Fever Dreams

Trump Spent the Debate Spreading the Fever Dreams of Extremely Online Racists

But even they knew he bombed.

Noah Lanard

A young racist man who spends too much time online should have heard a lot to like from Donald Trump during Tuesday’s debate. But from what I saw from the usual suspects on the right, his performance didn’t earn their praise. Winning is most important in their hierarchy of power and they knew they were watching a loser.

Trump’s open embrace of far-right disinformation started from the very beginning of the debate, when he alluded to Springfield, Ohio. In case listeners didn’t catch the blatantly racist reference to a fake story that’s been circulating about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio, he made it explicit later in the debate. 

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” Trump said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country and it’s a shame.”

This was not the first time that Trump has referenced Springfield in recent days. JD Vance has done the same, as has a who’s who of right-wing influencers. It has all felt like a mob with pitchforks in hand.

Trump, of course, was not done. In a word salad of MAGA paranoia, Trump claimed that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” As others quickly pointed out, it was not far off from a chyron from Succession meant to parody right-wing media.

When it came to foreign policy, Trump went out of his way to praise Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban. This might have been welcome news to New Right figures who’ve spent years posting about Orban and the authoritarian crackdowns he has used to shore-up his self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy.” But Trump couldn’t even make his odious points coherently. As he put it:

I’m just quoting [Orban]. China was afraid of [Trump]. North Korea was afraid of him. Look at what’s going on with North Korea by the way. He said Russia was afraid of him. I ended the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and Biden put it back on day one. But he ended the XL pipeline. The XL pipeline in our country. He ended that but he let the Russians build the pipeline going all over Europe and heading into Germany. The biggest pipeline in the world. Look, Viktor Orban said it. He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump.

Rod Dreher, a right-wing blogger who moved from the United States to Hungary largely due to his affinity for Orban and the direction he is taking the country, accepted that Trump had lost.

As Trump flailed during his Orban tangent, Harris looked on with a mix of amusement and seemingly genuine confusion. Across the stage was an angry and unhinged old man walking into every trap she laid for him when he was not stepping into ones of his own making.

Denying this was pointless for his fans. So, they turned to a tactic that losers have likely embraced for as long as debating has existed: From Catturd on down they blamed the moderators.