If that June debate was a five-alarm fire for Democrats that eventually forced Biden from the race, after Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s proponents should probably check the temperature in their own house.
The majority of the focus coming into Tuesday was about how Harris would handle her first-ever presidential debate with someone who had been on this stage many times. Could she answer questions about her position shifts; parry attacks from Trump, someone who tries to be the alpha on these stages; could she answer the attack that she’s light on policy; and could she appear “presidential”?
She may have seemed nervous at first, but she quickly found her voice and more than acquitted herself well. All of those questions were quickly dispatched:
Trump’s team ahead of the debate equated the Republican standard-bearer to boxing great Muhammad Ali. If he was a boxer, Trump was cut and bleeding in the middle of the fight, and by the end, was TKO’d. Or as a Democratic strategist texted afterward, it was more like Ali vs. Berbick, Ali’s last fight, decided unanimously — for Berbick.
Trump made the unusual move for a presidential candidate to go into the spin room after the debate and talk to reporters. That’s not something that’s normally done when someone has a good debate. That’s usually reserved for low-polling primary candidates, who felt they didn’t get enough time or attention during the debate.
2. The spotlight should now be on Trump’s incoherence and general lack of any serious grasp on policy.
Coming into the debate, we noted that if Harris is “able to acquit herself passably, the spotlight and scrutiny should be heavily on Trump.”
That’s because Trump did not have a very good debate against Biden in June, but his serious problems — his lack of substance and repeated lies — were overshadowed by Biden’s disastrous performance, maybe the worst of any presidential candidate in history.
With a more-than-competent performance from Harris Tuesday, Trump’s lies, meandering, conspiracies and often general incoherence was made even more glaring.
He wandered through conspiracies about, not just the election, but also about who is currently president (Joe Biden), the usual about immigrants who (aren’t actually) coming from “mental institutions and insane asylums” and the newly unusual (and debunked) about immigrants who (are not) “eating the dogs” or “cats.”
Trump got the conspiracy wrong, though, because it was about ducks, not dogs.
Trump even got wrong what the actual facts of Harris’ misleading charge that Trump predicted “a bloodbath” if the outcome of this election is “not to his liking.”
“It was a different term,” Trump said, “and it was a term that related to energy because they have destroyed our energy business.”
It was the correct term. He did say “bloodbath” back in March, but he was talking in the context of Chinese tariffs, the auto industry and a transition to electric vehicles — not “our energy business.”
It’s the very kind of thing that would have had Democrats nervous about their octogenarian former candidate and Republicans “outraged” on cable news about Biden’s mental state.
3. Trump was on the defensive and evasive, even on issues that should benefit him — and didn’t land much, if anything, that stuck.
Harris had Trump on the defensive from the get-go on the economy (about his tax cuts and tariffs), his jobs record, his handling of the pandemic and Jan. 6. There were times, even on immigration, when Trump decided to address a Harris attack instead of talking about the issue he ostensibly wants to talk most about.
For someone who likes to bill himself a straight shooter, Trump didn’t answer questions directly and dumped a greatest hits of lies from this campaign. He declined to say if he wanted Ukraine to win against Russia, wouldn’t answer if he had any regrets about his response to the violence on Jan. 6, and he twice refused to say if he would veto a national abortion ban, like his vice-presidential running mate said he would.
In fact, he went out of his way to say essentially that Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance doesn’t speak for him — in a clumsy and meandering way that led him to student loans:
“Well, I didn't discuss it with JD in all fairness. JD — And I, I don't mind if he has a certain view, but I think he was speaking for me, but I really didn't. Look, we don't have to discuss it, because she'd never be able to get it, just like she couldn't get student loans. They couldn't get student loans. They didn't even come close to getting student loans. They taunted young people and a lot of other people that had loans. They can never get this approved. So it doesn't matter what she says about going to Congress. So wonderful, let's go to Congress, do it.”
Never mind that Republicans in Congress would not act to help relieve student loans or that Republican-led states sued to end Biden’s executive action on student-loan forgiveness. But Trump was digging the hole even deeper for himself on abortion rights.
“I did a great service in doing it,” Trump said about the overturning of Roe. “It took courage to do it. And the Supreme Court had great courage in doing it. And I give tremendous credit to those six justices.”
Nearly two-thirds have said they opposed the overturning of Roe.
Trump was also outside the mainstream of public opinion in talking about the Affordable Care Act. He called it “lousy” and “not very good today” when record numbers of people have a favorable opinion of it.
Trump’s best attack was probably this:
“She's gonna do all these wonderful things,” he said. “Why hasn't she done it? She's been there for three-and-a-half years. They've had three-and-a-half years to fix the border. They've had three-and-a-half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn't she done it?”
But a coherent attack line was rare from Trump Tuesday night. And even this one was nearly a concession.
4. The moderators fact-checked unlike in the previous debate.
CNN said it was going to leave the fact checking to the candidates during the June debate between Trump and Biden.
ABC took a different approach. Moderators David Muir and Lindsay Davis interjected with fact checks four times — all were of Trump.
That was not a reflection of bias; it was because of just how many things Trump said there were blatantly false, like on crime statistics, the dogs and cats conspiracy and the 2020 election.
They did it with a mild, but clear tone and maintained control of the debate throughout the evening, getting to lots of topics and not letting either candidate run over them.
Their approach was notable, particularly with viewership expected to be high. When he went to the spin room, Trump added to his pile of grievances, claiming the debate was “very unfair” and called it “three on one.”
5. Harris has done everything right — and could still lose.
Harris arguably handled Trump better than anyone has at a debate, whether it was Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Biden in 2020 — even though most concluded that Clinton and Biden won most, if not all, of those face-offs.
Since getting into this shortened campaign, Harris has done pretty much everything right. She’s tacked to the middle, raised more than half-a-billion dollars, staffed up and opened field offices across the swing states, fired up the Democratic base and now even out-debated Trump.
But the political reality is Harris could still lose.
Trump has a strong and devoted base, and the seven swing states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada — are more conservative than the country at large.
People still are more pessimistic than optimistic on the economy, even if that’s improved some lately, and polls — including the NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll out Tuesday — have shown people trust Trump to handle the economy, immigration and the war in the Middle East more than Harris.
Could this debate have changed some minds? Maybe. But views of Trump have been ingrained. This race is very much a coin flip, according to the polls, and that’s unlikely to change very much even after this debate, because of how hyper-polarized this country is.
