Donald Trump Uses Final Debate with Joe Biden to Dog Whistle his Attacks
Joe Biden did nothing to conceal how little respect he holds for his rival, Donald Trump, during the final presidential debate on Thursday. Gesturing on stage in Nashville, the former Vice President told his limited in-person audience — and the millions more watching at home — that the incumbent President is little more than a walking embodiment of racism and extremism. “Come on,” Biden said, the contempt audible in his voice. “This guy is a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn.”
But here’s the thing about dog whistles: they only reach certain sets of ears. For everyone else, the vibrations whiz past without registering. And, perhaps by accident, Biden publicly diagnosed one of the biggest strengths and weaknesses of Trump’s performance during their last scheduled face-to-face meeting: if you were an average voter tuning in for the first time, you had no idea what Trump was talking about during some of their more heated exchanges.
The format of modern debates offer very few opportunities to have an expanded answer on any topic. Last night, the longest any candidate was ever supposed to take was two minutes to respond to each of six main questions. Trump often used his two minutes to float unproven allegations, personal attacks, political shorthand and dubious innuendo. When debate moderator Kristen Welker asked Trump if he understands why some Black families fear for their children’s safety, Trump wound himself into knots to talk instead about Biden’s 1994 crime bill and a “laptop from hell,” referring to a computer allegedly containing incriminating emails from Joe Biden’s son Hunter, which national security experts have widely said bears all the hallmarks Russian disinformation.
What does any of that have to do with Black families’ security? To the uninitiated, it is a bunch of words strung together like a late-night presidential tweet storm. To Trump’s base — and viewers of Fox News in particular — it was a bunch of shorthand that summarized Trump’s closing arguments in his race against Biden: that the former Vice President and his family are greedy criminals who traded U.S. policy for personal wealth and there’s a secret laptop that proves it all.
Before we go on, it must be said: Senate Republicans spent months looking into allegations about Biden and his brood. When their report was released six weeks before Election Day, it contained no evidence Biden ever bent U.S. policy to help his son or ever personally profited. Instead, Democrats noted that much of the allegation overlapped neatly with a disinformation campaign led by a Urkainian lawmaker with close ties to Moscow. Trump’s own Treasury Department had been so aghast at the disinformation campaign that it imposed sanctions on involved individuals and warned Americans about the spread of false information.
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