“Mini Mike—how’d he do in the debate the other day?” President Donald Trump asked, at a rally in Las Vegas on Friday. He was talking about Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former mayor of New York, for whom he had some advice. But first he wanted to remind the crowd of Bloomberg’s height. “Here’s a box, Mike!” Trump said. (Bloomberg did not, in fact, stand on a box for the Democratic debate in Nevada.) The crowd cheered on his derision. “He was a beauty—what happened?” Trump clutched his throat and lolled his tongue in a somewhat graphic mime of choking. Then he arrived at what he saw as Bloomberg’s central problem: “Pocahontas screaming at him.” He meant Senator Elizabeth Warren, and he knew just how Bloomberg should respond to her.
Warren, Trump told the crowd, “lied about her own heritage. She said she was an Indian!” He was referring to the fraught issue of Warren’s previous claims to Native American ancestry, which she said were based on her family’s oral tradition. She discomfited some Democrats by taking up a challenge from Trump to undergo DNA testing, both because the results showed that any such ancestry she had was distant and, as she has since acknowledged, DNA testing is not how tribal affiliation is determined, anyway. Trump mentioned the testing and, regarding “Indian blood,” told the crowd, “I have none, to the best of my knowledge. Wouldn’t mind having some, but I happen to have none.” But back to Bloomberg: “Why didn’t he bring that up when she was screaming at him?” Bloomberg didn’t call Warren “Pocahontas”; that was why “she won that debate.” The lapse was incomprehensible to Trump, who segued into a stream of reminiscences about how he had won his primary debates during the 2016 campaign. “That’s what they all said! I won,” he boasted.
This point has been something of an obsession for Trump, who said he had been astonished to hear a guest commentator on Fox News suggest that he had not won the 2016 Republican primary debates. At a rally in Colorado, a day before his event in Nevada, he brandished printouts of old press reports touting his debating prowess. “I became President because of the debates, because unlike Mini Mike I could answer questions,” Trump said—a line that might seem delusional if one thinks that, in order to “answer questions,” a person actually needs to give answers, rather than just attack the questioner. And yet Trump has something of a point; even if he didn’t “win” all the Republican debates, he did, on the whole, dominate them, at least in terms of shaping the tone. And that domination prefigured his takeover of the G.O.P. and the Party’s abasement of itself before him. Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Low-Energy Jeb. The President seems amazed that the Democrats aren’t all calling one another names. That’s what he would do.
How much the debates matter for the Democrats may be another question. One can only hope that the country is looking for an alternative to Trump, and that Trumpian insults are not the way to speed any of the candidates to victory. In 2016, Trump was running for office for the first time; before his first debate, the expectation was that he might flounder in the way that Bloomberg did. Instead, he was crude, unserious in his proposals, and aggressive—in a word, he stayed in character. If there is a kernel of decent advice in Trump’s indecent counsel, it has to do with directness and perceived consistency. Trump, though, sees only the insults. “Remember my first question?” Trump reminisced to the crowd in Las Vegas. This had been a query in his first debate, from Megyn Kelly, who was then still with Fox News, about the many derogatory terms—“fat pigs,” “dogs,” “slobs,” and “disgusting animals”—he had used when speaking about women. “I said Rosie O’Donnell! It was one of my best answers.” (He had said, inaccurately, that he only used such terms about O’Donnell, with whom he had a long-running feud.)
After that debate, in August of 2015, Trump said that Kelly had been angry, with “blood coming out of her wherever.” Last week, in Nevada, he said of Warren, who had similarly confronted Bloomberg with some of his past quotes about women, “Did you see the anger on her face, that nervous energy? She’s jumping up and down? She’s a mess!” Referring to Warren’s challenge to Bloomberg about the nondisclosure agreements that kept some women from speaking about their experiences at his company, Trump continued, “She said, I got him, I want to see those agreements—you open up those agreements! And this poor guy, he probably signed a hundred of them, and each one’s a disaster.” Trump’s definition of a “poor guy” here is telling. (Bloomberg has since said that he would release three women from their agreements.) “He said, I don’t want to open those agreements. Nobody told me this was gonna happen!” Trump then squatted down, so that only his head and shoulders appeared above the rostrum, and, continuing the Mini Mike act, squealed, “Nobody told me!”
Throughout the Nevada rally, which included an interlude in which he called supporters bedecked in Trump gear (including a brick-wall-patterned suit) to the stage, Trump repeatedly returned to the Democratic field. He wondered if younger people understood the reference when he called Pete Buttigieg “Alfred E. Neuman”; perhaps “only the real aficionados” were conversant with Mad magazine. (Still, he identified Buttigieg as “not a bad debater.”) Bernie Sanders was “too emotional.” And, Trump said, “Biden is angry—Eyahhuh, eye-heaah—that’s what happens if you can’t get the words out.” (Joe Biden has reckoned with a stutter.) “Mini Mike so far has spent almost five huuundred million dollars in order to get embarrassed by Pocohantas!” But, Trump added, “It’s not going to be her.” The day before, in Colorado, he had told the crowd that Amy Klobuchar had choked, which he also communicated with a strangulation mime. Who, then? “It looks like Bernie,” Trump said. “Crazy Bernie!” Maybe—we’ll know more after the South Carolina primary and Super Tuesday—but it’s not Trump’s decision.
