark about providing personal protective equipment to schools and businesses, followed by a zinger about Trump’s golfing—and, that was it…
Chris Wallace: ‘Vice President Biden, you have been much more reluctant than President Trump about reopening the economy and school. Why, sir?’
Joe Biden: ‘Because he doesn’t have a plan. If I were running, I’d know what the plan is. You've got to provide these businesses the ability to have the money to be able to reopen with a PPE, as well as with sanitation they need. You have to provide—’
Donald Trump: ‘Tell that to Nancy Pelosi.’
Biden: ‘Will he just shush for a minute?’
Trump: ‘Tell it to Nancy Pelosi. And Schumer.’
Biden: ‘Nancy Pelosi and Schumer — they have a plan. He won't even meet with them. The Republicans won't meet with them in the Senate. But he sits in his golf course — I mean, literally, think about it —
Trump: ‘You probably play more than I do, Joe.’
By this point in the debate, two concurrent thoughts were bouncing around in my mind. The first, bluntly, ‘who the fuck wants to support any of this?’ And the second? ‘Could you imagine how different this debate would be with Bernie instead?’ For the moment, let’s focus on the aforementioned exchange where the most Biden can do is implore us to ‘literally, think about it’—and contrast that with Sanders’ emergency pandemic response proposal from March before he dropped out.
That plan calls for all Americans to receive $2,000 per month for the duration of the pandemic—now six months running—(a proposal Sen. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, supports), the implementation of emergency paid family and medical leave for all workers, the broadening of unemployment insurance to include gig workers (presumably, not unlike, what happened under the CARES Act) with 100-percent wage replacement up to $75,000, and the expansion of Medicare to include all COVID-related testing, treatment, and vaccines for every American regardless of insurance status. In late July, Sanders followed this up with a bill in the Senate to provide and distribute free masks for all.
Biden actually supports a couple of these things, namely paid leave for all workers and the expansion of unemployment insurance (although strangely, despite supporting a nationwide mask mandate, he has not said if he supports Sanders’ masks for all legislation, of which Harris is also a co-sponsor), but would you know that based on what he’d said last night? Now, imagine a hypothetical Sanders-Trump debate, do you think Sanders would’ve spent those meandering 98 minutes without mentioning any of his coronavirus relief proposals?
Of course, Bernie Sanders isn’t Joe Biden, and watching Biden take the debate stage alongside Trump is part of losing the 2020 primaries to the establishment of the Democratic Party. Unfortunately these days, Joe Biden isn’t Joe Biden either—at least, not the same Joe who humiliated Sarah Palin in 2008 and stopped Obama’s slide in the polls eight years ago with a strong debate against then-Rep. Paul Ryan. As seen and foreshadowed in the Democratic debates of 2019, today’s Biden is a diminished one.
Case in point, about three minutes later in Gran Torino I, the moderator Wallace asked Trump about his continued political rallies amid COVID, to which Trump responded, ‘Well, so far we have had no problem whatsoever… We had no negative, no negative effect.’ Rather than use the opportunity to mention the fact one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, the former presidential candidate Herman Cain contracted coronavirus and died shortly after attending Trump’s June 20 rally in Tulsa, Okla., Biden instead brought up a story about Trump asking a reporter to ‘stand back, put on a mask.’
Much of the night was filled with these missed opportunities.
Either that; or Biden was too busy trying to distance himself from Sanders’ two signature policies: Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, or reminding voters how he’s not Sanders—which, in and of itself, seems like an argument for why Sanders should’ve been the nominee, but alas, hindsight is… fuck.
That this would be Trump’s debate strategy shouldn’t be surprising, considering Pete fucking Buttigieg, of all people, predicted it last July. ‘It's time to stop worrying about what the Republicans will say,’ Buttigieg said, ostensibly still running as a progressive at that point. ‘It's true that if we embrace a far-left agenda, they're going to say we're a bunch of crazy socialists. If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they're going to do? They're going to say we're a bunch of crazy socialists. Let's stand up for the right policy, go up there and defend it.’
