Thursday, September 12, 2024

Reactions from the Day after

I won't spend a lot of time on the establishment press reaction. For the most part, it is too disconnected from reality, too reluctant to face up to what we are seeing, to be of any value.

Take a minute to read this answer from Trump, keeping in mind that, though the moderator tried to steer him back to the immigration bill, this was a response to Harris pointing out that people have been observed leaving his rallies.

FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: First let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don't go to her rallies. There's no reason to go. And the people that do go, she's busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can't talk about that. People don't leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That's because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We're a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what's going on here, you're going to end up in World War 3, just to go into another subject. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk -- not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame. As far as rallies are concerned, as far -- the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It's a very simple phrase. Make America great again. She's destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success. We'll end up being Venezuela on steroids.
Any analysis that fails to capture how bizarre Trump's statements were is a gross misrepresentation.

This isn't to say the establishment press was uniformly bad. There were multiple high points.

This observation from NPR's Domenico Montanaro was excellent.


Chait did a good job putting the Haitian rumor in context.

The term presidential has always been elastic, and in the Trump era, its meaning has been stretched out like a pair of pants worn around for a week by a man 20 pounds too heavy for them. Yet, even by the distended contemporary standards, Trump’s claim about the dogs was weird, ridiculous, and the opposite of presidential.

There is poetic justice here. Trump is the victim of the sealed-off information ecosystem that produced and sustained his political career.

The conservative movement was built on the premise that the main organs of knowledge — journalism, academia, science — are hopelessly and even consciously biased toward liberalism. In response to this belief, the right constructed its own bubble in which only a claim originating from within the movement can be taken as true. Julian Sanchez once called this “epistemic closure,” meaning that its beliefs were not open to correction from outside sources.

The lie that migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, is a classic example of that method in operation. The story originated from white-supremacist sites online, which relentlessly promote the idea that non-white immigrants are dirty and dangerous. It quickly worked its way from the far right into mainstream conservative channels. Republicans seemed to think the idea gave them a potent meme.

 

CNN's Daniel Dale is consistently good.

And the Philadelphia Inquirer put things bluntly.

Silver, who we've been hard on lately, made an excellent point.


Too often, though, the news and analyses read like Pitchbot bits, so lets go to the source


The reactions on the right were also informative.


 

Though there was way too much horserace speculation, the electoral significance of one exchange seems to of gotten little attention. When Donald Trump refused to say whether he wanted Ukraine to win and Kamala Harris suggested that Putin would set his sights on Poland if Ukraine fell, she specifically directed the message to Polish Americans living in Pennsylvania. There are quite a few of them, almost 6% of the population, and there are substantially higher percentages in Wisconsin and Michigan. We have no way of knowing how likely Polish Americans are to be influenced by the specter of Russian aggression back in Europe, but we are talking about nontrivial numbers in at least three swing states.

On a related note, some of the most interesting reactions came from people on Russian payrolls, either here...



Or in Russia itself.


There is shock and dismay on Russian state television, since Moscow’s true preferred candidate Donald Trump was no match for Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday’s debate. Now, Putin’s top propagandists are eating crow, having walked into a trap of their own creation, after weeks of dismissing Harris as a weak, feeble-minded contender.

In the run-up to this presidential debate, Russian state TV propagandists constantly predicted that the “charismatic” Trump—previously described as “our Donald”—would resoundingly defeat his opponent. They’ve consistently described Harris as a stupid, inexperienced newcomer, who simply cannot function without a teleprompter, even citing ridiculous conspiracy theories from the likes of Alex Jones to assert that the Vice President has a severe “performance anxiety” and would show up to the debate high on drugs.

The coverage of the U.S. presidential race on Russian state TV was jam packed with compilations of Harris laughing or select quotes they repeatedly claimed no one could understand. Many of their clips came straight from Fox News, in which various hosts roundly mocked Harris and praised Trump.

On the night of the debate, this approach was still in use. During the broadcast of the show At Dawn on the Solovyov Live channel, immediately preceding the airing of the debate, host Kristina Busarova said that an “experienced politician” like Trump would most certainly steamroll Harris, describing the Vice President as “not smart and not savvy.” As she watched translated clips of the debate live on-air, Busarova looked deflated and confused.

Likewise, hosts and pundits on Russian state television struggled to explain the disparity between the way Kamala Harris was smeared in their relentlessly dismissive coverage, and the way she performed during the debate.

...

Despite their disappointment, Putin’s propagandists did find a bright spot for Moscow in the devastatingly disappointing debate. Trump’s refusal to say that he wants Ukraine to win in its battle against Russia’s invasion seemed to make them feel warm and fuzzy. Solovyov asked Simes to elaborate as to how Trump is planning to quickly end the war between Russia and Ukraine. Trump’s former adviser said that the ex-president would simply tell Ukraine to concede to Putin’s demands, and cut off all U.S. aid if the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky refuses to do so.

 
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