#Debates2020

Regardless of your political affiliation, everyone can agree: the first Presidential Debate in the 2020 election cycle was a disaster. While both candidates engaged in personal attacks and exchanged heated words more befitting a playground than the world stage, President Trump's performance was by far the more aggressive of the night, and the more interesting to analyze along with this week's reading.

In my opinion, here are the President's top five worst moments from the 2020 Presidential Debate last night:

5. Trump claimed that no one has gotten sick at his rallies, after a member of his own campaign contracted COVID and died while campaigning for him.  

4. Trump blamed the California wildfires on California’s forest management strategies in order to deflect from his dangerous climate change policies.

3. Trump’s repeated use of racist and inflammatory language (“China virus” for COVID, “Pocahontas” for Elizabeth Warren).

2. “I don’t know Beau. I know Hunter.”—Trump interrupts Biden’s discussion of his late son Beau, a Bronze Star recipient, to attack Biden’s living son Hunter for his struggle with addiction. (The response to this is the best Biden moment of the night.)

1. “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.”

 Honorable mention goes to Trump lying about mail-in ballots being dumped in rivers, and bragging about bringing back football.

I found Trump’s refusal to denounce white supremacist terrorist groups confusing, but not surprising, and I was reminded of a passage in Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse that might allow us to unpack the motivations for the Trump campaign to so blatantly align themselves with white nationalists. Crowley states that “the social agenda that motivates the religious Right is of little interest to economic  conservatives, but their acquiescence to it was required in order to amalgamate a voter base that was not sufficiently extensive to elect conservatives to office” (6). There is no logical connection between fiscal conservatism and apocalyptist Christian values. Jesus never said, “Let there be tax breaks for the wealthy,” and women’s reproductive rights are of no concern to rich men who want to stay that way.

According to an Atlantic article released yesterday, entitled “Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters,” Trump has a tendency to “ridicule conservative religious leaders, dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base” (Coppins). It seems that at least in the Trump administration, Crowley was absolutely right—apocalyptist Christians are viewed as pawns in Trump’s political game, not valued members of his constituency. Christian values are not Trump’s values, any more than Wall Street values are religious values.

What I find interesting is that many members of the religious Right appear to have understood this arrangement from the start. The morning before I cast my ballot in 2016, I visited a family member in her home. She was watching a religious program, and as the end of the program drew near, the televangelist reminded his audience to vote. “Remember,” he said, “you’re not electing a choir boy. You’re electing the president of the United States.” Evangelicals are under no illusions that Trump behaves in ways that align with their moral and social values--in short, they understand that a deal with Donald Trump is a deal with the devil, but the promise of a conservative Supreme Court was too tempting.

Trump has similarly aligned himself with racists and white nationalists. Donald Trump has a history of racism—his housing discrimination, attacks on the Central Park Five, and campaign rhetoric about Mexicans are a few examples that immediately spring to mind. However, I have to wonder whether enacting racist policy is Donald Trump’s goal, or whether this rhetoric is an attempt to galvanize another block of voters, whose interests are not religious or financial, but nationalist and white supremacist. There is, again, no logical connection between the religious Right, fiscal conservatives, and Proud Boys or the Ku Klux Klan. 

How did this faction of voters become such a critical part of Donald Trump's base? How are Christians and fiscal conservatives being persuaded to vote alongside these extremist groups? Are Donald Trump's racist remarks and policies politically motivated (to attract voters), financially motivated (to amass wealth), or something else? And just for fun, what was your worst 2020 Presidential Debate moment?