The problem, naturally, is that Democrats don’t know what the right policy is—demonstrated chiefly by the DNC’s running the same basic playbook in 2020 as they did four years ago: nominating a careerist, centrist politician with an eye towards flipping college-educated Republicans in the suburbs even if it costs them ‘blue-collar Democrats,’ albeit this time with a man… who may or may not have dementia.
Matt Karp, a history professor at Princeton University, discussed this in the larger context of the decline of class voting and its importance in Jacobin almost a year ago.
“In the United States, class voting produced the political coalitions that delivered the New Deal and the Civil Rights Acts,” Karp wrote. “This alignment has been under stress since the 1960s. Today, it is officially dead.” The death of this coalition, he says, coincided with the decline of labor power, the stagnation of wages, and the rise of austerity politics.
Source: McElwee, Sean. 'How to Reduce the Voting Gap.’ Demos. 2014.
As a result, working-class voters are far more apathetic about the political process and voting in general; according to Sean McElwee, in 2012, four-in-five Americans making more than $150,000/year voted, but as your annual income declines, so does the likelihood that you’ll actually vote. To the extent that only 47 percent of Americans making less than $10,000/year voted—a clear class divide not between Democrats and Republicans, but voters and non-voters. Contrary to what liberals online would have you believe, non-voters—if their income is any indication—aren’t ‘privileged’ people; no, they’re Americans on the margins, who’ve given up on a political system that continually does nothing for them, and asks them to support candidates who ignore their material concerns.
I bring this up not only to place Biden’s nomination into the context of the DNC’s rightward shift these last 50 years but also to pose the following question: ‘Who’s even watching these debates?’ The intervening eight years since the Obama-Romney race have only seen polarization deepen, leaving fewer undecided voters to be persuaded than in prior elections, as noted by Axios. Not to mention, seeing the Trump-Clinton race in 2016 and Trump-Biden race now has probably done little, if anything at all, to make non-voters more amenable to the idea of voting. Insofar as there are any truly undecided voters left who tuned in last night, it seems far more likely they came away with the impression that the best course of action would be to just stay home; there is a pandemic still going on, after all.
So, if the battle lines are set, and everyone set on voting has already decided on their guy in November, how do last night’s events shake up the race? Well, to Biden’s benefit, his pedestrian debate performance probably won’t matter, since there isn’t anyone really left to convince, and it’s not like Trump put forth a compelling argument for voters, either. Put simply, he’s not losing any ground here (assuming the polling’s right about his lead over Trump). That said, that Biden’s strategy against the clown fascist president is to simply lay-low and ghost his way to Election Day should serve as a reminder that liberalism has never served as a bulwark against budding fascism, and neither Diamond Joe nor American exceptionalist delusions will change that, ever.
Maclean’s Andray Domise said it best, ‘If that performance represents the height of the Democratic Party’s resistance to fascism in America, then God help us all.’
A masked Proud Boy confronts another person during a clash between right-wing groups and counter-protesters in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center, in Portland, on Aug. 22. (Photo by Aaron Mayorga)
After last night in Cleveland, one of the major headlines was Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacists when asked by moderator Chris Wallace. “Sure, I’m willing to,” Trump responded initially, “but I would say almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not the right-wing.”
But once Biden suggested Trump denounce the far-right extremist Proud Boys by name, Trump did the opposite. “Proud Boys—stand back, and stand by… Somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left.” It wasn’t condemnation; it was an endorsement, and the group quickly adopted Trump’s ‘stand by’ line as a de facto motto. As Meagan Day pointed out, ‘this is some of the boldest rhetoric we’ve seen from Trump embracing the phenomenon of right-wing violence.’ (An aside: consider that just weeks after the sky turned yellow on the West Coast, the Proud Boys—still a fringe group to most Americans—was mentioned before climate change was.)
While Trump’s ‘stand by’ order and his later suggestion that his supporters go watch the polls on Election Day received the most airtime, I’d like to focus on a more subtle and insidious statement of Trump’s from the first Gran Torino debate. During a bit of crosstalk between Trump and Biden regarding the protests in Portland, Ore., Trump uttered, ‘I had to send the US Marshals to take care of business.’
