Trump Finally Knows How 9/11 Felt
23 years later, it took Kamala Harris to get Trump to feel devastating loss
Sept. 11: Trump at last knows loss … Pundits give Harris the vibes win … Even right-wing media concede Trump’s defeat … The night’s other loser besides Trump who also lost …
Twenty-three years ago today, hijackers armed with knives took over four passenger jets, turning them into missiles that they flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and tried to fly into a still-undetermined target in the nation’s capital, presumably the White House or the Capitol Building.
Even today there are conflicting estimates of the dead. Almost 3,000 in New York. One-hundred eighty-four at the Pentagon. And 40 who died after they learned of the prior attacks, realized what their hijackers were doing, and fought back, leading to the plane’s crash in Shanksville, PA.
Most people older than a certain age laugh when people tell them to never forget. Literally no one in the 6,000 years since God made Adam and Eve and then somehow daughters magically showed up for their sons to marry has ever seriously uttered the words, “Slipped my mind about those planes doing that thing.”
I was lucky enough to be working at CNN, a few miles north of the World Trade Center. I remember the number of dead FDNY personnel (343) and doing some research to put that number in context: It was more firefighters than the entire fire department of Salt Lake City, UT. I confirmed online rumors that the Flight 93 passengers voted to fight back. That story is still online, a ghost whispering needlessly, like an asshole, “Never forget.”
In some ways, it’s a toxic message, because it elevated 9/11 to the status of Holy Cause, in the name of which America justified monstrosities. It’s hard not to think Earth would have been a lot better off if we had forgotten instead of acting as we did.
Even in the moment, people reacted…weirdly. By the time I could get down to Ground Zero a couple weeks after, vendors were selling shirts that showed the towers burning. The explosions. People were buying them.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Trump — a fixture of New York tabloids for his sketchy business and personal ethics and ready supply of crazy soundbites — called in to a local TV station (we had a lot more of them then). His thoughts that day were not about the lives lost, the grieving or the bodies that would remain buried for weeks more, or even about the famous skyline permanently scarred. Well, he was kinda thinking about the sklyine: What 9/11 meant for him and one of his buildings.
“I mean, 40 Wall Street actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan. And it was actually — before the World Trade Center — was the tallest. And then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest, and now it’s the tallest [because of the worst terror attack in U.S. history killing thousands of people in my city].”
The most charitable explanation is that the loss was so devastating that Trump was simply in denial, emotionally incapable of comprehending the unfathomable loss. If that’s true, he appears to be processing it now, 23 years later, courtesy of the devastation visited upon him personally by Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump was warned she would attack, and even how. And yet, like Republicans 23 years ago, he prepared no effective defense. She flew on to the stage, zeroing in on him, shooting her hand out at him. Before he knew what was happening, Trump found himself standing in the rubble of his own personal Ground Zero.
As the night unfolded, Trump seemed to be in shock, blathering non sequiturs.
In the aftermath, he appeared to be in denial, telling Fox that he won.
“I thought it was really good,” Trump said, calling it his “best debate ever.”
Denial, however, necessitated conspiracy theories. “We had three against one,” he said, echoing right-wing claims that the moderators sided with his opponent, the way debate winners never have to do because they’re focused on remining people of the winning they did.
And, in fact, time and again, the moderators allowed Trump to have the last word, at one point even aggressively talking over Harris as she fought to once, just once, get the last word. She need not have bothered, as the more Trump spoke, the more she won. And, on last night’s most important battleground, win she did.
#NeverForget
Harris Wins Post-Debate Debate Over Who Won Debate
Remember how snap polls didn’t show much damage to Pres. Joe Biden after his debate with former Pres. Donald Trump? And then the pundits decided Biden had to go and the polls moved with the newly rewritten vibe. That’s what last night was about: Giving media cause to shape the narrative the way the candidates wanted. On that score, Harris won. Even in conservative media.
Here are the front pages and leads of some of the biggest narrative-driving news outlets this morning:
One of my favorite front-page snapshots was the New York Times, trying to clickbait asking who won the debate among the commentators, and answering it two headlines down. (Spoiler: Harris won.)
But let’s look at the right-wing and/or conservative and/or right-wing conservative media, shall we?
The Washington Examiner gave the win to Harris in several ways. “Harris sets the pace,” they write, “sets the pace” being right-wing speak for “kicks Trump’s ass.”
Then there’s the headline complaining about the refs. The way losers do! But maybe most importantly, look at the Trump pictures they chose. Not helping, Washington Examiner!
The right-wing Washington Times packed everything into one headline: Harris was on offense, boo-hoo help me referees.
Of course, just because the right-wing media recognize that their guy — who spent the lead-up claiming he didn’t need to prepare — lacked the emotional stability or impulse control necessary to go up against someone who’s actually served in government, not made it serve her, doesn’t mean that undecided voters were able to decide based on last night.
The Quandary of the Undecided Voter
Pity the Undecided Voter, my compassionate Newsfuckers. All they want is enough information, the right information to decide whether the country should be run by Vice President Kamala Harris, the former California senator and prosecutor, or Donald Trump, the former president, adjudicated rapist and felon, slayer of abortion rights, hero of autocratic billionaires and their theocratic armies, bane of most of his own past cabinet secretaries and global laughingstock/nightmare.
I don’t want to conflate swing-state voters with undecideds, but obviously it’s swing-state undecideds who hold our fate in their uninformed hands.
So the Times asked swing-state voters. And the result was yet another case of the paper undermining its own clickbait question by spoiling the answer. In this case, the Times did it with a single headline, which asked who swing-state voters thought won the debate. The graphic made it clear: Harris won by a 23-2 margin.
