The Democrat party’s US presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris is up to the task of becoming the 47th US “Commander-in-Chief” and for taking on the likes of the GOP MAGA ex-president with his “Gish gallop“ style of debating.

As per Wikipedia, The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality.

In short, this debate strategy is designed to defeat an opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, non-sensical arguments. This is the art of performance over substance. Steve Bannon refers to this style of debating as “flooding the zone with sh*t”

Another devotee of the Gish Gallop debate tactic is none other than the GOP MAGA ex-president’s idol, the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Remember when the GOP MAGA ex-president spouted off so many lies during the 1st US presidential debate in 2024, POTUS Joe Biden was caught flat-footed because he didn’t know where to begin to counter all the lies, a mission impossible task. All the debate preparation that POTUS Biden’s handlers did to help him to be debate ready were not sufficient to overcome the ex-president’s usage of the Gish gallop debate style.

I could find only one writer out of numerous media critics who referred to how difficult it is to adequately respond to Trump’s Gish gallop debate style. During the June 2024 US presidential debate, it would’ve been mission impossible for any of the naysayers to have fared any better than POTUS Joe Biden on the debate stage but that didn’t stop them from blaming the president for his lackluster performance allegedly due his elderly age.

As per “Letters from an American,” dated June 27, 2024, Heather Cox Richardson writes:

(The GOP MAGA ex-president) “responded to the calling out of his own criminal convictions by saying that Biden “could be a convicted felon,” and falsely stating: “This man is a criminal.” And, repeatedly, Trump called America a “failing nation” and described it as a hellscape.”

“It went on and on, and that was the point. This was not a debate. It was Trump using a technique that actually has a formal name, the Gish gallop, although I suspect he comes by it naturally. It’s a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don’t know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them.”

See debate analysis: June 27, 2024 – by Heather Cox Richardson

I’m betting that VP Kamala Harris is well aware of the GOP MAGA ex-president’s Olympian skill in executing the Gish Gallop debate style which can be difficult to counter if one is unfamiliar/ unaware of this tactic.

Vice President Kamala Harris should make the public fully aware of the GOP MAGA ex-president’s usage of the Gish gallop debate gimmicky strategy to immunize them from buying into whatever the MAGA ex-president says. Since responding to all his lies is impossible to deal with in real time, she should single out the most egregious lie/ lies to counter with facts. Then she can point out that his flooding of debate time with spurious arguments proves that he’s not a serious candidate and that he’s probably too old for the job.

As per the August 20, 2024 Scientific American article by Madhusudan Katti, “Trump’s ‘Gish Gallop’ Debate Tactic Comes from Creationists:”

Excerpts:

June’s fateful Biden vs. Trump debate led not just to the sudden ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. Donald Trump’s performance also saw the return of a familiar tactic in American public discourse, the “Gish gallop”—an avalanche of nonsense presented as fact—on the debate stage. A favorite of creationists, the gallop’s trot into the political arena needs calling out as we head into the home stretch of the 2024 election.

Coined by the National Center for Science Education’s founding director Eugenie Scott in 1994, the Gish gallop takes its name from the creationist Duane Gish, who frequently challenged biologists to debates about evolution. His tactic consisted of talking fast and with confidence, bombarding opponents with falsehoods, non-sequiturs and enough cherry-picked factoids to confuse the audience. Scientists debating him faced the challenge of sifting half-truths from outright lies and finding the right evidence to refute them systematically, all within the few minutes allowed in response. Which effectively meant that when the bell went off, the Gish gallop left the scientist “stumped” and Gish declaring victory for creationism. Such a spectacle leaves the audience less informed than they were before the debate, all at the hands of a debater whose only goal is to discredit their opponent and “win” the debate.

As per the February 16, 2023 Atlantic analysis by Mehdi Hasan, “How to Beat Trump in a Debate:”

Excerpts:

“Donald Trump is an avid practitioner of a debating method known among rhetoricians as the Gish Gallop. Its aim is simple: to defeat one’s opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments. Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it.”

“As one pithy tweet—now known as “Brandolini’s law”—put it, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” The Gish Galloper’s entire strategy rests on exploiting this advantage. By the time you’ve begun preparing your rebuttal of the Galloper’s first lie, they’ve rattled off another dozen. They want to trick the audience into believing that the facts and the evidence are on their side. The technique is based on delivery over depth. Some call it “proof by verbosity.”

“Trump may be the grand master of the Gish Gallop, but he is not its originator. That honor goes to the person who gave the method its name: Duane Tolbert Gish.”

