Kamala's Mousetrap
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of a King" — Hamlet
It was an astonishing spectacle, hugely reminiscent of Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, The Mousetrap. The result was that at the zenith of a wrathful sideways rant, the former President of the United States, Donald J Trump, drunk with rage, claimed that Haitian migrants were eating the pets of kindly Midwesterners (Averted Gaze). That was the worst of it, the most embarrassing, racist moment of the evening, but not the full extent of Trump’s loss of cognitive reserve in Philadelphia, goaded on by the very clever Vice President. Thrown off-message by Harris, he embraced ridiculous, fringe conspiracy theories before a national audience, revealing an ugly part of himself. “If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness,” wrote Dr. Richard Friedman for The Atlantic.
Hamlet’s Mousetrap — based on an old play The Murder of Gonzago — was reworked by the Prince of Denmark to force the conscience of the tyrant, Claudius into revealing its regicide. Similarly, Kamala Harris baited Trump’s one-dimensional wrathful nature by playing Chess to his short-fingered game of checkers. Did the Democratic Party, one wonders, hire psychologists to profile Donald Trump’s cognitive fitness for office? Because, as a longtime Trumpologist, Harris’s patient and careful baiting of the former President was breathtaking to behold, suggesting the ease — and the very real national security concerns — of his manipulability. China used jumping children and chocolate cake; Saudi Arabia employed a ceremonial sword dance. In both instances the delight in Trump’s face was telling.
In my last post, I floated many possibilities as to what strategy the Vice President might pursue in the debate, among them, this:
Ultimately, Harris has to introduce herself to the American public in a way more substantial than she did at the Convention. Otherwise, Trump’s othering of her as a fire-breathing, card-carrying feminazi Communist will gain traction among the undecideds, who are going to determine this election. Will Harris do this by strategically getting under Trump’s skin?
She did. And we cannot help but be impressed at the way in which the Vice President slowly cheesed the trap as the debate proceeded, ultimately catching her mouse. Jonathan Chait, who like a broken clock is right twice a day, got it about right:
Harris tipped her plan early on in the debate, when she invited the audience to watch a Trump rally. Here, she was letting on to something that only political obsessives know: The Trump who performs at rallies is a terrifying, rambling clown whose incoherence can hardly be captured in the short clips that appear in news coverage.
Harris also did something clever by noting that the audience leaves his rallies early because they’re bored. Trump is weirdly obsessed with his rally crowds (as Barack Obama noted during his Democratic National Convention speech) and challenging their size makes him spiral.
From that point on, Trump began to perform exactly as he does at rallies. He shouted endlessly, ranted and raved, had difficulty staying on topic or defining his concepts in a way non-superfans can follow.
Harris essentially broke Trump when she honed in on the matter of crowd size and the former President never recovered. “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics,” Trump replied, weakly.
The former President and has always been more interested and influenced by metrics — by Nielsen ratings, NASDAQ Composites, one-to-ten gradations of women’s hotness — rather than by the struggles of individual human beings. So the mention of his declining crowd size is very personal. Clearly, Trump has been thinking about former President Obama’s joke at the DNC, alluding to the Stormy Daniels revelation that Trump’s — how does one put this in polite society? — “shortcomings” are more physical than intellectual. And although no actual metrics were forthcoming, the Harris campaign ran a spot featuring Obama’s lewd joke about Trump’s general crowd size on Fox, and it will soon air in media markets including West Palm Beach (where Trump lives) and Pennsylvania.
The animosity between Obama and Trump goes back to the incessant and insidious Birtherism charges levelled in early 2011. President Obama, who generally keeps his temper under tight wraps, took the opportunity to unleash, comedically, on Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner of that year. “I think that is the night he resolves to run for president,” Trump ally and longtime friend Roger Stone said in the opening scene of FRONTLINE’s documentary The Choice. “I think that he is kind of motivated by (the humiliation): ‘Maybe I’ll just run. Maybe I’ll show them all,’” Stone adds. “He was rocking back and forth in his chair,” Chris Christie wrote of Trump that night in his memoir. “He still didn't break a smile."
It is impossible to understate the cognitive decline on display on Tuesday. Harris won, clearly, but Trump was unable to even score points on his key strengths, namely: border security, the Afghanistan withdrawal and inflation. He was so profoundly triggered by Harris’s prosecutorial tone that he was more on the defensive than the offense this past Tuesday night.
Further, Trump was so dark and so wrathful, as opposed to Harris, who projected increased confidence and mastery of the subject matter as the debate wore on, particularly on the subject of US aid to the Ukraine. Trump, by contrast, could not seem to see the Ukraine War outside Putin’s interests. The Vice President was relentless in attacking Trump in the most personal terms — ways that we have never seen before in public; scoring against him at will — thus driving him to distraction. Brian Stelter observed in the Reliable Sources newsletter:
Critics say Tuesday's debate where Trump confused Virginia and West Virginia, promoted racist internet rumors and repeatedly lost his train of thought is the latest on-camera evidence of his deterioration …
Some of you have written to me in recent days observing a double standard between coverage of Trump and President Biden, specifically with regard to age. The biggest difference I see is the reaction from Democrats and Republicans. After Biden fumbled his June debate, the calls came from inside the house. Criticism and concern from members of Biden's own party drove the ensuing news coverage. There are no equivalent calls coming from Trump's party. (Just anonymous GOP sources griping that Trump couldn't resist taking the bait from Kamala Harris.)
As a result, questions about Trump's mental acuity mostly come from his political opponents, making a bipartisan concern (solid majorities of Americans doubt his mental and physical fitness) sound, well, partisan. "He's decompensating – his language, how he thinks, how he speaks," Philippe Reines, who played Trump in Harris debate prep, told Kaitlan Collins last night.
