The Online Right’s Brain Worms May Have Just Cost Trump the Election

AP Photo/Seth Wenig

Kamala Harris won and Donald Trump lost Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

The vice president may have been thoroughly unimpressive, but it still wasn’t especially close because the brain worms whispering in Trump’s ear were so debilitating that they may have just cost him the election.

The Online Right has fed into Trump’s ego and worst instincts for years. The product of their mutual admiration was the embarrassing, old conspiracy theorist Americans saw representing the Republican Party on stage tonight.

At various points, the former president made a point of repeating a debunked lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, his false claims about the 2020 election, and a pointless digression about Harris’s race.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country,” said Trump in one breath.

In another, he urged moderator David Muir to host a special about how the 2020 election was stolen from him.

And in another car crash of a moment, Trump insisted, “I read where she [Harris] was not Black, that she put out.”

As it turns out, taking your cues from Laura Loomer — the professional conspiracy theorist and virulent bigot who accompanied Trump to the debate — doesn’t pay dividends in a general election. Trump’s performance might have played well with the audience if it had comprised entirely of Tim Pool superfans, but contrary to his inner circle’s belief, most Americans are not.

The Biden-Harris administration has spent the last three and a half years digging a hole so deep that they managed to make Trump, the architect of the January 6 Capitol riot, the favorite in this year’s election.

They gaslit Americans about inflation. When they finally admitted what everyone else already knew, they passed an expensive environmental bill and slapped the name “Inflation Reduction Act” on it. They deliberately opened up the border and subjected American citizens to the crime and chaos that came with the flood of illegal migrants coming into the country. They surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban, lost 13 lives in the process, and then bragged about it. Their weakness led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel, and the solidification of a de facto alliance between Russia, China, and Iran.

And yet Donald Trump couldn’t manage to deliver a single damning line about any of their manifold failures on Tuesday , presumably because his mind is too addled with the latest derangements to make their way out of Loomer, Pool, and Tucker Carlson’s mouths and into his head canon.