The Real Way You Always Know Who Lost the Debate

Nothing about Tuesday night’s debate was particularly surprising. Donald Trump, in visible decline, became agitated, pedantic, and increasingly unserious as the broadcast wore on. He turned in yet another weirdly checked-out performance and continued a losing streak that was only briefly broken up when he faced off against an opponent who was slightly more advanced in his sundowning, three months earlier. Harris, meanwhile, is a career prosecutor, an effective performer of politics, and a 59-year-old woman—conditions that created an abject mismatch onstage. The VP proceeded to wipe the floor with the former president, by virtue of her ability to appear competent and normal in contrast to the dog eating and the rally-size grousing. There weren’t any curveballs dispensed from the moderation team, either, who teed up a pretty standard set of policy queries on immigration, abortion, the economy, and democracy. Harris did what she was supposed to do, and Trump did what he always does. That is the way things work.

And yet, for the embattled MAGA base who have internalized this idea that Harris is incapable of stringing words into sentences, her ability to answer basic questions about her policy positions could only be justified by conspiracy and collusion. We have been down this path before. Perhaps you remember the swirling rumors in 2020 that Joe Biden received his debate questions before the event—the same accusations were leveled Tuesday night, but this time around though, they were weirder, and much dumber.

The prevailing theory in MAGAdom is that Kamala Harris was discreetly wearing a pair of earbuds embedded in the earrings she wore on stage. The tech itself is real—in 2023, the audio company Icebach unveiled a set of pearl jewelry called the “Nova H1 Audio Earrings” that were outfitted with the ability to transmit audio into the wearer’s cochleas. If you are way down the rabbit hole, you might be willing to believe that Harris had orchestrated some sort of elaborate walkie-talkie system so she could receive live coaching from, I don’t know, Pete Buttigieg, standing a few feet offstage. It’s a position that has been signal-boosted by some of the more prominent knuckleheads on the right—particularly Naomi Wolf, former feminist scholar, current anti-vax nut job, who frankly deserves some sort of lifetime achievement award for gullibility. Here’s Wolf, laying out her case:

It’s hard to know where these allegations originally surfaced. Washington Post media reporter Will Sommer first brought them to my attention by singling out a post made by the 500,000 follower strong @The_Trump_Train account, which went on to achieve a half-million total views. It metastasized from there, becoming a bugaboo on all sorts of MAGA-aligned accounts. The claims, obviously, aren’t true and can be debunked in a variety of ways, none more compelling than the fact that the earrings Kamala was wearing don’t look like the Nova buds at all. Kamala has worn her debate jewelry on several different occasions before the big night, and as the Verge points out, it certainly seems like Icebach’s audio earrings never made it to store shelves. They aren’t even available to purchase on the company’s website, but that didn’t stop the company’s CEO from facetiously asserting that he could neither “confirm nor deny” his assistance in the vice president’s debate prep on LinkedIn. That post has since been deleted, after what I imagine was a stern dressing down from investors.

But all of this belies my larger point about this fabrication: Why would anyone wear earbuds at a political debate? I truly cannot think of a more ineffective way to cheat. Imagine trying to process questions from the moderator, and the persistent blabbering of Donald Trump, with a team of advisers in your ear. Sounds like a mechanical nightmare. If that happened to me, I’d freeze midsyllable like late-era Mitch McConnell. More importantly, why would Harris need help navigating a series of questions that everyone in the universe knew she’d be asked? Any politician worth their salt can navigate their border pablum in their sleep. She probably had her pro-choice spiel memorized for weeks, same with her Jan. 6 riposte. People do debate prep for a reason, because presidential debates are extremely predictable. That is probably a lesson Trump could stand to learn, because his free-associative approach behind the lectern is no longer resonating.

To be clear, this is loser shit. There is never a better way to know that one side is smarting from a terrible debate performance than when a voting bloc starts reaching for magical thinking to justify what went wrong. We saw it in June when Biden dead-enders said a bad cold was responsible for his campaign-ending travesty. Going back further, to 2004 after a surprisingly strong performance against John Kerry, some partisans speculated as to whether George W. Bush was packing a hidden buzzer to assist him with some rhetorical flourishes. It’s never a good look.

I know I’m dealing with people like Naomi Wolf here. She belongs to a fleet of fringe MAGA psychos who have attempted to manifest every conspiracy they’ve ever dreamt up into reality. Scroll deep into her replies, and you’ll find a variety of different sick flavors spun out from the overarching idea that Kamala Harris’ debate fitness is the result of a deep-state op. (Maybe she, like Biden, had the questions ahead of time!) Someone replying to Wolf’s tweet claimed that Harris’ body language—particularly the way she swallows—is indicative of a pathological liar, which is the sort of nut-job psychology we’ve all become accustomed to. But I suppose this is the political environment you get when one candidate is signal-boosting the insane, racist, and easily debunked accusation that Haitian refugees are eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. It’s grim out there! But I hope the early returns from her performance encourage the Harris team to get their candidate out into the public more often. The vice president has the facility to speak candidly and extemporaneously. If MAGAdom can only rationalize that fact by conjuring the specter of camouflaged earbuds, then she’s in a good spot.