BY MAX BURBANK | It was all there from the get-go, but I missed the full weight of the moment. Because I was, you know, peeking through my fingers. The shadow of the Trump/Biden debate was too present, the visceral elevator drop where it became clear how bad things were, how much worse they were than I had anticipated, the sense memory of that gut punch made being fully present in the opening moments of this second debate impossible. In preparing to write this piece, I re-watched Trump vs. Harris, this time with the cloud of the past fully and permanently dispelled by a joyous and long-awaited clock-cleaning the VP delivered.

Are you as old as I am? As a child did you lie on the living room floor, chin in hands, watching Diana Rigg as Mrs. Peel beat the living crap out of some well-dressed thug, all the while looking as cool and collected as if she was eating a damn watercress finger sandwich at high tea instead of handing out broken bones and concussions? That’s what Kamala Harris’ debate performance put me in mind of. It was welcome as hell and a highly effective cloud-of-the-past disperser. Go back and watch those first forty-five seconds or so.

Let’s walk through them together: Harris enters from the right, Trump from the left. Her stride is longer, more vigorous, two steps for each of his. Trump’s pace is almost reluctant. The two men at the last debate did not shake hands or greet each other, that hangs in the air. You can see Trump’s not sure what happens next, he hesitates; Harris holds at center for a nano second, giving Trump a chance to come meet her at center stage, neutral ground, but he freezes. Maybe he thinks it’s a power move, making her come to him or walk away, but the moment is almost instantly gone, she crosses the distance powerfully, invades his space, her hand already outstretched, and what can he do, he has to take it. He attempts the childish, bullying yank-in shake I assume he learned at Roy Cohn’s knee, but Harris knows it’s coming because it’s what he always does, utterly predictable and her weight is already placed against it.

“Kamala Harris” she states, not just implying he doesn’t know who she is, but underlining that in fact he doesn’t, he’s gone to great lengths not to know her, he mispronounces her name, he claims to be confused over her racial identity, he calls her stupid which even her enemies certainly know is a million miles from the truth. He’s willfully, purposefully chosen not to know his opponent and so she tells him. “Kamala Harris.” Flat, powerful. “Let’s have a good debate.” His voice is wispy and insubstantial compared to hers, old one might be tempted to say. “Nice to see you. Have fun.”

“Have fun.”

Have “fun”? Have FUN? It’s like his advisers told him, “Listen, whatever you do, just for God’s sake don’t be weird, ‘cause they have you on the ropes with that” and Trump is such a frikkin’ compulsive contrarian he’s like, “Screw you, I’m gonna lean in.” Have fun. I bet he regrets that suggestion, since on the whole it looked a lot more fun for her than it did for him. They assume their podiums and she smiles a very normal, human smile and Trump stands there for a second like a mannequin in the Big, Tall, Lost, and Elderly section at Target before suddenly pasting on his inane Clint Eastwood squint and the big, tight lipped grin that showcases his third chin and dangly turkey wattle neck flaps. It’s kind of like the face he made during his photo-op over the headstones at Arlington National Cemetery, just less teeth, minus his infantile, habitual thumbs up, and without breaking any laws or callously disrespecting the dead.

Their dynamic was established that quickly. I kind of think Trump knew it, but he seemed sure he could turn things around by spending the next hour and a half getting steadily more enraged and focusing on biting down on every single baited hook Harris threw at him like a starving haddock.

Harris seemed a little nervous for the first few minutes, but by the time they got to the abortion question she settled in and dominated for the rest of the evening. I literally cannot think of a single moment where Trump held the upper hand. I’m not sure Trump understands or agrees that the point of a presidential debate is to increase the number of people willing to vote for you. His strategy seemed aimed at taking folks already thoroughly committed to voting for him and making them want to… uh… vote for him, like… harder?

Have you ever seen a picture of a bull on a farm, and it’s got a big metal ring through its nose? It’s not a fashion statement. See, a bull is a very large, potentially dangerous animal, but its septum is very sensitive, so once you’ve got a ring through it and you tie a lead to that ring, you can make the bull go wherever you want it to. That’s a highly oversimplified and sanitized explanation of what is arguably animal cruelty, but I can assure you no animals were harmed in

the making of that sentence because it’s a metaphor, wherein Trump is the bull and Harris is the farmer. And sure, I’ve already deployed the baited hook metaphor with Harris as fisherman and Trump as haddock, but about eight million pundits have used that one already today and as far as I know, I’m the first bull ring guy.

