Trump’s Disastrous Debate Proves the GOP Needs to Log the Fuck Off

Donald Trump lost last night’s ABC debate, full stop. This is not the partisan take, but one supported by those with working eyes, ears and brains. Most people polled afterwards said they thought the normal woman creating a new library of reaction gifs beat the confused old man reading your crazy uncle’s Facebook page.

It’s been said before, but it really is worth repeating after last night’s “sir this is a Wendy’s” debate that Taylor Swift won: the generation that brought us the phrase “don’t believe everything you read on the internet” in the 1990s now broadly backs a movement that believes freedompatrioteagle.kgb when they say that Venezuelan drug cartels have captured territory from the United States of America in my hometown of Aurora, Colorado. And that Hatian immigrants are terrorizing the town of Springfield, Ohio eating people’s cats and dogs (a lie that originated with neo-Nazi groups online). And that Kamala Harris wants to perform “transgender operations on illegal aliens” in prison. And that America is gripped in an epidemic of post-birth baby killing. And, and, and…

The core aspect of Republicans’ alienation from politics and broader American life is this poisonous world they have trapped themselves within, and the tension created when it comes into contact with objective reality like last night at the debate. Grievance is the eternal story of the day in the GOP, and the minority groups targeted by their constant churning hatred are the only thing that ever changes. Every scandal is a reverse-engineered self-righteous ego trip that further alienates these people from their friends and families and isolates them within a Ponzi scheme that may or may not be financed by Russian intelligence agents. Before the web, this right-wing media ecosystem was populated by a bunch of goldbugs and Rush Limbaugh acolytes, but now there is a youthful hyper-online energy that has been injected into the GOP.

It can generally be characterized as coming from Elon Musk’s mentions, and this new brand of Republican is even more credulously idiotic than the Limbaugh generation (as evidenced by the fact that the dullard of Herbalife fame, Bill Ackman, found their arguments intellectually stimulating). These doofuses will believe quite literally any stupid bullshit you present to their babybrains if you couch it in the language of pseudo-intelligence all these LinkedIn tryhards have convinced themselves is the key to success.

The Limbaugh generation of Republicans have been trained to follow these right-wing media fraudsters into the gates of hell, so even though some of America’s elderly have likely never even heard of 4chan, because that is the GOP’s assignment editor now, 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 split families across America, but also, we are at least eight years into this shit while it continues to get worse, and the only solution I see so far is ridicule. So let’s all spend today pointing and laughing at the weirdos.

Kamala Harris didn’t need to say a single word to win last night’s debate. There is real truth to the old political maxim that if you mute the TV, you can better tell who is winning, and she was able to portray herself as the normal well-adjusted person who regular non-internet poisoned Americans can relate to by simply furrowing her brow and reacting to the batshit that Trump spewed last night. It was a tour de force of an SNL audition, and her facial expressions buried Trump deeper than any of the moderators’ fact-checks could.

It is never good when your political movement tanks in the polls by simply presenting itself as it is, and JD Vance is proof positive of how Americans generally think these people are really weird. The right-wing media ecosystem designed to keep folks increasingly radicalized inside the GOP has now made a clean break from reality and become a political liability. What once (and still is) a reliable way for deranged billionaires to manufacture rage into electoral results now carries the risk that any normal person residing outside this safe space for lunatics may hear the things these people believe and recoil in horror. Republicans themselves, as irrevocably internet-poisoned people, are the biggest political liability this party has. Log off, you fucking weirdos.