Trump's "Transgender Operations on Illegal Aliens in Prison" and "Concepts of a Plan"? This is Exhausting!

Last night, one of those events that everyone still insists on calling a "debate" happened again.  This was, thankfully, most likely the only such farce that we will have to endure in this year's contest between Vice President Kamala Harris and Defendant Donald Trump.  I drew the short straw at Dorf on Law and agreed to watch the non-debate live and to write an analysis of what happened.  It feels as though some sort of combat pay should be involved, but I will nonetheless soldier onward.

To get to the bottom line immediately, this was a bad joke.  Predictably so.  Harris was not consistently as good as I expected her to be, but she had many effective moments and put in a solid B+ performance.  (Trump is, as always, ungradable.)  That is not the joke part, but having competed in actual debates against opponents who were completely out of their depth -- as Trump always is -- I can state from weary experience that it is nearly impossible to maintain one's own A-game when the person on the other side of the room is doing the equivalent of eating paste and shouting, "Nuh uh.  You are!!"

Trump got started early on his lies by denying that tariffs are sales taxes, and at another point he claimed that "Putin endorsed her last week."  He said that Harris is a Marxist.  He repeated his deranged claim that everyone -- left, right, and center -- wanted to overrule Roe and return abortion to the states.  Everyone.  "Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote."  He says that all the time, and it is completely false.

As always, Trump repeats his lies with such confidence that it is impossible to know whether he knows he is lying.  And it leaves an opponent to wonder: Where do I even begin to respond?  Inevitably, some things are not worth addressing, and Trump then happily skates away to tell more lies.

Even in that degraded environment, however, Trump somehow worked his way around to saying something so uniquely vacuous that Harris and the moderators were genuinely confounded.  It was the one defining, surprising moment in the non-debate, and it was truly, howlingly hilarious.

When asked about health care and whether he would get rid of the Affordable Care Act, Trump first responded with something incoherent about how congressional Democrats had somehow refused before Trump took office to improve that law.  That was relatively harmless (at least by Trump's standards), and it was in any case utterly unremarkable in the context of the torrent of lies that Trump was continuously spewing.  

But what was Trump's "plan" for health care?  He said that he would keep the ACA -- as bad as it supposedly is -- and replace it only if he could come up with something better.  Not content with blurting out that banality, he made the emptiness of his position even clearer by saying that, well, if they could come up with something better and cheaper, then he would go with that better and cheaper thing.  Genius!  Why did no one else ever come up with the clever notion that you should replace what you have with something that has both higher benefits and lower costs?  What a visionary!!

But just when it seemed that Harris would have to fight the urge to say, "No duh, Donald," one of the moderators asked Trump if he had a plan that would in fact be better and cheaper.  Trump said -- and I am not making this up, as the transcript shows -- this: "I have concepts of a plan."  The term laugh-out-loud funny has been overused in the internet era, but LOL.  I mean, LOL LOL LOL LOL.  This was the Trumpian moment for the ages.  Do you have a plan?  He could simply lie and say yes but then refuse to divulge details, but somehow some tiny residual shred of honesty stopped him, leading him to say that he had "concepts of a plan."

What else could he tell us about his concepts that might or might not be germinating into a plan, even as we speak?  Again, something better.  "But if we come up with something I would only change it if we come up with something better and less expensive. And there are concepts and options we have to do that. And you'll be hearing about it in the not-too-distant future."  Aha, so it is not only concepts but options, too, and he has both?  This does not even count as mailing it in.  The man has spent years exhausting the rest of us, but now he has exhausted himself so completely that he no longer can even summon the energy to be devious.  I might have a plan someday, and if it's good, I'll do it.  Vote Trump!

Because I strongly believe in making independent judgments when assessing such events -- and especially because the post mortems in the media are typically nothing but spin and instant groupthink that quickly congeal into a distorted conventional wisdom -- I am following my longstanding practice of writing this column without having seen or read any coverage of the non-debate.  I thus have no idea whether that knee-slapping "concepts of a plan" moment has been the focus of attention.  But it definitely should be.

Certainly, the more obvious takeaways are that Trump is still as negative and angry as ever and that he is still a liar.  Again, however, it is all low-energy and weak, as if he is scraping the bottom of the barrel of the bile that is his life force.  Yes, he can still scowl and yell, but his performance was simply a jumble of the same things that he has been saying at his rallies and in Fox interviews for years.

There are rock bands from the 1960's and 1970's that reunite and manage to get through their performances by sheer muscle memory, and although Trump would not even count as a one-hit wonder, his playlist is stale and familiar.  There are 78-year-old enervated former rockers who can still do a guitar windmill and maybe the occasional jump, but it is embarrassing for everyone involved.  The only difference with Trump is that he lacks the capacity to feel embarrassment.

In any event, the pre-event buzz was that Trump needed to expand his appeal beyond his base, and in that he certainly failed.  His closing statement was that the Democrats are "destroying our country," preceded by this: "We're a failing nation. We're a nation that's in serious decline. We're being laughed at all over the world."  Ah, the uplift.