 “The writer John Grant explained the key to Gish’s approach in his 2014 book, Debunk It! Fake News Edition:”

“In 1994, after watching Gish run rings around scholars and scientists, a frustrated Eugenie Scott, then the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, coined the phrase Gish Gallop. In these debates, Scott noted, “the evolutionist has to shut up while the creationist gallops along, spewing out nonsense with every paragraph.”

“The “nonsense” is an integral part of the Gish Gallop. Gish’s claims were repeatedly debunked, yet he regurgitated them again and again, at the same speed, in the same order, in debate after debate.

“Like Gish before him, Trump ceaselessly repeats claims that have been publicly discredited. In theory, rebutting these falsehoods point by point is the best way to stop a Gish Gallop. But in the real world, you rarely have the opportunity to do this.”

“So what do you do? From my days as a student debater at Oxford University to my decade as a TV interviewer, I’ve come across my fair share of Gish Gallopers. Here’s what I’ve learned.”

1. Pick your battle.

“Perhaps the first time I encountered a Gish Galloper in person was in 2013, during a debate on Islam and peace at the Oxford Union. One of my opponents, the far-right activist Anne Marie Waters, began her remarks with this word salad of an attack on my faith and my co-religionists:”

“She Galloped on in this vein for several more minutes, piling one “example” of evil Muslims upon the next, and not stopping to expand or elaborate.”

“There was no way I could address all of the supposed examples she cited to justify “fear of Islam”; she listed 33 items in less than 2 minutes—about one every four seconds.”

“This was no nuanced discussion about the problems of Islamist extremism. No, this was a screed that sought to taint all of Islam, and all Muslims—presumably myself included—as aiders and abetters of terrorism. Any effort I might make to draw distinctions and unpick some complex realities from this fabric of bigotry would be doomed. It would’ve taken several minutes, if not my entire allotted time. It also would have put me on the defensive, when the key to winning any argument is to put your opponent on the back foot. So, instead, I chose to zero in on the most ludicrous assertion: that Saudi Arabia was the “birthplace of Islam.”

“Just on a factual point,” I responded, “you said that Islam was born in Saudi Arabia. Islam was born in 610 A.D. Saudi Arabia was born in 1932 A.D. So you were only 1,322 years off! Not bad.”

“By mocking and debunking that particular claim, I poured doubt on the rest of them—and made my opponent look foolish in the process.”

“When facing a Gish Galloper, going line by line is impractical, if not impossible. Instead, single out their weakest claim or argument. Highlight and mock it.”

2. Call them out.

“Don’t let your audience be fooled into assuming that your opponent has special command of the subject because of all the “facts” they’ve just spouted. Explain to them what your opponent is doing, and that the Gallop is really just a sleight of hand.”

“Another devotee of the Gish Gallop is Russian President Vladimir Putin. In recent years, the former KGB agent and his acolytes in state-run media have perfected what a RAND Corporation study dubbed “the firehose of falsehood.” Whether justifying the illegal invasion of Ukraine or interfering in U.S. elections, the Russian government—to quote from the study—uses “high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions.”

“But the RAND study also offers—albeit at risk of overextending its metaphor—this piece of handy advice for fighting disinformation: “Don’t expect to counter Russia’s firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth. Instead, put raincoats on those at whom the firehose is aimed.”

“Putting “raincoats” on your audience means making them aware of what a Gish Galloper is subjecting them to. Point out, for example, that the speed at which they’re speaking is a sign of deceit, not intelligence. Or even that they’re relying on a favorite tactic of the Kremlin’s.”

3. Don’t budge.

“Above all, make sure you stop Gish Gallopers midstream. And then don’t let them move on to the next falsehood. Keep pounding at them with a well-prepared rebuttal. They may not concede the point, but they’ve been derailed and are now forced to argue on your terms.”

“For years, Trump Gish Galloped unchecked, disorienting opponents and audiences alike. Unprepared, time-limited, or weak-willed interviewers and moderators would fail to interject, correct, or take a pause to respond to his nonsense. That is, until August 2020, when my friend Jonathan Swan, then a national political correspondent for Axios, sat down with the then-president for a televised interview.”

“Trump tried to recite a bunch of dodgy stats on COVID-19, to pretend he had the pandemic under control. But Swan wouldn’t let him. When Trump started waving a bunch of printouts of graphs and tables, Swan inspected them and debunked the president’s claims in real time. Throughout, Swan gave Trump plenty of openings to speak, but he never let him get up to Galloping speed.”

“As soon as it aired, Swan’s interview went viral. This was the rare moment that revealed Trump’s Gish Gallop for exactly what it was: a deliberate strategy to deflect and distract.”

Read: Communication experts’ advice for handling Trump’s interruptions

LA Times Column: How Trump uses the ‘Gish Gallop’