What Happened When I Tried to Find the Good in Donald Trump – DNyuz

“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” With that absurd and racist lie, Donald Trump lost Tuesday night’s presidential debate. To be clear, he also lost on policy, substance, style, temperament, coherence, and veracity. If there had been a white towel to throw, it should have been thrown, although a white hood might have been more appropriate.

By the end of the debate, Trump resembled a deflated whoopee cushion.

The salience of the bizarre pet-eating statement obscures a central claim of the MAGA right: that those of us who despise Trump do so only because we live in an echo chamber that magnifies the worst of Trump and ignores the good. To my Republican friends, I ask: Where was the good in Tuesday’s debate?

Sitting alone on a hotel bed, my laptop cradled in my lap, it became clear to me, after listening to the exhaustive litany of complaints about Trump, that whatever positive aspects of Trump’s candidacy may be, are far outweighed by the sneering, vindictive, mean-spirited, boring old man struggling to spout words through his dentures.

What was the good thing?

Where was Trump’s positive vision for the nation? For all the criticism of Harris’ lack of policy specificity, where was Trump’s vision? What policies did he outline that you, my Republican friends, support? Because the only policies I heard him outline in detail were the deployment of the National Guard and local police to round up millions of people, herd them into camps, and send them God knows where.

We just watched the local police crack down on a minor traffic violation by Miami Dolphins star Tyreek Hill. Are we going to have these inexperienced thugs go door to door in every neighborhood in the country to determine who stays and who goes? How exactly is that going to work? Trump hasn’t gotten that far. And what happens when the first bullets start flying in that effort? Is that the right thing? And if not, where was it?

Was it his admission that after nine years of promising a big and wonderful health care system to replace Obamacare, he in fact has no plan, but instead “drafts of a plan”? Was that the moment, my Republican friends, when you smiled and said, “See? He has drafts of a plan. And it only took him nine years.”

Was that the good thing?

Or was it when he named Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban as a character witness? Why not his former vice president? Why not his former foreign minister or his former defense minister or a former Republican president? Is it because they are all in spite of him? Is it because many of them, having seen the man in action, now refuse to vote for him? Was that the right thing?

Or was it when he swore up and down that he would “solve” the Ukrainian war before he even took office, without mentioning how that would be possible without bringing Ukraine to its knees and slaughtering its people. If he had another plan, I would have liked to hear it. But he didn’t say it. “Trust me, bro” is not a war plan.

So I ask again: where was the good?

Was it when he lied, again, that he won the 2020 election? Or was it one of his other 30-plus lies, as counted by CNN’s fact-checker, Daniel Dale? (And compared to 1 by Harris.) As Dale made clear, these weren’t little white lies or little shades of truth. Trump’s lies were outright falsehoods. Mendacious, easily disproven nonsense.

Was that the good thing?

Or are MAGA Republicans still clinging to the lie that Trump’s economy was better than it is now? It’s easy for any administration to cherry-pick the good times and ignore the bad, but you can’t time out a presidency, and the final numbers for Trump’s record economic performance are abysmal: 2.7 million jobs lost, inflation up from 1.7 percent to 6.4 percent, and the largest trade deficit since 2008.

Yes, it’s true that Trump’s last year was marred by COVID. That sucks. But it was on his watch. We’re not going to go around saying that the economy from Herbert Hoover to the Great Depression was great. Because the one thing that everyone remembers, rightly so, was that the Great Depression happened on his watch.

Should We Restore Herbert Hoover’s Reputation to Save Trump’s?

So I ask again from my lonely echo chamber: What am I missing about Donald Trump, having watched him spend nearly two hours Tuesday night spouting what the comedian George Wallace described as “a jukebox of bullshit”? Is it his fine nature? His eloquence? His forceful defense of American democracy? What on earth am I missing? I have tried—God knows I have tried—for nine long years to understand the appeal of this man. I have interacted with countless Trump supporters. I have had countless conversations with them, and inevitably, during those dialogues, I have been assured that if I could just escape my echo chamber, I would understand?

Does Tuesday night count? That was a raw, unfiltered Trump who said everything he wanted to say in the way he wanted to say it without censorship and he came across as one of those people you want to avoid if you see them talking to themselves on the sidewalk.

What was the good thing?

“This is a man who, if elected, may have to serve a prison sentence in order to be president of the United States. Does that make sense to anyone?”

—Michael Ian Zwart

“Our country is going to hell,” he said in his closing remarks. Is that so? Or is what’s going to hell the personal fate of Donald John Trump, who, as Kamala Harris rightly noted, is due to appear in a Manhattan courtroom on November 26 to face sentencing for his 34 felony convictions. That’s about 34 more felonies than any major party presidential candidate in history. This is a man who, if elected, may have to serve time in prison in order to be president of the United States. Does anyone get that? How is having a broke criminal in the Oval Office going to make America great again?

What was the good thing?

I would like to suggest that any cognitive dissonance I am currently experiencing is due to my Republican friends’ insistence that Trump is the better candidate, when everything I see with my own eyes tells me he is not fit to run a shoe shine business. It is not us, the vast population of rational Americans, who are trapped in an echo chamber. It is you. It is you who bounce from a demented podcast to a discredited website to the news channel of your choice selling Trump Trout wind-up toys. It is you who live in that echo chamber.

What did you see on Tuesday night? Did you see the emperor strutting around in nothing but a long red tie? Or did you see Superman, holding the baby Jesus, with a single duck under his arm, as he fled from a horde of hungry Haitians? What did you see that the rest of us find so inexplicable?

What was the good thing?

I would humbly suggest that the conservative media has created its own echo chamber in which President Trump can say no evil and do no evil. It’s an echo chamber whose sound is muffled only because it’s built with padded walls. It’s a chamber in which reality doesn’t have to conform to, you know, reality. Instead, the prisoners can chat among themselves about immigrants kidnapping pets and imaginary gangs taking over apartment complexes and trying to recreate Venezuela, whatever the hell that is. That resources.

Look, I don’t know what kind of President Kamala Harris will be. I suspect a really good one. But I absolutely know what kind of President Donald Trump will be. Terrible. Shit. Puke and shit. To be generous, I’ll use the US News and World Report ranking, which lists Trump as only the third-worst president in American history. Other surveys have ranked him as the real worst, but I’ll ignore the opinions of communist professors, because I like to see the good in people. Unfortunately, in the case of Donald Trump, I find less and less. Maybe none at all.

Let’s be clear: no one steals and eats your pets. But if Donald Trump gets re-elected, you might want to check your wallet. And make sure you’re the one eating your lunch.

Michael Ian Black appears on Do I have news for you?CNN, Saturday 9 p.m. ET

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