But what about actual undecideds? Brace yourselves, sensitive Newsfuckers. The undecided remain…undecided.
Here’s the New York Times headline, but I want to drill into the unchallenged premise driving both this story and virtually every other “Undecides want more details” narrative.
Quick digression: The most important word in journalism is “said.” It’s the magic tool that lets you avoid saying whether what is said is true or not. Journalists can never ever know what anyone wants, so they ought never report what anyone wants.
All the news can say is what people say they want. And, yes, undecideds say they wanted the fine print in last night’s debate. Newsfucker, I call bullshit.
Some examples. “Voters said they were glad she has a tax and economic plan. But they want to know how it will become law when Washington is so polarized,” the Times writes.
This is deeply unserious thinking, unchallenged by the Times. The way it will become law is if undecided voters end Washington polarization by voting for the thing they want but aren’t sure how it will pass.
There is no answer to “how it will become law” when we don’t know yet who controls Congress or by how much. These are fundamentally not people who are so engaged with policy granularity that they still need White Paper subsection 14.b.3.
The Times spoke to one older couple, and reported back:
“The couple ended the night wondering how the costly programs each candidate supported — Mr. Trump’s tariffs and Ms. Harris’s aid to young families and small businesses — would help a couple like them, living on a fixed income that has not kept pace with inflation. They said they didn’t hear detailed answers on immigration or foreign policy, either.”
Threatening to deport 15 million people despite it being impossible is a pretty damn detailed answer. Trump’s claim that world peace will magically arise following his inauguration lacks detail but his inability to provide it is the information you need to become un-undecided.
The point is, you don’t need more information to understand these answers. They’re prima facie lunacy.
Imagine a heart-attack patient. The doctor says they want to know how tall the patient is before deciding whether to prescribe aspirin or a foot amputation. That doctor is our undecided voter. America is the patient. (And I’m the tyranny of evil men; but I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd.)
The media need to stop blaming politicians for the indecision of the undecided. The media is incapable of understanding the undecided voter. And it’s not because the media need more information.
All they’d have to do is push back on these undecideds more. “What more information do you need? DHS staffing levels? Budgetary breakdown for the State Department?” Their hunger for facts would vanish with the application of such journalistic Ozempic.
The undecided don’t want more facts about the candidates, they want a “fact” to justify their vote. But what they need is more information about government and how things work.
And the media can’t exactly say that, now, can they?
The Biggest Loser
Surprise! It wasn’t former Pres. Donald Trump.
I actually didn’t think Trump was the flaming grease fire everyone else did. We know this guy! His voters love this and I’ve tried to train myself — perhaps too well — to hear him the way they do, making real-time excuses for his shortcomings in order to find the closest thing to gold nestled in the mounds of his intellectual dung.
So, yeah, I don’t think Trump lost them. The media vibe may cost him among those undecideds, but I think the biggest loser was the progressive left and, more importantly, the people helped by progressive policies.
If anyone mentioned poor people or poverty, I missed it. The Democratic candidate bragged about expanding the territory in which oil barons can suck planet-destroying combustibles from the Earth, poisoning and seismically destabilizing the world.
On topic after topic, Vice Pres. Kamala Harris neglected or actively rejected multiple articles of faith of successful politicians and effective policy. Former Pres. Donald Trump saved his most effective rejoinder for the end, when it was too late — presumably because a closing statement left him with no immediate stimulus to respond to, forcing him to resort to what his advisors had begged him to say: Why should we think you’re going to do anything you say when you haven’t done it yet?
Harris could effectively have responded1 that (a) we were cleaning up your mess, as Democrats always have to do after voters with no long-term memory return a Republican to the White House and (b) maybe you didn’t notice the massive, transformational legislation we passed despite your failed attempts to kill it.
I’m not naive, I know how that would’ve played with the vibe-defining media. And, yeah, I understand that she’s left herself considerable wiggle room to govern to the left of her campaign. She says she won’t ban fracking, for instance, but that doesn’t mean she can’t fuck it via regulations.
And yes, her campaign isn’t even two months old. And she likely believes that playing it safe will shape the vibes enough to give her not just a shot at winning, but at picking up enough “swing” states, and enough congressional wins down-ballot, to give her a mandate.
Whether and how she’ll choose to use it, that’s up to us. We just need more information!
Bonus Media Appreciation Moment
I’ll just say it. ABC News did better than I expected. Fine: Much better. They fact-checked dispassionately, matter-of-real-factly. Their pregame, too, had important, substantive information — not (just) horserace bullshit — pre-refuting specific lies former Pres. Donald Trump would later tell, especially about crime and immigration.
Kudos also to CNN’s Abby Phillip, who blew up two decades of media both-sidesism and shivved the bad-faith cries for symmetrical fact-checking.
“Just fyi: when there is asymmetrical lying, there will be asymmetrical fact checking.”
That’s what fairness looks like. Fair parents don’t punish both kids when one fucks up. They set a bar for behavior and whoever violates it gets punished.2 It’s good to finally see TV news leaders plant their flag on this.
TCB
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Go get ‘em, kids.
I know, Trump went last so Harris couldn’t respond. But you take my point!
Analogy for metaphorical purposes only. “Punishment” is a terrible framework to apply to parenting and whenever I slip and do it, I always end up, uh, punishing myself.
LOL good hed ;)
Great, thank you for refreshing my memory about what an asshole Trump was after 9/11 and loved the 9/11 tie in with the debate.