Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

Finding the words to describe what we just saw on national television is going to take me a while. Where do you begin? With the insane gibberish about immigrants eating pets someplace in Ohio? With Trump begging his idol Victor Orban to replace JD Vance as his running mate? With his not-ready-for-prime-time permanently angry teeth-baring scare-face? With his inability to string even five words together without careening off into what he now says is criminals from 168 countries coming into our country so those countries can reduce their crime rates?

Despite the format, despite the questions, despite the ostensible purpose of the exercise, there was no controlling the extraordinary Trump madness on display. Vice President Harris should get an Oscar or an Emmy or something for the way she put a quizzical little smile on her face and rested her chin on her wrist and just looked at him in astonishment as even more outrageous lies spilled from his mouth. The look her face was better than fact-checking him.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, never once turned his head to look toward his opponent at the other lectern. He started off his first answer with a worn-out version of the speech he gives at every rally about the criminals coming across the border and all the rest of it. And then Kamala Harris stuck the needle all the way in. She invited people to go to one of his rallies so they could see all the people leaving early because they are “exhausted and bored” by Trump. 

His hackles went up and they never went down. It was at this point that he threw out the right-wing internet talking point that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. ABC moderator David Muir fact-checked Trump in real time, saying that Springfield’s city manager had said “there was no credible allegation” of such things happening, and that sent Trump further into crazed mumbling and accusations that crime rates had risen and babies were being murdered right after birth by a governor in West Virginia, then it was Virginia, and then he got cut off by one of the moderators with a fact check that so-called “after birth” baby killings are illegal in all 50 states.

That that is the sort of fact-check the ABC moderators were reduced to performing will go down in American political history.

One of the panelists on MSNBC, I think it was Chris Hayes, went so far as to say that Kamala Harris’ performance tonight was the best he had ever seen in a presidential debate, and he may be right about that. Lawrence O’Donnell made the excellent point that when Trump was running down his list of lies about abortion, he lied to the American people about themselves by saying that everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, wanted to get rid of Roe v. Wade. O’Donnell gave a statistic, something like 60 percent, of Americans who say they supported Roe, and that percentage I think went up to 70 percent after the Supreme Court overturned it. O’Donnell said Trump was looking into the camera and telling people they didn’t believe what they believe.

Which would be remarkable if it wasn’t just one more in a list of lies that began with the first parting of Trump’s lips and ended only when his last utterance had blessedly left our television screens. The Vice President called out several things Trump said as lies, using the word “lie,” and she turned to face him several times when she accused him of lying, a power-move that Trump has not faced before on a debate stage, or to my knowledge, ever, at least since he announced he was a candidate for president in 2015. No Republican who debated him in either 2015 or 2016 called out his obvious lies, not even once. No Republican in the House or the Senate ever called him a liar to his face. Certainly, none of his ever-changing array of cabinet secretaries ever called him a liar. And Kamala Harris has to be the first human being to tell Trump to his face, “you were fired by 81 million Americans.”

It was impossible to see if he was unsettled by being called a liar by the woman he is running against, because by the time Harris uttered the word and pointed out the obvious, he was already so crazed with anger he was screwing his face into a mask of rage and doing everything but spit audibly into his microphone.

By any rational measure of who won the debate tonight it was Kamala Harris. It is of course unknown at this point if she will get a “bump” in the polls that derives from Trump’s display of rank insanity on the public stage. If there is any decency left in the psyche of an America that has withered under the daily deluge of ten years of the madness that was on display tonight, this election may have just hit its turning point.

Buckle in. We will soon see how deep is the rot of the MAGA and how hard we will have to struggle to overcome it.