The incident Trump is making reference to here is the killing of Michael Forest Reinoehl, a U.S. Army veteran and anti-fascist, on Sept. 3, 2020. Reinoehl was suspected of shooting and killing Aaron J. Danielson, a member of the far-right organization Patriot Prayer days earlier during a pro-Trump caravan rally.
While the Thurston County, Wash., Sherrif’s Office claims Reinoehl was armed with a .380-caliber pistol, amid conflicting testimony, a resident of the apartment complex where the shooting occurred alleged, through a lawyer, that the Marshals who confronted the Army vet ‘yelled no warnings or commands before firing’ on him. According to The Oregonian, there have also been calls for an independent agency to deal with the investigation into the Marshals’ shooting of Reinoehl.
When asked by Jeanine Pirro on Fox News about it on Sept. 12, Trump replied, ‘I will tell you something — that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.’ (Note: It hasn’t been yet proven Reinoehl—who was never arrested or tried—was the one who shot and killed Danielson, and officials say it could take three months before their ballistics testing on Reinoehl’s .380 is complete.) He also added that if unrest occurs after the election, ‘We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that.’
Chris Wallace’s question-framing during this segment of the debate also gave cover for Trump’s rhetoric and contributed to the media narrative that ‘Portland is under siege’. ‘In Portland, Ore., especially, we had more than 100 straight days of protests… many of those turned into riots,’ Wallace prefaced a question to the former vice president. (This false perception isn’t unique to Wallace or Fox News; it’s endemic in the media, yielding Trump a carousel of ‘law-and-order’ talking points.)
Wallace’s frame incorrectly places culpability for the unrest on the protesters and obscures the role that escalating police violence against those demonstrating peacefully in the streets has played over the last three months there. Umbrella phalanxes, P100 respirators, cardboard shields, helmets, ski goggles, body armor, and the like—all are different means protesters have taken to protect themselves against the police’s riot-gear get-ups and routine use of tear gas and ‘impact weapons’ in addition to the antics of their far-right supporters.
Soon after, Wallace changed his phrasing telling Biden, ‘Sir, you’ve never called for the leaders in Portland, and in Oregon, to call in the National Guard and knock off 100 days of riots.’ Incidentally, that remark from Wallace—about the so-called 100 days of riots, not protests, in Portland—eventually prompted Trump’s aforementioned brag about a possible extrajudicial killing. Some ‘fourth estate’ we have, huh?
All to say: that debate served as a reminder that, regardless of who wins this election—and heads up: we probably won’t know who won for, at least, a few days and that’s not including the inevitable judicial trickery à la 2000 the GOP will try to pull—things are only going to get progressively worse from here. America, mirrored by the apparent mental states of its two major party candidates, is in decline.
The uselessness of Biden and Trump, Democrats and Republicans notwithstanding, the climate will continue to destabilize, communities will keep falling victim to natural disasters, income inequality will deepen and people will be left to endure—as I said in April about COVID—with no safety net to catch them. You may not want to accept this—it might even seem perverse now to ponder—but in a few years’ time, you’ll look back on this awful year and find yourself thinking, ‘if only, we could go back to that.'
I’ve been listening to a lot of MGMT recently, particularly their last album Little Dark Age, which was partially recorded after Trump’s win in 2016. There’s a great lyric in the album’s opening track that aptly summarizes the debate viewing experience, ‘Welcome to the shitshow / Grab a comfortable seat.’ Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2018, singer Andrew VanWyngarden explained the album’s title. ‘We called it Little Dark Age because that’s hopeful. It’s a little dark age… because it envisions an end to all of this.’
I’m sympathetic to the sentiment—as recently as nine months, before Super Tuesday; before COVID; before George Floyd; I held out a sliver of hope. But, in the interim, much has happened; the world is permanently changed; and, yet, the response is all too familiar: incompetent, unimaginative, and lacking in the boldness to actually make a material difference in people’s lives. VanWyngarden is right though—this is a dark age, we’re in dead of night, and the only question left to ask: Is it midnight yet?