My Debate Night Mission: to Find the Good in Donald Trump

“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” With that absurd and racist lie, Donald Trump lost Tuesday night’s presidential debate. To be clear, he also lost on policy, substance, style, temperament, coherence, and truthfulness. Had there been a white towel to throw, it should have been thrown, although perhaps a white hood would have been more apropos.

By the end of the debate, Trump looked like a deflated whoopie cushion.

The salience of the bizarre pet-eating statement belies a central claim of the MAGA right, that those of us who despise Trump only do so because we live in an echo chamber which magnifies the worst of Trump while ignoring all the good. To my Republican friends, I ask: Where was the good during Tuesday’s debate?

Because from my vantage point sitting on a hotel bed by myself, laptop firmly in lap, it became clear to me over the course of the exhausting litany of complaints from Trump, that whatever good there may be with a Trump candidacy, it is far outweighed by the sneering, vindictive, petty and boring old man struggling to spit his words through his dentures.

Where was the good?

Where was Trump’s positive vision for the nation? For all the criticisms of Harris’s lack of policy specificity, where was Trump’s? Which policies did he outline that you, my Republican friends, support? Because the only policy prescriptive I heard him describe in any detail was using the National Guard and local police to round up millions of people, herd them into camps, and send them God knows where.

We’ve just seen how local police handled a minor traffic infraction by the Miami Dolphins’ star wide receiver, Tyreek Hill. Are we supposed to entrust these same undertrained goons to go door-to-door in every neighborhood across the nation to determine who stays and who goes? How exactly is that going to work? Trump didn’t get that far. And what happens when the first bullets in that effort start flying? Is that the good? If not, where was it?

Was it his admission, that after nine years of promising a big and beautiful health care to replace Obamacare, that he does not, in fact, have a plan, but has, instead, “concepts of a plan”? Was that the moment, my Republican friends, you smiled and said, “See? He has the concepts of a plan. And it only took him nine years.”

Was that the good?

Brian Snyder/Reuters

Or was it when he name-checked the Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban as a character witness? Why not his former vice president? Why not former secretary of state or his former secretary of defense or a former Republican President? Is it because they all despite him? Is it because many of them, having seen the man in action, now refuse to vote for him? Was that the good?

Or was it when he swore up and down that he would “solve” the Ukrainian war before he even took office without mentioning how such a thing would be possible without cutting Ukraine off at the knees and allowing their population to be slaughtered. If he has some other plan, I would have liked to have heard it. But he didn’t say. “Trust me, bro” is not a war plan.

So I ask again: Where was the good?

Was it when he lied, again, that he won the 2020 election? Or was it any one of his other 30-plus lies, as counted by CNN’s fact-checker, Daniel Dale? (And as compared to 1 by Harris) As Dale clarified, these weren’t little white lies or minor shadings of the truth. Trump’s lies were outright falsehoods. Mendacious, easily disprovable bunk.

Was that the good?

Or is it that the MAGA Republicans are still clinging to the falsehood that the Trump economy was better than it is now? It’s easy for any administration to cherry-pick the good times while ignoring the bad, but you don’t get to call time-out in a presidency, and the final numbers of the Trump economic record are abysmal: 2.7 million jobs lost, inflation rising from 1.7 percent to 6.4 percent, and the highest trade deficit since 2008.

Yes, it’s true that Trump’s final year was sullied by COVID. That sucks. But it was on his watch. We don’t go around saying the Herbert Hoover economy was aces right up until the Great Depression. Because all anybody, rightly, remembers was that the Great Depression happened under his watch.

Do we need to rehabilitate Herbert Hoover’s reputation in order to save Trump’s?

Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

So, I ask again from my lonely echo chamber: Having watched him spew what the comedian George Wallace described as “a jukebox of gibberish” for nearly two hours Tuesday night, what am I missing about Donald Trump? Is it his fine character? His eloquence? His forceful defense of American democracy? What the hell am I missing? I have tried—Lord knows I have tried—for nine long years, to understand this man’s appeal. I’ve engaged with countless Trump supporters. I’d have innumerable conversations with them and, inevitably, during those dialogues I am assured that I would understand if only I could escape my echo chamber?

Does Tuesday night count? That was raw, unfiltered Trump saying everything he wished to say in the way he wished to say it without censors and he came across looking like one of those people you cross the street to avoid when you see them talking to themselves on the opposite sidewalk.

Where was the good?

“Our country is going to hell,” he said in his closing remarks. Is it? Or is what’s going to hell the personal fortunes of Donald John Trump, who, as Kamala Harris correctly pointed out, is due in a Manhattan courtroom on Nov. 26 for criminal sentencing due to his 34 felony convictions. That is approximately 34 more felonies than any major party American presidential nominee in history. This is a man who, if elected, may have to defer prison time in order to serve as President of the United States. Does that make sense to anybody? How does having a broke-ass felon sitting in the Oval Office make America great again?

Where was the good?

I would suggest that any cognitive dissonance I may be currently experiencing is due to the insistence from my Republican friends that Trump is the better candidate when everything I see with my own eyes tells me he’s not fit to run a shoeshine stand. It it is not us, the vast population of rational Americans, caught in an echo chamber. It is you. It is you who bounces from lunatic podcast to discredited website to your news channel of choice that sells Trump Trout wind-up toys. It is you living in that echo chamber.

What did you see Tuesday night? Did you see the emperor parading around in nothing but a long red tie? Or did you see Superman holding baby Jesus, with one duck under his arm as he fled a horde of hungry Haitians? What is it you see that the rest of us find so inexplicable?

Where was the good?

Brian Snyder/Reuters

I would humbly submit that the conservative media has created an echo chamber of its own in which President Trump can say no wrong and do no wrong. It is an echo chamber whose sound is only muffled because it’s built with padded walls. It’s a chamber in which reality need not comport with, you know, reality. Instead, the inmates can babble to each other about pet-napping immigrants and imaginary gangs taking over apartment complexes and trying to recreate Venezuela whatever the hell means.

Look, I don’t know what kind of president Kamala Harris will be. I suspect a very good one. But I absolutely know what kind of president Donald Trump will be. Terrible. Shit. Vomit and shit. To be generous, I will use the U.S. News and World Report ranking which has Trump listed as only the third-worst president in American history. Other surveys call him the actual worst but I will set commie professors’ opinions aside because I like to see the good in people. Unfortunately, in the case of Donald Trump, I find less and less. Perhaps none.

Let’s be clear: Nobody’s stealing and eating your pets. But if Donald Trump gets re-elected, you might want to check your wallet. And make sure that the person eating your lunch is you.

Michael Ian Black appears on Have I Got News For You, CNN, Saturday 9 p.m. ET