Let Them Eat Cats

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

With that one line, former President Donald Trump all but ensured the focus of Tuesday night’s first (and potentially only) presidential debate would not be on the Biden-Harris’ catastrophic failures, but rather on his performance.

Trump delivered all the best and most memorable one-liners—"I’m talking, remember that one?” and “She copied Biden’s plan and it’s like four sentences like Run Spot, Run” immediately come to mind—but he was also far more off-topic. All three of his opponents, Vice President Kamala Harris and moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis made sure of that.

Harris repeatedly goaded Trump into such inanity as whether crowds leave his rallies early and in so doing succeeded in her most basic task: Taking the focus off of her and Biden’s many failures. Her refusal to answer the very first question posed to her—the standard “Are people better off than they were four years ago?”—was a sign of incredible weakness. She nervously recited platitudes about being raised in a middle-class home and believing in “the ambition, the aspirations, [and] the dreams of the American people” because even she knows how badly her own policies have hurt said people.

Trump should have immediately pointed out that the average American family is now paying more than $1,000 more per month for the same goods and services they bought when he was president, but he instead took Harris’ bait and turned what should have been a grand slam into a defensive-sounding missive on his Chinese tariffs.

A better-prepared debater (and better debater, period) would have dominated the economic questions, but Trump's great weakness has always been that he perpetually sounds like a kid giving an oral book report after only skimming the Cliff's Notes. He never has as full of a command of the facts as he needs to successfully rebut the lies with which he will inevitably be bombarded.

The “eating cats and dogs” moment—easily the most memorable and viral of the entire debate—is a perfect example of this. Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio really are apparently grabbing ducks and geese from ponds and parks and potentially eating them. Audio of a 911 call to the Clark County Sheriff’s Office confirms this. So does an official police report.

Trump was likely conflating a very real incident in Canton, Ohio in which a woman (who is not Haitian) was arrested in mid-August after she “smashed a cat’s head with her foot and then began to eat the cat.” The horrific incident was caught on video, but it does not appear to be related to the rumors of dog-and-catnapping in Springfield.

This allowed the obviously biased David Muir to live fact check Trump and turn the attention away from the fact that Biden and Harris have dumped 20,000 Haitians into a city of 60,000. It doesn’t matter what the 11.5 million illegal immigrants Biden and Harris have imported are eating; what matters is that Biden and Harris imported 11.5 million illegal immigrants.

Again, Trump could have nailed Harris for this but instead was consumed by minutiae. Along the margins, all of this may hurt him with a few undecideds but it’s difficult to believe there are all that many true undecideds—and certainly not very many who watched the entire debate.

This is debates shouldn’t be judged on overall candidate performance, but rather on moments. Especially now, in an age of social media algorithms and lightning quick attention spans, 20-30 second clips are often the only basis on which many undecided voters judge which candidate won and which candidate they came away liking more.

That said, debates also hinge on the management of expectations, and far too many Republicans came in droves expecting a blowout win like Trump scored over President Joe Biden in June. That was easily the most lopsided debate in modern history and so disastrous for Biden that he dropped out of the race less than a month later. But it was also far less about Trump's performance than it was about the fact that Biden’s obvious cognitive decline could no longer be covered up.

Kamala scored a win by simply having a brain that hasn’t turned to applesauce, but she was still the same old awkward and unlikeable shrew that even Democratic voters overwhelmingly rejected four years ago. Her hilarious mugging while Trump was speaking—mock-smiling, putting her hand to her chin—was so obviously designed to score her the “Yas Kween” moment that she desperately wanted that it just looked sort of pathetic.

She is also still saddled with the worst economic and foreign policy record in memory and was last night thoroughly unable (and deliberately unwilling) to defend it. That is a vulnerability that will live on long after all memory of the debate—even the pet-eating parts—have faded. That’s a massive weakness that Trump should have done a much better job exploiting.

All in all, the debate has been something of a wash that allows each side to claim victory, but the biggest loser will undoubtedly be David Muir's journalistic reputation. His role was to moderate, not to debate Trump. He couldn't help himself, but he would be wise to remember why his former colleague Candy Crowley is his former colleague: She destroyed her career with a failed fact check of Republican candidate Mitt Romney back in 2012. She came to President Obama’s defense so forcefully, so passionately, and so dishonestly that she could never again pretend to be an objective journalist.

Muir’s behavior was much worse, as he repeatedly sparred with the Trump while setting up Harris and was so overbearing that now, just hours afterward, it’s impossible to remember who his co-moderator was (it was Linsey Davis). Were he a better debater, Trump could have defeated all three of them, but he was obviously getting angrier as the debate wore on and all three repeatedly goaded him with left-wing talking points about him being a “threat to democracy.”

Trump, though, isn’t a great debater, but neither is Harris and in the end the debate was probably a draw between them with Muir as the biggest loser (immediately shedding whatever Republican viewership he once had). Ultimately, however, will anyone really remember anything about this debate a week from now?

Aside from the pet-eating, that is.