Kamala Harris Did Something Unthinkable

She started treating a delusional narcissist like a delusional narcissist.

Hi,

Yesterday me and a bunch of friends gathered in front of the TV, ate tortillas, drank wine, and watched the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Some of you may have joined in on the live Webworm chat where we shared thoughts, jokes and memes — and a basic glee in the realisation that Harris was largely wiping the floor with Trump. We also shared the reactions of our disinterested pets.

But it was a passing comment from reader Laura that stuck with me:

“Imagine if you had been in a coma for 10 years and you woke up to the debate on the TV you would be like, “How is he even on the stage, let alone allowed to run for president?” and someone would say, “He’s BEEN president”. I would be like, “Please put me back to sleep”.

I was particularly charmed by the use of the word “coma” in relation to Trump, because the more I thought about it, the more I realised it describes the state America finds itself in.

The country has fallen into a collective coma as to how utterly deranged this man is.

Putting it another way, the problem with America is that it’s become addicted to treating Donald Trump like a normal person.

While last night’s moderators did an excellent job of some live-fact checking (“There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born” said the ABC’s Linsey Davis), there is still this base level charade of having to say, “Thank you candidate Trump” after he vomits out a bunch of clearly deranged shit.

It’s like someone in a waistcoat saying, “Yes, good point” to a baboon flinging faeces at the wall in a zoo enclosure.

This whole charade was illustrated incredibly well last week when Trump attempted to answer a question about affordable childcare with this word salad:

“It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it — in this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re gonna have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world.”

How did the room react? They clapped. They clapped to a man who’d just made much less sense than the screaming drunken guy you walked past at 3am who’d fallen into the gutter, shat his pants, and vomited all down his front.

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Not only that, but the media laundered that deranged word salad like it was a normal answer, Parker Molloy pointing out:

The Associated Press headlined its article about Trump’s answer: “Trump suggests tariffs can help solve rising child care costs in a major economic speech.”

Politico summarized that portion of his pitch: “He also pledged to tackle government inefficiency with a new Elon Musk-inspired commission and to launch a sovereign wealth fund with money collected from tariffs to finance everything from infrastructure projects and child-care costs to paying down the national debt — moves that might ease concerns about the fiscal impact of his agenda.”

She called it “sanewashing” — and it’s a reminder of how deeply America feels the need to perform constant backflips to maintain that this utter lunatic is somehow normal.

America has been in this coma for years. And last night, it briefly woke up.

It woke up when Kamala Harris did something unthinkable and started treating a delusional narcissist like a delusional narcissist.

This was an incredibly novel approach, because traditionally people debate Donald Trump like he’s a normal politician. Journalists do it. Joe Biden certainly did in the last debate.

But Kamala Harris came up with a new tactic: She googled “How to debate a narcissist?”

As she spoke, she increasingly inserted little barbs targeting Donald Trump’s massive ego — and he took the bait. Instead of just debating him on policy or fitness, she went directly for the seething mass of insecurity and delusion that makes up almost his entire being — and she won. 

Donald Trump is raw, unfiltered Id, and targeting that hurts him far more than the most well-structured dissection of his nonsensical policy positions. The former president doesn’t care about policy. He cares about dominance. He can bluster through any number of attacks on his character or his handling of the big issues, bulldozing polite politicians by calling them sleepy turdsucklers as they whine “but my norms”.

But hit him with a well-timed blow to the fragile masculinity, and suddenly he can’t concentrate. After Harris mentioned his allegedly dwindling wealth, he ignored the actual topic at hand to launch into a lengthy boast about his big bank account. When she poked his precarious manhood by mentioning rally sizes, she might as well have been pointing out the size of his dick. He reacted accordingly, rambling about how various Americans are either executing newborn babies, or roasting pet dogs over an open fire.

Suddenly America could see Trump for what he was: that mindless, dysregulated baboon flinging his faeces across the room.

She saw him for who he was, and we all saw it along with her. America got to see what’s always been, and it was wonderful. 

I think it’s also worth noting that Trump has, in a way, done us a service by exposing the American exceptionalism and Sorkin-esque self-aggrandising for the offensive charade it always was.

You can put on airs and graces and go on about norms, but in the end America is pure Id rampaging around the world doing what it wants. Most institutions are still committed to the charade — but Trump never was.

The dark river of xenophobia, racism and fear has always existed in America, they just cover it up with high minded rhetoric like they’re some shining city on a hill and the world’s only democracy.

What Trump has done is make that pretense increasingly untenable — and, at times, ridiculously, horribly comical.

Additional writing by Hayden Donnell.