Yeah, Trump Lost The Debate All Right

Via the Mew York Post,

The internet is lapping up a catchy new parody song poking fun at former President Donald Trump’s “they’re eating the cats” debate comment — with the music video raking in hundreds of thousands of views Friday.

. . . A video of the tune had raked in more than 267,000 views on X Friday — with fans howling with laughter and calling it the purr-fect fall “banger.”

It’s “too too, too good,” one listener gushed, while another called it “brilliant.”

So all of a sudden, a 78-year-old teetotaling Republican becomes a Gen Z icon. Love him or hate him, they love him. But let's check in with Sean Trende of Real Clear Politics, who as I've been saying all along has brain waves amazingly well tuned to the conventional wisdom, as he acknowledges here:

Let’s start out by stating that the emerging conventional wisdom surrounding Tuesday’s presidential debate is probably correct. The night started out promisingly enough for former President Donald Trump. He handled initial questions about the economy reasonably well; the opening theme, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago,” is exactly the theme he wants heading toward November. Trump seemed surprisingly confident and calm. Vice President Kamala Harris seemed nervous and a bit off of her game. For the first five minutes or so, it didn’t seem like a repeat of the June debate, but it did seem like one where Trump might be fighting to a draw.

Harris then proceeded to grab Trump by the combover and drag him around the debate stage for 85 minutes.

. . . Overall, though, from a debater’s standpoint, it wasn't close. Trump was defensive, erratic, and made claims that either confused facts or were simply at odds with them. Harris, on the other hand, was confident and prosecuted the case against Trump with precision.

Well, I would find it entirely plausible if Sean Trende had actually been co-captain of his middle school debate team. "From a debater’s standpoint, it wasn't close" indeed. By the Friday after the debate, the pundits are writing ponderous think pieces under photos of Kamala making Lily Tomlin Ernestine faces, while ordinary people are grooving to Trump's TikTok video on their phones. Sean Trende and everyone else is ignoring the big takeaway from the debate:

One of the big problems for campaign director Brian Fallon, is Kamala’s linguistic pattern, ie. how she talks. There has never been a successful politician in history who talks through their nose in a nasal dialect; it is just too annoying to the average ear.

The same principle applies in business; there are very few people in leadership positions with linguistic afflictions (nasal talkers specifically). The only person with nasal linguistics (speech and dialect patterns) who came close to success, was Ross Perot.

Kamala Harris has a speech pattern that is very annoying. This sounds shallow, but it is a factual challenge that Brian Fallon is trying to overcome by keeping the principal quiet. Quite simply, every time Kamala Harris opens her mouth, she loses votes.

Her policies have nothing to do with it. All the Ivy League Republicans who keep urging Trump to stick to policies are missing the big point: listening to Kamala is like hearing fingernails scraping a blackboard. When Trump announced there would be no more debates, I felt a wave of relief that I wouldn't feel obligated to sit through another 90 minutes of nasal weepiness. But all the co-captains of all the middle school debate teams don't see things that way:

This week, after a debate with Vice President Harris that he apparently did not take entirely seriously, Trump said he would not debate her again. He said there was no need for a “third debate” because he had clearly won the first two. He was including the June 27 debate he had with President Biden, who had been the presumptive Democratic nominee at the time.

Perhaps that was not surprising, as Trump kept Biden in his sights throughout his debate with Harris this week — name checking Biden repeatedly without naming Harris once.

But what was surprising was Trump’s claim to having won both debates. Few would question he won the June 27 meeting with Biden, who seemed so diminished as to be hard to recognize.

. . . Yet here was Trump, on the afternoon after the debate, telling reporters he was not interested in a rematch with Harris because he had “won the debate according to every poll — every single poll, I think.”

Another indicator is Gutfeld: when Joe withdrew from the campaign, I sensed that Gutfeld was at a loss for a schtick to replace poopy-pants jokes -- through the end of July, they weere nightly, sometimes more than once a night. Now they're just once a week or less. But all of a sudden, Haitians eating dogs and cats have replaced poopy-pants, and Gutfeld is back on his stride.

That's become the most memorable moment from Tuesday's debate, which Trump clearly lost -- except nobody can drop Haitians eating dogs and cats, and nobody wants to hear Kamala talking through her nose.

My theory has been that it wasn't the June 27 debate that took Joe down -- Gutfeld had already done it with poopy-pants jokes. Beware the meme of Haitians eating dogs and cats.