The Cornered Rat

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After covering most presidential debates on this blog for thirteen years, I bailed out last night. I quit after 20 minutes. That’s 22.2% of the debate, less than one quarter.

I couldn’t bear to watch the (verbally) violent disposal of a cornered rat. I found it painful to see Trump talk and shout over the moderator, Chris Wallace, and his opponent, Joe Biden, while lying and making things up with even more than his usual abandon.

The spectacle was degrading, demoralizing and demeaning to the very notions of democracy, respectful debate, and civilization itself. It was a travesty of our alpha-male-ape ancestors’ trial by combat, or medieval knights’ jousting contests, but in context more like children arguing on a playground. As the PBS pundits who watched the whole gruesome thing (and their citizens’ focus group) concurred, no one who watched it all learned a thing.

Why no one foresaw this dismal but predictable outcome is hard to understand. Wallace, of course, was supposed to be neutral. Perhaps he tried to be. But as a legitimate newscaster with a reputation for being tough on Trump, he, too, fell within the cornered rat’s fury.

He should have had means to cut off each speaker’s microphone, perhaps with a red light to let him know. But no mere off switch could ever fill the void of self-control, self-discipline and respect for others that is Donald Trump.

And therein lies the tale of last night’s debate. Our unfit president has made a career of breaking every known rule of law, custom, diplomacy, tradition and decency, and of flaunting his infractions. Underneath it all, he has had some accurate gut feelings about where his own personal interests lie. Now, he must know the end for him is nigh.

For the walls are indeed closing in on Donald J. Trump. According to a vast array of polls, he’s losing his bid for re-election. Even the thirteen-point test of Professor Lichtman—the only expert to have predicted Trump’s win in 2016—shows him losing now.

But that’s just the beginning of Trump’s Shakespearean downfall. As the New York Times’ exposé of his tax returns suggested, Trump has failed at almost everything he’s done except his “reality” TV show “The Apprentice.” His casinos, his hotels (except for Trump tower), his golf courses, his winery, his airline, and most of all his adjudicated-as-fraudulent “university”—suffered bankruptcy, were sold at a loss, or have been losing reams of money.

Throughout his term as president, Trump has never shown the slightest sustained interest in policy, serious problem solving, or even reading the briefing papers painstakingly prepared for him by the experts who work for him. What he wanted as president, evidently, was to continue his career of aggrandizing himself and “monetizing” his personal fame.

But when he falls from presidential power and immunity, all that stops cold. The $421 million that he now reportedly owes soon comes due. Neither Deutsche Bank nor Russian oligarchs will have any reason to lend him money. Officials and business people worldwide will no longer have reason to curry his favor by joining his clubs or patronizing his properties.

Then the curtain will have parted on the Wizard of Oz, revealing a once-successful carnival barker, now a bully and con-man, entirely out of his league and out of options. Then the avalanche of lawsuits, foreclosures and criminal prosecutions will begin. There will no longer be a Department of Justice memo to protect Trump as a sitting president.

A man who spends so much mental energy calculating what’s in it for him must know this. At some half-conscious level he must foresee his utter downfall. So we can expect Trump’s public utterances (including his midnight Tweets), his actions, his debating, and his decisions as president to become more and more bizarre, self-focused, erratic and dangerous as the campaign season and his lame-duck presidency drag on.

It’s now incumbent on our public guardians—in our Department of Justice, our intelligence agencies, our career bureaucracy, our career military, and our press—to be on guard against the cornered rat’s fury as his downfall comes to its slow but inevitable conclusion. Those who guard the briefcase with the Nuclear Button, in particular, must be prepared to save the world.

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