“Interesting choice of earrings tonight, @KamalaHarris…,” Loomer wrote, including a screenshot of Harris with a red circle around her ear.
Loomer isn’t just some regular internet crackpot either. She was spotted exiting Trump’s plane before the debate in Philadelphia Tuesday. Trump has considered hiring her for a job, according to the New York Times in a report from April, but she hasn’t officially taken any role with the Trump campaign as far as anyone knows. Loomer herself has said she’ll be press secretary one day, a rather terrifying thought, and was even spotted attending a 9/11 memorial event with Trump in New York on Wednesday.
But it wasn’t just Loomer who was spreading this idiotic nonsense about Harris. Tara Bull, a right-wing influencer who pays for a blue checkmark on X (which allows her to be artificially boosted on the social media platform), insisted that Harris was being “fed lines” through audio earrings.
Rumors are circulating that Kamala Harris was wearing audio earrings and being fed lines.
Isn’t this against the debate rules? pic.twitter.com/3sRTvp20DW
— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) September 11, 2024
Another account, called The Truth About Vaccines, shared similar screenshots, making the same deranged suggestions that Harris was actually getting some kind of help through the earring.
BUSTED! SHE’S WEARING EARPHONE EARRINGS
NOVA H1 Audio Earrings – the first and only wireless earphones embedded in a pair of pearl earrings on a gold- or silver-plated clip.
LOOK AT HER EARRINGS! Busted! pic.twitter.com/gJYwbXQWmU
— The Truth About Vaccines (@TTAVOfficial) September 11, 2024
Icebach Sound Solutions, the maker of the Nova earrings, told Gizmodo on Wednesday that the company doesn’t know if Harris was wearing its product, but took the opportunity to tell us that it would actually be well-suited for precisely that kind of debate environment. In fact, the managing director of the company said Trump should try it out.
“We do not know whether Mrs. Harris wore one of our products. The resemblance is striking and while our product was not specifically developed for the use at presidential debates, it is nonetheless suited for it,” Malte Iverson told Gizmodo via email.
“To ensure a level playing field for both candidates, we are currently developing a male version and will soon be able to offer it to the Trump campaign. The choice of color is a bit challenging though as orange does not go well with a lot of colors,” Iverson continued.
The company even added a line to the product listing on its website for the earrings, saying these were a “Special Edition For Presidential Debates,” which will be “soon available for everyone,” though the link just takes users to the CES website for 2025.
We suspect Iverson was joking, of course, but Trump’s poor performance during Tuesday’s debate was deadly serious. Just about everyone who saw the debate Tuesday night knows Trump lost. Conservative commentators Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo Rivera laid into Trump on NewsNation after the former president crashed and burned on live television.
“When he’s talking about migrants eating dogs and cats, I mean, that’s something Saturday Night Live would do,” O’Reilly said.
The “eating dogs and cats” thing was Trump’s weirdest obsession of the debate, spreading a viral internet rumor about migrants that’s been debunked by reputable sources. Rivera was even harsher, calling Trump “childish” and “creepy” while ridiculing the idea that some people are trying to make excuses for Trump.
“You can apologize for him all you want, but he did not seem presidential. He wouldn’t have even made the debate team at a junior high,” Rivera said.
The debate was incredibly embarrassing for Trump and he even suggested on Fox News this morning that he may not want to do another debate, which makes sense after the shellacking he received from Harris. But it remains to be seen whether his poor performance will lead to any change in the polls.
FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average currently has Harris polling at 47% and Trump at 44.3% at the time of this writing, though we won’t see polls that take the debate into account for at least a couple more days. And thanks to the Electoral College, Harris is going to need to win by a healthy margin in the popular vote to ensure she wins the electors needed in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Things look encouraging, as many polls have Harris virtually tied in states like North Carolina and Georgia (places where Joe Biden was losing significantly before he dropped out in late July). But nobody knows what will happen with certainty until Election Day on November 5.
Make sure you register to vote if you haven’t already. You can get more information about that at Vote.org. Trump needs to lose if this country is going to have any shot at keeping his hateful agenda at bay. With any luck, the far-right will simply keep whining about earpieces and urban legends about migrants eating pets, while Harris makes her way to the White House and real power. As Harris said on Tuesday, it’s time to turn the page on the Trump era. And we couldn’t agree more.
