Trump Hates Being A Loser— But He Sure Looked Like One Tuesday!
This morning, Señor T went running to Fox & Friends to whine how unfair ABC News was to him at the debate. So unfair that the network should be shut down. How dare they fact check his lies! It was rigged, it was rigged! I guess he figured out Kamala had handed his ass to him! Dan Ladden-Hall reported that the Orange Clown complained “that he’d faced a ‘rigged deal’ with the debate, with moderators ‘correcting everything’ he said while ‘not correcting with her.’ Asked why he felt moderators hadn’t corrected Harris in the same way, Trump answered: ‘Because they’re dishonest.’” Really, not because she didn’t spend all her time lying?
“I think ABC took a big hit last night,” he continued. “To be honest, they’re a news organization— they have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.”
Trump used the interview to repeatedly complain that the debate was “three-to-one,” meaning he felt that moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis were on Harris’ side against him.
The CNN moderators in June notably did not fact-check or question statements made by Trump or Biden during that event, as per agreed rules.
Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt cited a report from Media Research Center— a conservative group which describes itself as dedicated to combating “falsehoods and censorship” in the news media in order to “preserve America’s founding principles and Judeo-Christian values.” The report, which was covered by right-wing outlets including Breitbart and the Daily Wire, claimed Muir’s show, World News Tonight, was unfairly biased against Trump and in favor of Harris.
The show then aired a compilation of what Earhardt described as the “lies” Harris told about Trump during the debate, including her statements that Trump “plans on implementing” Prject 2025 and “will sign a national abortion ban” if he returns to the White House.
…Trump claimed the evening had gone well for him. “I’ve been told I’m a good debater,” he said. “I think it was one of my better debates. Maybe my best debate.”
It wasn’t. He was awful, unless you want to judge him about how much he pleased the MAGA crowd. In terms of picking up any new voters? Nope; that’s not what the polling shows:
This morning, Jeff Greenfield reiterated that the debate last night was an opportunity for Kamala to show the voters— who don’t know her— to introduce herself and her policies and show how she could stand up to a bully. “Harris,’ he wrote, “knew the points she wanted to hit, and hit them. She did so well enough that the Trump folks might have suspected a hidden teleprompter had been smuggled in. She repeatedly talked about her plans to lower the cost of housing, to give tax relief to new parents, oh and did you hear that she won’t ban fracking and owns a gun? But perhaps even more impressively, Harris made it Trump’s night— in the worst possible way. The campaign armed Harris with a series of trip wires hoping that Trump would be unable to resist setting them off. Not only did Trump take the bait, he brought a couple of his own, which he tripped over again and again. It was as if Lucy showed up with half a dozen footballs for Charlie Brown to kick, and Charlie himself brought a few more for good measure. The fact that Trump had more speaking time will not be a source of complaint from the Harris camp; they’d likely have ceded him a lot more minutes.”
Harris knew exactly what she was looking for when she taunted Trump about crowds leaving his rallies “out of boredom and exhaustion.” She knew he could not resist claiming that his crowds were bigger, that she had to pay her followers to attend. But even the Harris team could not have expected that Trump would pivot immediately back to the “millions and millions” of undocumented immigrants and claims that they’re “eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!” (As sportscaster Warner Wolf might have said, “You could’ve turned your sets off right there.”
More broadly, Harris anticipated that Trump would resort to “Donald’s Greatest Hits.” She wants to convince the country to turn the page on Trump and as soon as she said that Trump had been “fired by 81 million voters,” she watched Trump dive deep into the rabbit hole of the “stolen 2020 election.” She all but invited Trump to profess a remarkable neutrality between Russia and Ukraine, and then argued that with Trump in power, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv and then staring down Poland— and that there just so happens to be hundreds of thousands of Polish Americans in Pennsylvania.
Even the optics played out in Harris’ favor. She trumped Trump at the outset of the debate by going over to him and shaking hands. She certainly wasn’t afraid of being seen as smaller than Trump.
During the debate, she repeatedly looked over at him while she was assailing everything from his record on race to his global troubles to the refusal of so many of his top aides to support him. Trump looked doggedly ahead— something the occasional two-shots made clear. It was one of a number of key differences between the debate Trump had with President Joe Biden, who often looked listless in the split screen on television.