Because Trump no longer even tries to come up with new lines of attack, we were treated to even more of the usual deluge of fantasies and delusions.  He repeated that the Biden Justice Department had coordinated all of the criminal cases again him (and apparently all of the civil ones as well).  That is why he is a convicted felon and a defendant, you see.  Democrats are also the reason that a registered Republican shot at him.  Babies are supposedly being born and then aborted after birth, and Trump apparently thinks that either the governor of West Virginia or Virginia said so, but the story changed from his first telling to his second.  Even in what was supposed to be an election-defining event, Trump simply lapsed into plug-and-play mode for his litany of lies and grievances.

Did you know that there are millions of criminals and terrorists pouring across our open borders?  Trump wants you to think so, and he assures us that the numbers are much bigger than we have been told: "[Y]ou look at these millions and millions of people that are pouring into our country monthly where it's I believe 21 million people, not the 15 that people say, and I think it's a lot higher than the 21. That's bigger than New York state. Pouring in."  So apparently there are millions and millions of people entering the country monthly, but is he saying that the total number of such people is "a lot higher than the 21" million, or is that also a monthly figure?  No one knows, and it was not worth Harris's time to try to call him on it.

The one time Trump tried to add a new lie to his act, the moderators tried to call him out on it.  He had a bizarre line about how immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado, are eating the local citizens' pet dogs and cats.  That one certainly grabbed my attention, but only because it was obviously something that Trump had gotten from a viral meme that must be circulating on the far right in the US.  When the moderator pointed out that the city manager of Springfield said that "there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community," Trump responded that "I've seen people on television," which is a tell, because television is reality for Trump.  He then added that those television people "say my dog was taken and used for food."

This has the same vibe as the many-times-debunked stories that floated among Republicans about schools putting litter boxes in classrooms for children who thought they were cats.  But back on the pet-eating front, what about the city manager in a very Republican community in southern Ohio saying that that story is also untethered from reality?  No problem, says Trump, because "maybe he said that and maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager."  So just like the statistics on falling crime that Trump refuses to believe, he defaults to his usual reactions to any inconvenient facts: slander and denial.

Speaking of slander, Trump for some reason decided to do a drive-by against Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz: "[H]er vice presidential pick, which I think was a horrible pick, by the way for our country, because he is really out of it."  Why is Walz horrible and really out of it?  He "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."  Okay.

Speaking of running mates, the moderators asked a question about JD Vance's assurance that Trump would never, ever sign a national abortion ban.  They asked Trump to confirm or deny.  Trump responded: "Well, I didn't discuss it with JD in all fairness. JD -- And I don't mind if he has a certain view but I think he was speaking for me but I really didn't."  At least Trump is an equal-opportunity vice presidential abuser.  (Mike Pence can surely relate, but on an entirely different level.)

There was no time to work through that puzzler, however, because Trump then drew an odd comparison between national abortion legislation and student loan forgiveness.  (Again, I am not kidding.  I guess this is an example of his newly-dubbed "weave.")  Although hardly the most important part of that exchange, it is notable that Trump said this: "[L]et her sign a bill to close up the border. Because they have the right to do it. They don't need bills. They have the right to do it."  So a man who was the President of the United States for four years does not know the difference between a bill and an executive order, and he says that Harris should sign a bill even though they don't need no stinking bills.

But why would we notice any of that when Trump added in some gratuitous insults against President Biden: "The President of the United States, you'll get him out of bed. You'll wake him up at 4:00 in the afternoon, you'll say come on. Come on down to the office, let's sign a bill." Again, exhausting.

There are clearly too many lies to go through here -- which is the point, of course -- but I do have to point out that Trump can no longer even keep his different lies straight.   Immediately before saying that Harris "wants to confiscate your guns and she will never allow fracking in Pennsylvania," both obvious lies, he offered the eye-popper that I included in the title of this column: "Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison. This is a radical left liberal that would do this."

Huh?  Trump is used to talking about reassignment surgeries -- saying over and over again at his rallies that kids are getting such surgeries at school (apparently involuntarily?) -- and he is used to talking about "illegal aliens" and about crime and prisons (even though the immigrants being in prison would suggest that Biden/Harris are in fact enforcing criminal laws), so why not do a mash-up and put them all into a bigger, compound lie?

In an upcoming Verdict column, I will turn to what might generously be called Trump's policy views but are more a matter of listening to him grunting words like "economy" and "war."  For now, I will end by noting some comments from NYU History Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who is a leading scholar on fascism and authoritarianism (and is thus rightly panicking about Trump), from an interview earlier this week:

For an authoritarian, [an occasion like the non-debate] is an occasion to indoctrinate people and to spew lies and to really stage a kind of fear-and-smear propaganda show.  ... We have these rituals in the election season, and we've had them because we're a democracy.  And I believe they don't really work when you have one candidate who has exited democracy.  ... These are not people [Harris and Trump] who are even working in the same frame, and so it is problematic to put them together and pretend everything is OK and that they're equal candidates.  So I do have a problem with that whole frame that we're pretending that we're still in a democracy and that we can compare these people and treat them as equals.

In the end, then, being exhausting is Trump's goal.  It is undeniably funny to listen to him talk about "transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison" and to watch him flounder so badly that he had to assure us that he has "concepts of a plan."  As Ben-Ghiat says, however, last night was not about any of that for Trump.  It was not the usual non-debate that we see in every election season, because this is not someone who is trying to expand his outreach to win a democratic election.  This is someone who has "exited democracy."  We have been repeatedly warned.