Donald Trump’s success in the 2016 Republican nominating contest was largely a function of his willingness to embrace and elevate dangerous, hateful and false claims from the rightmost fringe of Republican rhetoric. There was a whole galaxy of assertions and arguments on blogs and social media that even Fox News kept at arm’s length, but there were a lot of disaffected people on the right who believed them and were frustrated that Republican officials didn’t parrot them.
Trump did. This was the genesis of his “straight talker” reputation, and it allowed him to build a big, loyal base of support that powered him to the nomination. Once he won, and he and his supporters made clear that fealty was a requirement, the rest of the party slowly fell in line.
By now, there is no meaningful space to Trump’s right and there is no meaningful political conversation on the right that isn’t defined by Trump. There are Republicans and conservatives who oppose Trump and criticize his politics, but they have no power. The power sits with, and flows from, Trump.
And that means he is no longer the outsider, the guy saying things that lack a voice. He is, instead, the guy who is primarily responsible for defining or validating what’s said. He’s the king of MAGAland, and while there are other prominent members of the peerage — Elon Musk, Fox News, Tucker Carlson, etc. — it is Trump’s voice that remains supreme because it is to him that the base is most loyal.
It also means that he no longer knows how to talk to anyone outside of that world, as was obvious during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night.
Trump talks a lot, giving lengthy speeches at rallies and lots of interviews to sycophantic interviewers (Musk, Fox News, etc.). He has a habit of, over time, distilling points to little sound bites, familiar phrases and references that his base understands without having to say more. They’ve created a shared vernacular over the course of the past nine years, and Trump is used to making vague references and getting a knowing response.
On the debate stage, though, these references landed very differently. His clumsy, incomplete reference to the false claim that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets was incomprehensible to people not tuned in to the political conversation and, particularly, to the pro-Trump conversational universe. Even some of those sympathetic to Trump understood that this was a miss.
But he couldn’t help it. Trump is so used to having audiences who agree with him — diners at Mar-a-Lago, podcasters who are friends with his son — that he was visibly flustered by the response he got on the stage. In the Skinner box that is campaigning, applause and recognition are the rewards Trump seeks. In that room, no matter which of his most popular riffs he threw out, he wasn’t getting what he wanted.
Viktor Orban? No? Ashli Babbitt? That name usually triggers a big response. How about “peacefully and patriotically”? Trump’s supporters understand that this phrase is meant to absolve him of culpability for the Capitol riot. Did viewers at home know what he meant?
It was more frustrating still because Harris kept pushing his buttons. Trump’s triggers are as big and obvious as his ties, and Harris kept priming them. Trump — again, not used to this! — kept taking big bites of the bait. Even if he wanted to say something that his campaign advisers had suggested, first he had to defend his crowd size or his tenure at the Wharton School of Business or whatever other insecurity Harris drew into the spotlight.
And then there were the moderators, a focus of particular ire among Trump’s supporters (who, of course, have learned that there’s no reward earned from criticizing Trump). ABC News’s David Muir and Linsey Davis challenged the candidates and gave them the chance to engage with one another. But they also refused to allow Trump to make significant false claims without noting that they were false.
No, immigrants aren’t eating pets. No, crime isn’t up. No, the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. No, it’s not legal in blue states to kill a newborn. There’s obvious value in having the moderators clarify factual points instead of leaving it to one of the candidates, as though these things are a matter of debate. Nor did they correct all of Trump’s myriad lies, like that he “had nothing to do with” the rally outside the White House on Jan. 6, 2021. But Trump and his allies are used to a universe in which they say false things and they all agree with each other that they are true, or at least true enough.
Trump also wasn’t corrected when he claimed that he “probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they” — Biden and Harris — “say about me.” In his world, this is true enough: “They” wanted Trump dead and the assassination attempt was the result. In the real world, there’s no evidence the shooting was anything other than an unstable young man seeking attention — a John Hinckley attack, not a John Wilkes Booth one. But no one ever presses Trump on this stuff, so he just threw out this conspiracy theory that would have been a winner at a rally.
By any objective measure, Harris fared better in the debate than Trump did. This doesn’t mean that the state of the race has changed much. Trump may be incapable of appealing to those outside of his base, but his base is big and engaged and has been enough for him to secure just under 50 percent of the vote in the past two presidential elections. One reason he sticks to the same patter is that it works in keeping his base loyal.
But Harris’s victory did offer one more opportunity to demonstrate how distant from reality Trump’s claims sit. He took the unusual step of visiting the “spin room” after the debate, where he insisted to reporters that polling had shown that he won the debate easily. He shared some of these “polls” on his account at Truth Social; they were almost uniformly online surveys conducted by Trump-sympathetic social media accounts, the functional equivalent of taking a straw poll of people’s favorite baseball teams at Fenway Park.
It is in this world that Trump lives. It is to this world that Trump is used to speaking. It is this world’s belief system that Trump reflects. It’s his worldview — and either you agree or Trump doesn’t really have anything to say to you.
“Donald Trump has no plan for you,” Harris said more than once, speaking to undecided voters. This was an easier argument to make when any plan Trump had to offer was presented in the foreign language spoken by residents of Trumpworld.
