Pedigree Chump

The world’s first animal-themed election rambles on into glorious mayhem as Donald recounted live on ABC: “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.”

Wait till Homer finds out.

After the revelations from JFK Jnr about his whale and bear antics, and Trump’s Shark Story the MAGA campaign is resembling more of a menagerie than a bid for office. But it’s rare that you get such a precise moment in history – the precise moment when someone wins an election contest on live tv. Perhaps Robert Junior’s uncle John had such a moment in 1960 when facing Richard Milhous Nixon (the Simpson’s gags write themselves)?

In US election lore the face-off between Kennedy and Nixon hosted by the debate moderator, Howard K. Smith (also of ABC News), was won by the tanned and telegenic Sen. John F. Kennedy. Kennedy, legend has it, was perceived to be more appealing than Vice President Richard Nixon,  whose sweaty, haggard appearance gave off what Kamala’s team would no doubt call ‘bad vibes’. The encounter would result in Max Frankel, then the executive editor of the New York Times, to write sardonically several months after Nixon’s death in 1994, that “Nixon lost a TV debate, and the Presidency, to John F. Kennedy in 1960 because of a sweaty upper lip.” The incident led to the now famous Democrat posters of Nixon saying: “Would you buy a used car from this man?”

But what if it’s not true?

What if Mr Trump goes on to win the election?

What if America is in such a state that you can go on live television and state that people are eating cats and dogs and then win? He did, you may or may not remember say live on television that ‘they’ were executing babies after birth in some Democrat states. It was a statement left unchallenged by Joe Biden, who, by that stage, it’s safe to say wasn’t the sharpest tool in the toolbox.

This is, after all, what Sarah Kenzidor calls ‘the era of the No Information Voter‘. This is a campaign almost entirely devoid of policy, other than total continuity, and remains a new (ish) phenomenon of Lies v Vibes.

In this sense almost nothing either of them says matters at all.

Some have suggested that Mr Trump should have put more meat on the bone, so to speak, to flesh out his cats and dogs story. What, for example, was the preference? Is Kitten Curry preferred over (German) Shepherd Pie? We need details Donald, we need recipes. Are they served on the bone, medium rare? Ceviche? How are they caught? Do you just grab them like Donald suggested?

Is it cynical to suggest this is a survivable event, even a vote winner?

Possibly. But I’m cautiously pessimistic. This is a man who lives in a Gold Tower. This is a country that previously elected him, and two members of the Bush family and Ronnie Reagan and the aforementioned Mr Nixon. This is a country that had Dan Quayle as Vice President. Here was a man who famously altered 12-year-old student William Figueroa’s correct spelling of “potato” to “potatoe” at the Muñoz Rivera Elementary School spelling bee in Trenton, New Jersey, yet rose to the highest office in the land. This is a country in which Ben Carson was a national figure. This is country in which Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, hosted a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a small business in the Holmesburg neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia, between a sex shop and a crematorium.

You have got to admit, the signs aren’t great. Imagine if you just fell into dictatorship by voting for a clown show?

Twenty three years ago, as the smoke was still rising from the Twin Towers above the remains of thousands of dead Americans, Donald Trump judged it to be a good idea to go on TV and brag that his building was now the tallest in New York. Heather Heyer was murdered in Charlottesville by one of the people Trump called “very fine people” and still people voted for him. Given all of this there is no reason at all why a convicted felon who went on a tv debate claiming immigrants were eating cats and dogs couldn’t become the next President of America.