Trump’s Disastrous Debate Proves GOP Needs to Pull the Plug

Donald Trump lost the ABC debate last night, period. This is not a partisan view, but one supported by people with working eyes, ears, and brains. Most people polled afterward said they thought the normal woman who creates a new library of reaction gifs wins over the confused old man who reads your crazy uncle’s Facebook page.

It’s been said before, but it’s worth repeating after last night’s “sir, this is a Wendy’s” debate that Taylor Swift won: The generation that gave us the phrase “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” in the 90s now broadly supports a movement that believes freedompatrioteagle.kgb when they say that Venezuelan drug cartels have seized US territory in my hometown of Aurora, Colorado. And that Haitian immigrants are terrorizing the city of Springfield, Ohio by eating people’s cats and dogs (a lie that originated with online neo-Nazi groups). And that Kamala Harris wants to perform “transgender surgeries on illegal aliens” in prison. And that America is in the grip of an epidemic of post-birth infanticide. And, and, and .

The core aspect of Republicans’ alienation from politics and broader American life is this toxic world they’ve locked themselves into, and the tension that arises when it collides with objective reality, as it did last night during the debate. Grievances are the eternal story du jour in the GOP, and the minority groups that are the targets of their constant hatred are the only thing that ever changes. Every scandal is a reverse-engineered, self-serving ego trip that further alienates these people from their friends and family and isolates them within a pyramid scheme that may or may not be funded by Russian intelligence. Before the web, this right-wing media ecosystem was populated by a bunch of gold diggers and Rush Limbaugh devotees, but now there’s a youthful, hyper-online energy that’s been injected into the GOP.

It can generally be characterized as stemming from Elon Musk’s mentions, and this new brand of Republican is even more gullible moron than the Limbaugh generation (as evidenced by the fact that Herbalife idiot Bill Ackman found their arguments intellectually stimulating). These idiots will literally believe any bullshit you throw at their baby brains if you couch it in the language of pseudo-intelligence that all these LinkedIn tryhards have convinced themselves is the key to success.

The Limbaugh generation of Republicans has been trained to follow these right wing media frauds to the gates of hell, so even though some elderly people in America have probably never heard of 4chan because that’s now the editor of the GOP, every 78 year old Fox News viewer/presidential candidate is functionally more online than your average 30 year old. It’s a genuinely sad situation that has divided families across America, but we’ve also been in this shit for at least eight years and it’s getting worse and worse and the only solution I can see for now is ridicule. So today let’s all point our fingers at the weirdos and laugh at them.

Kamala Harris didn’t have to say a single word to win last night’s debate. There’s truth to the old political adage that if you turn off the TV, you can better see who’s winning, and she was able to portray herself as the normal, well-adjusted person that regular, non-internet-addled Americans can relate to by simply furrowing her brow and responding to the nonsense Trump spouted last night. It was a tour de force of a SNL audition, and her facial expressions buried Trump deeper than any fact check from the moderators.

It’s never good when your political movement sinks in the polls simply by presenting itself as what it is, and J.D. Vance is proof that Americans, by and large, find these people really weird. The right-wing media ecosystem designed to keep people increasingly radicalized within the GOP has now made a clean break with reality and has become a political liability. What was once (and still is) a reliable way for deranged billionaires to channel anger into election results now carries the risk that any normal person living outside of this safe space for the insane can hear the things these people believe and recoil in horror. Republicans themselves, as people irreversibly poisoned by the internet, are the biggest political liability this party has. Log out, you fucking weirdos.