‘Disgrace’ is Inadequate to Describe Trump and His Running Mate*
It’s no wonder so many supporters of the Republican ticket deny the Holocaust.
I had little doubt that Vice President Harris, an experienced trial lawyer, would respond to Trump’s predictable venom and self-aggrandizement while delivering a refreshing and hopeful message along with a zinger or two, given her target rich opponent. It’s become hard for me to see and listen to Trump’s constant prevarication and his blatant bigotry and xenophobia, so I planned not to watch the debate. I’ve had quite enough of the dangerous monster’s hate-filled rhetoric. I am exhausted by the deranged nonsense and easily disproven lies that inexplicably resonate with a large percentage of Americans. Trump does it because it works. What that says about his discipleship — who profess a [per]version of Christianity and patriotism — is deeply troubling.
I reconsidered my decision not to watch the debate, however. On balance it could be a positive experience, I thought, so I tuned in. I could always turn it off.
I was rapt almost from the beginning.
Vice President Harris delivered the most stylistically and strategically masterful debate performance I have witnessed. Trump, who became even more diminished and frenetic as the debate progressed — smaller in a word — delivered among the worst.
I won’t try to characterize the respective performances and their contrast. Karl Rove, a conservative political strategist and Fox News contributor, kindly — and eloquently — did that for us:
“Tuesday’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was a train wreck for him, far worse than anything Team Trump could have imagined. . . .
“Ms. Harris pressed Mr. Trump on the economy, the Ukraine war, foreign policy, healthcare, the Jan. 6 attack and especially abortion, leaving him flustered and often incoherent. . . .
“Mr. Trump had to know the vice president would try to get him to lose his cool. She did. She went after him on his multiple indictments. She called him ‘weak’ and belittled him as a six-time bankrupt, spoiled inheritor of wealth. She said his former national security adviser thought him, in her words, ‘dangerous and unfit’ for the Oval Office.
“As is frequently the case with Mr. Trump, he let his emotions get the better of him. He took the bait almost every time she put it on the hook, offering a pained smile as she did. Rather than dismissing her attacks and launching his strongest counterarguments against her, Mr. Trump got furious. As her attacks continued, his voice rose. He gripped the podium more often and more firmly. He grimaced and shook his head, at times responding with wild and fanciful rhetoric. . . .
“There was no sustained, specific indictment of her record on almost any issue. Mr. Trump offered angry responses, pursed lips and eyes darting mostly down, seldom looking at her. And what was it with his makeup that left white circles around his eyes? This was his most important opportunity to make an impression of strength and relative stability. . . .
“It matters how debating candidates carry themselves. There, it was no contest. Ms. Harris came across as calm, confident, strong and focused on the future. Mr. Trump came across as hot, angry and fixated on the past, especially his own. She mastered the split screen, projecting confidence and wordlessly undercutting him by smiling while shaking her head as he spoke.
“Many undecided and swing voters will make up their minds less on any single issue than on their visceral reactions to the candidates. Ms. Harris did herself much good with that crowd Tuesday. Mr. Trump didn’t.”
A Catastrophic Debate for Trump
“Rove . . . recalled Trump’s previous insult of Harris in July as ‘dumb as a rock’ and wrote: ‘Which raises the question: What does that make him?’”
Karl Rove Flips Donald Trump’s Insult For Kamala Harris On Ex-President
The selection of a mini-me who is obsessed with cats and childless women as his running mate won’t raise the ceiling of Trump’s support. It was Vance, a U.S. senator for Ohio, who on Monday “spread lies and smears against his own constituents in Springfield — Haitian immigrants who have settled there to make a new life for themselves.”
Come to think of it, excepting Native Americans and African Americans, all U.S. citizens are immigrants or descendants of immigrants who came to this country, often to escape desperate conditions, to settle here and make a new and better life.
Doubling down on Vance’s dangerous lies and smears that “people had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” Trump “told an audience of 67 million people that ‘they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats.’”
I don’t have words to express how dangerous and deeply offensive this is on every level or what it reveals about the character of Trump and Vance. Vice President Harris’s statement that people who served with Trump including military leaders describe him as a “disgrace” was poignant but inadequate. I leave it to The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie to give it a go:
“The main impact of those lies and smears . . . has been to terrorize the entire Springfield community.”
“On Thursday, bomb threats led to the evacuation of two elementary schools, city hall and the state motor vehicle agency’s local facility. The mayor has received threats to his office, and local families fear for the safety of their children. Several Springfield residents, including Nathan Clark — father of Aiden Clark, the 11-year-old killed when his school bus was struck by a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant — have pleaded with Trump and Vance to end their attacks and leave the community in peace.
“‘My son was not murdered. He was accidentally killed by an immigrant from Haiti,’ said Clark, rebutting a claim made by Vance. ‘This tragedy is felt all over this community, the state and even the nation, but don’t spin this towards hate,’ he continued. ‘Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose.’