If I were a better writer I’d go back and scratch the bait metaphor, but even though summer is technically over I’m still embracing “Brat,” which a 12-year-old customer at my place of employment informed me “refers to someone who is confidently rebellious, unapologetically bold, and playfully defiant.” Actually, that’s what dictionary.com told me. She told me it meant “Messy, but OK with it” after asking me apropos of pretty much nothing if I was having a “Brat Summer,” to which I responded that I was unsure since I did not know what that meant. And OK, my place of employment is a comic book and pop culture collectibles store, but I take my slivers of joy in this life where I can find them, and I don’t appreciate you judging me.

My point is, Harris controlled Trump throughout the debate. She knew where she wanted him to go, tugged on the rope and off he trundled in her chosen direction like the gigantic, plodding lump of beef, confusion, rage, and loose testosterone he is. Metaphorically.

In just her second statement of the evening, Harris said, “I’m going to tell you all, in this debate tonight, you’re going to hear from the same old, tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances, and name-calling.” The former Commander-in Beef scuffed the dust with one cloven hoof and obligingly lumbered off to do just that.

Trump’s every response boiled down to either A.) Millions of migrant criminals streaming from prisons and mental institutions like Orcs marching out the gates of Mordor or B.) How every problem in America would be solved by the Chinese paying massive tariffs on all their exports but somehow never hitting on the idea of requiring American importers to pay those fees or passing the cost directly to U.S. consumers. So, “Same old playbook,” Check.

“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,”  hollered Trump, incorrectly. That sounds just the teensiest bit racist, right? I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. “All I can say is I read where she was not Black, that she put out, and, I’ll say that,” The former President opined, “and then I read that she was Black, and that’s okay.” Uh, definitely racist, but I guess saying it’s “okay” to be Black is what passes for tolerance with Trump.

“But her vice-presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is okay.” Well, kudos for a totally untrue statement that isn’t inherently racist, but really not something Walz or ANYONE ELSE ON EARTH BESIDES TRUMP EVER SAID.

“First of all, I wasn’t given $400 million. I wish I was. My father was a Brooklyn builder—Brooklyn, Queens—and a great father, and I learned a lot from him. But I was given a fraction of that, a tiny fraction, and I built it into many, many billions of dollars. Many, many billions. And when people see it, they are even surprised,” Trump snorted around the ring in his nose, somehow managing to brag and whine simultaneously, a Trumpian technique I call “Brining,” which I am told is also a key feature of his skin care regimen.

Harris said right up front exactly what Trump was going to do. It wasn’t hard. It’s exactly what he’s done for almost 10 years, with virtually no variation. There are kids who are going to vote for the first time this election who can barely remember a time when Trump wasn’t running for president. Even when he held the office, he never stopped running for president, because he doesn’t have the vaguest idea what being president would actually entail, so he spent his entire presidency either golfing or holding campaign rallies for an office he ALREADY HELD! Trump is not anything if not entirely, easily predictable. And see, here’s the thing. A president who most anyone can lead around by the nose? That’s DANGEROUS! If Kamala Harris can get Trump to dance around like a monkey just by grinding his organ, think what Putin can do, and YES, that is my THIRD Trump as easily-led-animal metaphor, because that is the kind of high-quality word smithery you get with me!

Harris controlled Trump throughout the debate. She made it clear how easy it is to make this man go wherever you want him to go. When the question to her was about immigration and border security, an area that is supposed to be a strength for Trump, she spent the first half of her time answering the question—but then pivoted to surprising territory. She told viewers she wanted them to attend a Trump rally so they could see for themselves how dismal and egotistical they are, how at these events which Trump values beyond all other aspects of his political life, his strongest, most fanatical supporters… leave early! Because even for them, it’s boring, it’s exhausting!