She immediately challenged him to a second debate. He told his friends on Fox & Friends that “I'd be less inclined to, because we had a great night. We won the debate. We had a terrible a terrible network.” Looks like now the felon is afraid of the prosecutor. And if she was able to so effortlessly bait Trump into destroying himself, what was the trained KGB agent in the Kremlin able to do? Not to mention the rest of the authoritarians Trump likes to hang with.
The NY Times asked 14 political commentators who won the debate— including several right-wingers. Only one, ass-clown Daniel McCarthy, was clueless enough to say Trump won. Everyone else said Kamala did, including David French, who said it wasn’t close, GOP strategist Liam Donovan and Ross Douthat, who whimpered that “it wasn’t a rout.”
Meanwhile, over at The Bulwark, Will Saletin noted that Trump “can’t fire the person responsible for his bad performance, because that person is himself. And he can’t repair his many bad answers, because those answers were driven by a fundamental defect: He simply doesn’t care about other people. That’s what Kamala Harris exposed. She used the debate to speak to Americans. She told them how she would improve their lives. You can argue with her plans or her level of clarity about them, but at least she described those plans and addressed them to voters. She said Trump had no such plans. She accused him of focusing on himself, not on people’s daily concerns. To rebut that accusation, Trump needed to set aside his ego and speak to viewers about how he would help them. But he couldn’t do it. Instead, he bragged about himself— which just proved Harris’s point… A presidential debate isn’t just an argument. It’s a job interview. If you win the argument but come off as a jerk, you might lose the election. When your opponent tells people that you care only about yourself, no amount of talking about yourself can answer that charge. You can’t argue your way out of the accusation. The only effective answer is to act in a way that disproves the accusation. That’s what Trump failed to do. He failed because he’s incapable of it. And that, among many other reasons, is why he shouldn’t be president.”
David Frum summed up the debate by explaining how Harris roped a dope. She triggered a meltdown. “Trump lost his cool over and over. Goaded by predictable provocations, he succumbed again and again. Trump was pushed into broken-sentence monologues— and even an all-out attack on the 2020 election outcome. He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, and was backward-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible. Harris hit pain point after pain point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who had served with him, the boredom and early exits of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Every hit was followed by an ouch. Trump’s counterpunches flailed and missed. Harris met them with smiling mockery and cool amusement. The debate was often a battle of eyelids: Harris’s opened wide, Trump’s squinting and tightening… Hemmed, harried, and humiliated, Trump lost his footing and his grip. He never got around to making an affirmative case for himself… Almost from the start, Harris was in control. She had better moments and worse ones, but she was human where Trump was feral. She had warm words for political opponents such as John McCain and Dick Cheney; Trump had warm words for nobody other than Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian strongman whom Trump praised for praising Trump. It was an all-points beatdown, and no less a beating because Trump inflicted so much of it on himself.”
The whole charade was conducted so that pundits and networks and bloggers have something to blather about.
Trump lost, as was inevitable. But to what end? He didn't lose a single one of his voters.
Harris won, as was inevitable. But to what end? She didn't gain a single voter. Some of her lies and non-answers may have actually lost her a few.
The only way Harris could have won and/or Trump lost that might have actually affected the election was if Trump dropped dead on stage.
But as Mr. Toomey observes... Let's say Harris wins the electors. Then what? Since she remains vague to contradictory in her "plans", you must look to the real "doers", which is the par…
From a technical perspective, it was not possible for Harris to do any better than she did last night. As anyone who has ever conducted a high-stakes jury trial knows, it requires a sophisticated skill set that is easily adaptable to a high-stakes political debate. She adeptly adapted that skill set in preparing for and conducting that debate.
It's a relief to think that the odds of Orange Julius II and Project 2025 visibly diminished last night. There still is, however, a question about a potential presidency assuming Harris does win. This piece identified some of them:
Harris continually offered broad, sometimes self-contradictory pronouncements on how to deal with the country’s pressing issues. Asked what she would do about climate…
I wonder if the Orange Menace ever has anyone tell him the truth anout himself to his face. I doubt.
Kamala has tremendous chutzpah, in a good way. Telling him military leaders say he’s a disgrace and other world leaders laugh at him. Wow!!! Incredible.