If Trump seemed profoundly off-message by the confrontation, Kamala exuded calm collectedness. She memorably put Trump on the defensive on Project 2025 and abortion. Indeed, the visuals were revelatory throughout the debate. In the split-screen, Harris clearly had figured out how the cameras would view her facial responses to Trump’s answers and planned accordingly. “Harris took on a studied look of bemusement or incredulity,” Anthony Zurcher of BBC News noted. “Trump, for his part, mostly scowled.” She, in fine, presented optimism as a sparkling contrast to the conspiracist-laden negativist pessimism that Trump has been peddling for years. And Trump, as we all know, doesn’t do good at smiling.
The only person really claiming that Trump won right now is the Trump campaign because they have to. This is another authoritarian cue from their campaign, the fear and the misinformation. But they say differently, according to CNN’s Kaitland Collins, in private. Imagine a campaign in a Democracy where Fear — of losing one’s job, of losing ones career in the Republican Party —trumps (excuse the pun) Truth. That is the campaign of Trump, who, for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, has a favorability rating of 43%. That’s the bad news, to be sure. The good news, which I prefer to end on, is that Trump’s unfavorables have always pretty much been above 50%, closer oftentimes to 60%. And it is very rare that Trump’s favorable ratings go above 45%. That is to say that for a sexist, bigoted authoritarian-manque, 45% is an absurdly high number. But in the grand scheme of things, Trump’s tops out, almost always, viewed negatively by roughly half the country.
Tuesday meaningfully ended with a Harris endorsement by Taylor Swift, the gold standard of celebrity endorsements. Since then, over ten million people have liked the Instagram endorsement. And nearly 400,000 prospective new voters have followed Swift to Vote.gov, a government website that directs users to state-specific voting information. Will that change the calculus of the election? It is impossible to tell at this close distance from the endorsement, but it is worth watching.
Will Trump return for a second helping of embarrassment next week? His ego, clearly, demands it. Can Kamala further goad him into a return matchup by shaming him with the charge of “beta”? If so, can Harris finish the job, goading Trump even further out into the weeds of conspiracy and racism? Or will Trump’s campaign staff intervene, finding an excuse to sit this one out? Who can predict anything in a Presidential campaign that has included, thus far, a shift in the principals of one party and an assassination attempt on the other?
“If Donald Trump wins in November and launches a full-blown authoritarian presidency next year—as he has promised to do in his own words—what exactly would that national nightmare look like? One set of oft-floated worst-case scenarios looks something like this: Trump orders his pliant pick for attorney general to prosecute Liz Cheney and other high-profile critics and frog-march them before the cameras. Trump invokes the Insurrection Act to dispatch the military into cities to crush mass protests. Trump unshackles deportation forces to drag millions of undocumented immigrants from homes and workplaces. Trump purges our nation’s intelligence services, stocks them with loyal foot soldiers, and unleashes them as a domestic spying force to gather information on designated enemies of the MAGA movement.” (Greg Sargent/TNR)
“Serhii ‘Flash’ Beskrestnov hates going to the front line. The risks terrify him. ‘I’m really not happy to do it at all,’ he says. But to perform his particular self-appointed role in the Russia-Ukraine war, he believes it’s critical to exchange the relative safety of his suburban home north of the capital for places where the prospect of death is much more immediate. ‘From Kyiv,’ he says, ‘nobody sees the real situation.’ So about once a month, he drives hundreds of kilometers east in a homemade mobile intelligence center: a black VW van in which stacks of radio hardware connect to an array of antennas on the roof that stand like porcupine quills when in use. Two small devices on the dash monitor for nearby drones. Over several days at a time, Flash studies the skies for Russian radio transmissions and tries to learn about the problems facing troops in the fields and in the trenches. He is, at least in an unofficial capacity, a spy. But unlike other spies, Flash does not keep his work secret. In fact, he shares the results of these missions with more than 127,000 followers—including many soldiers and government officials—on several public social media channels. Earlier this year, for instance, he described how he had recorded five different Russian reconnaissance drones in a single night—one of which was flying directly above his van.” (Charlie Matcalfe/MIT Technology Review)
“It’s hard to think of a more iconically American company than US Steel. It’s right there in the name. But it’s more than that. The company emerged from Andrew Carnegie’s Pittsburgh-area steel mills, which produced one of the largest fortunes and were the site of one of the bloodiest and most brutal industrial strikes in US history. Its formation in 1901 was orchestrated by J.P. Morgan, who blended Carnegie Steel Company with several smaller concerns in one of the first large-scale corporate mergers the country had ever seen. At its wartime peak in 1943, the firm employed over 340,000 people. When the organized crime figure Meyer Lansky reputedly claimed in 1962 that the mafia was ‘bigger than US Steel,’ he was making quite a brag. Today, that wouldn’t be much of a brag. As of the end of last year, the company had fewer than 22,000 employees. In terms of employee headcount, the University of Pittsburgh is bigger than US Steel. It’s no longer even the largest American steel company (it’s third). And that’s not much competition — the US as a whole produces only 5 percent of the world’s steel, compared to nearly half in 1950. So in the face of increasingly tough competition both domestic and foreign, US Steel started to look for a buyer. Late last year it found one in Nippon Steel, the largest steel manufacturer in Japan, which offered $14.9 billion for the company. In many ways, it seemed like a natural fit. The world’s current leading steel producer, by a wide margin, is China, and just as a US-Japan alliance is the linchpin of efforts to contain China militarily, a US-Japan corporate merger could be a linchpin of efforts to contain China’s efforts to dominate the steel market. Letting a military rival control the production of such a crucial material (and such an important one for defense applications like warships and warplanes) comes with clear risks. Except the deal now looks unlikely to go through.” (Dylan Matthews/Vox)