Watching the presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris reminded me and, more likely than not, many other Americans of the distrust we have toward the media.
We’ve been asking the same question for eight years, but it never seems to confound me any less: When did it become acceptable for a presidential candidate to lie openly and on live television?
Furthermore: How did “moderating a debate” come to mean “facilitating a deeply disturbed man’s attempts to sow division and defend acts of sedition against our republic”? When did the racist, hateful, fearmongering, and psychotic ravings of a man who, were he not a nominee for President of the United States, would be advised to seek psychological help, become acceptable to provide a platform free of unbiased pushback, counterpoint, and at many points, basic fact checking?
During the September 10th, 2024 ABC News Presidential Debate, moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis—though it seems they may have tried their best not to—aided and abetted Donald Trump as he pushed the U.S. ever further into the amoral hellscape we now find ourselves in. They offered little to no correction of Mr. Trump’s lies, allowed the former president to interrupt and speak whenever he felt so inclined (even as they cut off the Vice President in the few times she attempted to rebut baseless lies spoken by Mr. Trump), paid no mind to Trump’s outright refusal to answer questions or speak within the allotted time, and gave the former president the final word on many topics — a gift he used to promote lies and false narratives often unrelated to the topic being discussed.
The ABC team represents an embrace of the distorted reality Mr. Trump has forced us to live in since he first entered the 2016 Republican Presidential Primary. The level of this distortion and depravity is such that a former president of the United States can, in front of a live audience of millions, disseminate dangerous lies such as the claim that Haitian immigrants are “eating the dogs” and “eating the cats” of the residents of a small city in western Ohio, that babies are being delivered and then “executed” in post-birth abortions, that the election he lost four years ago was actually a stolen victory, and that his opponent may have magically switched her racial identity for some backwards play at political gain.
Hearing this, and reading it back to myself, this “brave new world” of dissemblance, deceit, and divisiveness is not all that different from the story of the previous eight years of American politics. It just so happens that tonight was the night when we may have hit rock bottom.
When a man lies so often that one can no longer claim it is intentional but rather a combination of malice and pure pathological compulsion—and when that man has the fervent support of over 30% of the electorate—one must wonder whether we have always been a country where the sacredness of truth, the existence of personal values, and action in defense of the public good is the exception and not the rule. How did we get here?