“This direct rebuke from a grieving father has stopped neither Vance nor Trump from spreading anti-immigrant — and specifically anti-Haitian — lies and fanning the flames of hatred. ‘Don’t let biased media shame you into not discussing this slow moving humanitarian crisis in a small Ohio town,’ Vance said on Friday. ‘We should talk about it every day.’
“The ‘humanitarian crisis,’ it should be said, is the revitalization of Springfield after years of decline. Haitian immigrants have filled jobs, bought homes and filled city coffers with property and sales taxes. And while there are growing pains from the sudden influx of new residents, the charge that Haitian immigrants have, in Vance’s words, brought a ‘massive rise in communicable diseases, rent prices, car insurance rates and crime’ is false. He is lying about people, the very people he swore an oath to represent, in ways that will inspire additional threats of violence and may well bring physical harm to the community.
“In his speech accepting the Republican nomination for vice president, Vance rejected a creedal notion of American identity. America, he said, ‘is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.’ He went on to add that America is a ‘homeland’ and that ‘people will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.’
“To some overly credulous commentators, this was nothing more than respect for place and a call to assimilate. But as Adam Serwer observes in The Atlantic, Vance’s argument was more radical than it appeared at first glance.
“‘To say that Americans are willing to fight for their plot of land is to say that they are like every other group of people that has ever existed and that exists now. It is to say that there is nothing particularly special about America or American ideals at all. But the ideals that have animated the American project have exercised such a powerful appeal around the world precisely because they speak to more universal aspirations.’
“To reject creedal nationalism, Serwer says, is to embrace, in its stead, a blood-and-soil nationalism that hold some Americans as more American than others. It is to say that there are some people who, on account of their origins or those of their parents and grandparents, cannot be full and equal members of the national community.
“In waging rhetorical war on the Haitian immigrants of Springfield, Ohio, Vance has clarified the meaning of his convention speech. It does not matter, to Vance, that these Haitian newcomers came here legally, under the Temporary Protected Status program. It does not matter that they filled a valuable need. It does not matter that they reversed a slow collapse that has already sapped the life from so many former industrial towns. It does not matter that they work hard and seem eager, by all accounts, to establish themselves as productive members of the community.
“What matters to Vance is who they are, where they come from and what they look like. They don’t belong to this soil, he might say, and therefore they don’t belong. Right now, the most Vance can do to wage this war is use his words. I shudder to think what might be possible if he had the authority of the state to wield as well.”
JD Vance’s blood-and-soil nationalism finds its target
Given Vance’s conduct of late, it’s hard to reach any other conclusion.
According to Heather Cox Richardson, “[t]he widespread ridicule of Trump’s statement has obscured that this attack on Ohio’s immigrants is part of an attempt to gain control of the Senate. Convincing Ohio voters that the immigrants in their midst are subhuman could help Republicans defeat popular Democratic incumbent senator Sherrod Brown. . . .” Letters from an American.
This on the heels of Trump’s sadistic plan to round up millions of immigrants, place them in temporary encampments, and deport them. Last week in Wisconsin, he assured that “getting them out will be a bloody story.”
I also don’t have words to express what this reveals about the character of the voters for whom this resonates. This is the first time I have quoted Jeff Tiedrich who publishes the deeply sarcastic This Week in Stupid on Substack. In today’s post, he said in reference to a September 13, 2024 New York Post article, titled Haitian motorist makes illegal turn in Springfield, Ohio, smashing into mom driving with autistic daughter:
“here’s a fun, cool thing those madcap Nazis did in Germany in the 1930s: every time a Jewish person ended up on the wrong side of the law, it was blown up into national news. it didn’t matter how small or insignificant the infraction — there it was, splashed all over the front page of Der Stürmer. Neues Volk regularly published photos of Jews, alongside write-ups of their supposed crimes.
“‘Jewish Criminality, the Nazis labeled it. ‘the jew is outside the law’ was the message to be hammered home.
“oh, and if it were some financial crime at the center of the story — tax avoidance, or bank fraud — the compliant, Nazi-adjacent press had a fucking field day.
“this constant barrage of ‘every Jew is a criminal’ propaganda was so effective, that by the time the Nazis started carting Jews off to concentration camps, the average German citizen was all what the fuck took so long?
“all of which should make what’s going on in America in 2024 send shivers up every decent person’s spine.”
That this dangerous rhetoric works is deeply disturbing. It’s no wonder Trump strategically pals around with Laura Loomer and that so many supporters of the Republican ticket deny the Holocaust.
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.
**Richard J Van Wagoner is my father. His list of honors, awards, and professional associations is extensive. He was Professor Emeritus (Painting and Drawing), Weber State University, having served three Appointments as Chair of the Department of Visual Arts there. He guest-lectured and instructed at many universities and juried numerous shows and exhibitions. He was invited to submit his work as part of many shows and exhibitions, and his work was exhibited in many traveling shows domestically and internationally. My daughter Angela Van Wagoner, a professional photographer, photographed more than 500 pieces of my father’s work. The photographs of my father’s art reproduced in https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner are hers.