Sundown In America
By: Sam Corey
Tags: Politics, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Election 2020, Humor

The United States of America: Honestly, who even knows anymore? In the immediate aftermath of the First Presidential Debate, CNN’s resident RBF Jake Tapper snarked, “That was a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck.” Judging from the overbearing reactions from brain-damaged tweeters, the general sentiment around this bleak shitshow is that it was, in fact, a bleak shitshow. I’m not sure what people were expecting out of a wretched incontinent-off featuring two demented, fossilized mutants repping the catty nonsense that boomers slurp out of the cable news gravy hose. Was this supposed to be an epic duel of highfalutin rhetoric and grandiloquent visions? It’s not as if MAGA chuds support Donald Trump because they double-checked Politifact to verify his detailed plans to erect a 2000-mile-long rape-defense barrier and finagle the Mexican government to finance it. And what normal people call Joe Biden’s visible senility is what Democrats call electability. Maybe the dream was that something would finally fracture the edifice, like Biden’s teeth falling out or one of them soiling themselves on air. Here’s the deal: This debate was bound to degenerate an unrelenting volley of irate, sundowning jibberish between a psychotic melting creamsicle and a doddering husk who has the oratory style of a slinky you have to keep pushing down the stairs.

Make America Great Again versus C’mon, man!? A leafblower versus a wind chime. Every excruciating moment beautifully captured where we are as a nation — a functionally failed state that experienced a shortage of cotton masks and sanitary wipes a month into a pandemic counteroffensive. Questions about a Supreme Court Justice nomination plunged into tendentious soliloquies about our busted healthcare system, each interrupting one another before the previous half-answer sputtered to completion. Trump did his best to primate-stomp on the debate format, answering COVID-related inquiries with bluff and bluster and spittle and sozzle, swaying oddly and doing accordion things with his hands; then he’d go on the rest of the night bloviating and lying and picking weird food fights. This president is incapable of expressing anything other than whatever urge or anxiety is currently troubling his damp and roiling essence. Trump did dial back the Bannon-scented comic-book-villain dada of his inaugural address and leaned into casual Nazism — but instead of Hugo Boss, it’s with Bonobos. Biden immediately, deftly called out his opponent’s rat-a-tat-tat unsubtle dogwhistles, insisting they won’t work because it’s no longer the 1950s. (Apparently, the former veep hasn’t gandered at Tucker Carlson’s ratings.)

It is not BREAKING NEWS, at this point, to point out that Trump is constitutionally incapable of doing any of the important and urgent things required of him as president. There is no leadership of any kind from the apex of government, and while it’s hard to say what the Democrats are doing, exactly, “leadership” surely isn’t the right word. Biden froze and stammered and stuttered when asked about packing the courts or eliminating the filibuster, and wouldn’t commit to either, or really anything other than uttering the five talking points recorded into the Teddy Ruxpin cassette tape inside his pudding brain. As the federal government lurches further toward authoritarianism to entrench the Republican’s disproportionate minority rule, the best Joe Biden — he is the Democratic Party, after all — can muster is simulating gravitas and vaguely gesturing at more tactical retreats, all while calling himself “the reasonable one.” Get out and vote! Call your Senator! Democratic governance is an ongoing sludge of grim pragmatism that’s wholly insufficient in addressing America’s manifold disasters, so instead, they plant their flag in decadent and supreme symbolism.

There is no depth to Donald Trump’s character. He has spent the last four years showing America he’s as every bit as selfish, shameless, ignorant, dyspeptic, bellicose, and self-aggrandizing as he was during his opening salvos about Mexican rapists and playing drone-strike whack-a-mole at wherever the Radical Islamic Terrorism P.O. box is. In both unsurprising and queasily jarring fashion, a sitting president who offered a mealymouthed condemnation of literal Nazis after Charlottesville also froze and equivocated and told a violent far-right street gang to “stand back and stand by” when asked in no uncertain terms to renounce white supremacy. And after a long, strange campaign against mail-in ballots, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. He’s up to his eyes in balls. So what he has done, and will continue to do until November, is bring his few blunt tools — unflagging hyperaggression, a knack for pushing on bruises, shoving others into traffic, and a blank and wild antipathy for other people — to bear when defending his record, hoping that it results in compelling enough television to keep him in power. Biden is a guy who TiVos shows just so he can rewatch the commercials.

