Trump delivers nonsensical debate line about immigrants: “In Springfield, they are eating dogs”

My generation came of political age with the first of the televised presidential debates, in 1960, when John F. Kennedy with his Prince Valiant looks met Richard M. Nixon with his five o’clock shadow and no TV makeup to cover it.

For better or worse, it was the night that changed presidential politics forever. Theater replaced substance. Cosmetics triumphed over policy.

There’s a classic reminder of this. Those who watched that first Kennedy-Nixon debate thought Kennedy won. Those who only heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon had won. Kennedy was tan and rested. Nixon tried to tough it out despite heavy perspiration from a miserable cold. TV displayed all of it; radio kept some of us in the dark.

Since then, we’ve all watched some campaigns seem to change course in the tick of a clock and a single remark that becomes part of American legend – for better or worse.

There was Gerald Ford, in 1976, somehow declaring there was “no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and never will be under a Ford administration.” Ford was mocked relentlessly for that schoolboy gaffe, and it cost him heavily in his loss to Jimmy Carter.

Ronald Reagan did himself a lot of good when he ran against Walter Mondale. Reagan was 73, which was considered old. Reagan quipped, “I want you to know that I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Mondale was 56.

The most devastating line of any TV debate was probably the 1988 vice presidential one-on-one between Democrat Lloyd Bentsen and Republican Dan Quayle. In Quayle’s youthful zeal, he compared himself to the young John Kennedy.

“Senator,” Bentsen said, “I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”

All were moments that have become part of American legend across many years. But none will be remembered as vividly as this week’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

There has never been such a decisive debate victory, it says here, as Harris’ over Trump.

She was calm, she was reasonable, and she spoke colloquially. Putin “would eat you for lunch,” she told Trump, who had no response. The top military people, she told Trump, considered him “a disgrace.” Trump’s response was lame.

She seemed like a grownup who had paid attention to policy and knew how to rattle off specific plans when asked. She knew facts. She’d done her assigned homework. Trump was the schoolboy called upon to deliver a book report, and he hasn’t actually read the book.

If you think Bentsen’s JFK line to Quayle has lasted a long time, consider Trump’s insistence that immigrants are eating American citizens’ dogs and cats. Assured this wasn’t true, Trump lamely replied, “But I saw it on television.”

Yeah, nobody ever got a story wrong on television.

Now we’ve got all kinds of media offering variations of “Lock up your pets” lines, with photo-shopped images of Trump surrounded by dogs and cats.

In his devastatingly bad TV debate, Joe Biden looked like a doddering old man who’d been caught in a storm and didn’t know how to get out of it. Trump was doddering, too. But he displayed it by hollering, by free-associating verbally until he stumbled onto a word that sounded sufficiently attention-grabbing.

But he was repeatedly over-dramatic, claiming America was going down the drain, warning of impending World War III, and blaming everything on Harris – whose political resume, until Biden’s unanticipated departure, had barely registered with voters.

One of the great reality-based movies of the 20^th century was “Inherit the Wind,” the 1960 black-and-white film based on the Scopes’s so-called monkey trial. In real life, it was William Jennings Bryan defending a literal translation of the Old Testament and its miracles against all those who would bring science and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution into the modern era.

But the movie Bryan’s out-stayed his welcome in the public eye. In the movie’s final courtroom scene, the old war horse is stumbling about, losing way, searching for an audience that has heard his spiels for too long.

That was Trump in his debate with Harris. She was on top of her game. He was William Jennings Bryan lost in the wilderness, hollering as loud as he could so someone might hear him and help him find his way home.

Even without the nonsense about immigrants eating our dogs and cats, he was still a man talking to an audience that could not believe what they were hearing.