And Trump, like the thin-skinned, reactionary, undisciplined dope he is, departed from the subject of immigration, his HOME BASE, where he is supposedly STRONGEST and went on an absurd, disturbing tirade that began with him defending his crowd sizes, then absurdly insisting that Harris doesn’t draw crowds or enthusiasm which even Fox News admits she does, and then he segued into his worst, most wildly racist moment of the evening by claiming without evidence that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were abducting and eating people’s pets! Eating dogs and cats!

And when the moderator fact checked him on it, he started shouting about how he’d seen people on TV saying it, as if that was proof, without mentioning that the people he’d seen saying it are other imbecilic, bigoted MAGA talking heads like his own VP pick, erstwhile Hillbilly and Yale graduate JD VANCE! Harris maneuvered Trump into wasting time he could have used scoring points on a subject where polls show people favor him, goaded him into hitting his single lowest point in a debate already overstuffed with multiple other low points!

In all the pre-debate punditry, the consensus was that both candidates had pretty much the same task: Define Kamala Harris. Because if, after the last decade, you don’t know exactly who Trump is, I doubt your ability to know anything about anyone ever. Trump failed to define Harris. Sure, he said lots of awful things about her, but they were fairly transparent lies—and more than that, they were basically the exact same set of lies he deploys against anyone he feels has in some way wronged him.

There is virtually no difference in his attacks on former employees he once said were “the best minds,” people who have accused him of sexual assault, and anyone who had the temerity to run against him, from Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz to Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris. Everyone is stupid, everyone is ugly, everyone is out to get him, it’s so unfair, everyone is the worst whatever in the history of the United States, in the history of everything, everyone is “crooked” and everybody knows it, even whoever he’s railing against at the moment, especially those people. It’s tired, boring old boiler plate—and like all droning, one-note, same-old-same-old schtick, it becomes noise that gets instinctively tuned out. So Trump did not achieve what everyone on both sides of the aisle said he needed to.

Did Harris define herself? Well, I think so, but I don’t count since I already have a pretty good idea of who she is. But if you, like lots of folks, have made the perhaps wise mental health choice to not follow politics all that closely, there’s a lengthy document on her website detailing all her policies. In the debate, Trump claimed “She doesn’t have a plan. She copied Biden’s plan, and it’s like four sentences like, ‘Run Spot, Run.’” As always, this statement tells us more about Trump than Harris, in this case that Trump can’t count or do even the simplest math, since her policy statement runs to a few thousand sentences.

Regardless, I think that Harris did leap through the definition hoop though, in that I learned something about her I had not known before: There was a split screen moment that I found… illuminating. It’s very near the end of the debate. Trump is angrily illustrating for the millionth time his complete misunderstanding of how tariffs work, and Harris shakes her head repeatedly, looks down, narrows her eyes at him like she can’t believe what she’s looking at, all what you’d expect, but then… at about the 1:35:25 mark, her expression changes.

And look, I know this is subjective, but to me it felt like an utterly authentic moment. She looked like she felt bad for her opponent. Like for an instant the specifics of the evening dropped away and she was just a human being watching an angry, clearly miserable, empty, joyless old man who had scaled the mountain of American success and found nothing there. And it didn’t make her angry, she took no pleasure in his suffering, didn’t revel in his weakness…it made her sad. To me, it looked like compassion.

I don’t feel that for Trump. I’m not capable of it. As a Jewish Unitarian Universalist (and yes, you are allowed to be all those things at once, look it up), I am called upon to embrace the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Every person. It’s the first principle, the UU Prime Directive. And in the case of Trump, in the case of the vast majority of the MAGA movement, I fail that calling. I lack the necessary compassion. I want, and I think America desperately needs, now more than ever, a president who surpasses me in that regard.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Chelsea Community News welcomes back clever columnist, dyspeptic pundit, and pants fancier Max Burbank, whose My CoviDiary column (published with startling regularity in 2020 and the early months of 2021) looked at the pandemic in all of its forms and functions and, as time went on, as a blunt weapon wielded by then-President Trump. Click here for December 2020 content. Click here for the November entries. Click here for the October entries. Click here for the September entries. Click here for the August entries.  Click here for the July entries.  Click here for the June entries. Click here for the May entries. Click here for the April entries. Click here for all March entries . My CoviDiary is reprinted, with the author’s permission, from its original publication via maxburbank.wordpress.com. Oh, and by the by, spicy language abounds, should you choose to proceed ahead.

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