In a perverse way, Trump is the perfect businessman to run the flubby end-stage of the American empire: He doesn’t make anything, he doesn’t generate revenue, but he’s worth billions because he says so. Three days ago, the New York Times revealed that the faux-rich-guy “had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.” Turns out, a man who has spent his entire life stiffing people also worms his way through tax loopholes. Biden is the ideal griever-in-chief as both Pax Americana and his fizzing brain reach their sad collapse. His candidacy is a fond reflection on all the good times while Democrats slowly shift from denial to acceptance in the Kübler-Ross cycle regarding this nation’s destiny. Of course, neither option involves rationally assessing our problems and offering sober, commensurate solutions.

America is a sales culture and we want a salesman to peddle some ambient flimflam that semi-articulates why they’re best suited to be the protagonist of this decaying, dying nation. After decades of news flurries including titillating half-truth bombshells and compulsive warnings and panic-switch flips, this country may be deeply partisan enough where none of last night’s crankfest actually matters outside of treacherous spectacle value and running through the motions of pretending America still operates as a superficial democracy. Our horizons have been beaten away by hegemonic propaganda, hurtling with anodyne and sanitized phrasings that justify the rule of the entrenched managerial class — a patina of logic cloaking a high-mass death machine that prevents people from thinking about how the present order is insane and bloodthirsty and cruel in ways it doesn’t have to be. Whether out of instinct or inertia, we keep eating it up.

Moderator Chris Wallace said he wouldn’t assume the role of fact-checker prior to the debate, as if a third-party calling out Trump’s incoherent riffraff under the national gaze would finally vanquish the Orange One. Republicans have reached the point of pure mental surrender to the will of Trump because they monomaniacally want Roe v. Wade overturned, no matter how debased or shameless the cost. Winning Democalypse 2020 will be based on the strength and plausibility of each candidate’s falsities, or at least their confidence in bullshitting their base. Everything in politics these days is euphemistic and focused-tested into meaninglessness. Biden fibs about his progressive credentials — in the final primary showdown between him and Bernie Sanders, he flatly lied about not wanting to slash Social Security and still cruised to overwhelming victory. Trump does the kind of lying that Republicans love because it pisses off the libs; Biden stans admire his lying because it makes the effort of trying to sound honest. Running Joe Biden is the political equivalent of paying $750 in federal taxes.

I’ve been told I’m a cynic because I articulate the very observable reality that America is broken and soul pulverizing and pyrotechnically fucked — and both parties are either too blatantly corrupt or too manifestly incompetent to alter this trajectory. I understand the importance of booting Trump from office, that ineffectual liberalism is preferable to the dimestore Julius Streichers the Republicans trot out. I GET IT — mostly because it’s an obvious take that would net you a B-minus on a PoliSci 101 assignment. Last night, though, has only reinforced my suspicion that the real nihilism lies in the belief that America’s political possibilities are limited by conventional Democratic electoralism; where the pool of voters is fixed and the only thing the Blue Team can do is draft an army of snake oil salesmen who otherwise consult for Dracula Associates, and they narrowly cast tiny fragments of suburban, white, upper-middle-class normies to win wafer-thin majorities that’ll hold for a few years until they’re overthrown by rampaging reactionaries, thus leading to continued grinding immiseration. That is a view that offers no hope or possibility for any sort of change.

Maybe, in a way, the edifice was fractured. Neither emperor has any clothes, or even knows how to dress themselves, for that matter. Last night was a confused, random ejaculation of circular words and stutters around nothing because both candidates are at the stage of most people’s lives where they’re hopped up on prescription drugs and wander into traffic. They are the figureheads of unsettled psychic energy and placeholders for the profoundly rotten systems around them. The great hope is that such a grotesque burlesque is alarming enough to catalyze some positive change. This is what an apocalyptic moment is, provoking a visceral disgust, absolutely and always as gruesome as it is permitted to become.