Remember when an awkward debate moment was a grown man saying “oops”?

CNN

Lisa Van Dusen

September 30, 2020

In classic narrative warfare fashion, Donald Trump treated Tuesday night’s presidential debate in Cleveland not as a debate, but as an odious psychological warfare assault on his own country.

By refusing to engage in anything other than lies, insults and bullying, Trump was expressing his contempt for not only the forum in which he was participating but for the electoral process he sees as an obstacle to power and the voters acting as brazen accessories to that inconvenience.

By not only refusing to condemn white supremacist groups but by issuing a shout-out to them as his personal militia accompanied by an ominous warning of what’s to come, Trump was transposing a level of political thuggery previously unseen outside certain eras, authoritarian datelines, Mulberry Street social clubs and — fittingly enough — reality shows to the presidency of the United States of America. His debate performance essentially amounted to a dead-fish delivery warning from a Mob boss to the American electorate.

By ignoring the global context of Trump’s actions as they unfold within a wider war on democracy in which America is an extraordinarily valuable degradation target, interpretation first responders on such occasions are leaving out a piece of the answer to Trump’s otherwise inexplicable behaviour.

For operational purposes — and it really does clarify this vortex of lunacy to see it as an intelligence operation, notwithstanding the fact that it seems more like a stupidity operation — Trump’s constant, performative provocations of fear, division, tactical grievance, disgust, outrage, revulsion and helplessness are a feature, not a bug, of this particular presidency.

Trump walked onto a presidential debate stage Tuesday with a clear plan to replace that debate with what MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called “a monstrous, unintelligible display of loghorrhea” — attacking the memory and service of Joe Biden’s son, Beau, constantly interrupting both Biden and moderator Chris Wallace, and, per multiple expressions of disgust on Twitter, provoking millions to turn him off, ride the mute button or turn the channel out of psychic self-preservation.

Despite the fact that Donald Trump has used every moment of his tenure to discredit democracy, cheapen the Oval Office and diminish American credibility, influence and power worldwide, Panglossian disbelief can still make it hard to remind yourself that he’s not a failed president, he’s a successful saboteur. It’s actually not hard for people who’ve had any regrettable acquaintance with the corruption-enabled, reality-hijacking, unbelievably cynical tactics of the interests aiming to keep him in power, but most Americans haven’t. For operational purposes — and it really does clarify this vortex of lunacy to see it as an intelligence operation, notwithstanding the fact that it seems more like a stupidity operation — Trump’s constant, performative provocations of fear, division, tactical grievance, disgust, outrage, revulsion and helplessness are a feature, not a bug, of this particular presidency.

In that context, what he did Tuesday night was both an escalation and a doubling down. In narrative warfare terms, it was an input in the daily content assembly line moving America toward an outcome in November. He has established the following assumptions in the minds of voters: That he is willing to do anything to stay in power, including tampering with votes through proxies in the US Postal Service, at local electoral levels and elsewhere. He has established that he is willing — if leveraging a pandemic won’t work as a rationale to cancel an election — to use racism as a battering ram. He has taken the politics of personal destruction, commodified corruption and means-to-an-end relentlessness that pre-existed in certain Washington circles for decades and scaled them to existential threat levels.

Where this leaves America five weeks before Election Day is with a massive potential heist looming in the form of a stolen election posing as a dark episode in history in which Donald Trump — former game show host and beauty pageant impresario — single-handedly destroys American democracy. It may be the biggest fairy tale we’ve seen in an epidemic of manufactured chaos that has provided cover for the flabby but terribly consequential frat pranks that pass for power games these days.

The only way to stop it, absent a cavalry on the horizon, is for Americans to vote in numbers so overwhelming that all the shamelessness in the world can’t deny them.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and a columnist for The Hill Times. She was Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP in New York and UPI in Washington.