Trump Loses It
But some cautionary notes
Happy Thursday.
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How bad was the debate for Donald Trump? As I wrote in the Atlantic Daily newsletter: The morning after “found the former apex predator of American politics looking for some hand-holding.”
Trump now says that if he ever debates again, he wants a safe space with his reliable fluffers — Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters — as moderators. In other words, Trump was saying: “No más.”
How bad was the debate? Just listen to the chorus of keening and wailing from the deplorable right. Trump and his orcs were incensed that the ABC moderators had fact checked some of his more egregious lies: pointing out that it’s illegal to kill babies and that immigrants are not, in fact, eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Megyn Kelly posted: “These moderators are a disgraceful failure and this is one of the most biased, unfair debates I have ever seen. Shame on you @ABC.” Other reactions were even more hysterical…. “What you saw last night from ABC has never happened before in American history,” the former Trump aide Stephen Miller complained in a post on X. “We’ve always had leftwing bias from establishment corporate press. This was something else entirely: this was aggressively working to sabotage and undermine the democratic process.”
Not to be outdone, Sean Davis, a co-founder of The Federalist, suggested not only that ABC lose its license but that the moderators and network executives be charged with “criminal election fraud and interference.”
**
As for the debate itself: I’m going to dispense with the usual caveats, hedges, fudges, and circumlocutions and just say it: Kamala fuqqing killed it. And since I am of reasonably sound mind and body, I fully confess and repent my underestimation of her skills.
Because, damn.
Kamala Harris baited Trump with surgical precision, triggering his insecurities — about his crowd sizes, his wealth, his racism his criminal record — while giving him full scope to wallow in his delusions. In the 90-minute debate, she exposed Donald Trump and broke him. “I’ve been watching presidential debates since 1976,” Peter Wehner writes in The Atlantic. “And I’ve even been peripherally involved in a few. And I’ve never seen a candidate execute a debate strategy as well as Harris did.”
In stark contrast — vividly captured on the debate’s split screen — Trump was undisciplined, unprepared, and easily goaded into his signature tantrums of grievance, which were as incoherent as they were divorced from reality. “In his confusion and reactiveness,” writes David Frum, “he seemed to have forgotten any debate strategy at all.”
For veteran Trump-watchers, much of this was familiar — his penchant for rambling, fatuous fabulism. But for many of the 67 million viewers, Trump’s muddled performance may have come as a revelation. Tens of millions of voters watched a live reality television show in which a bitter, confused, and diminished old man was falling apart in front of their eyes.
And this was not a one-off. What they were seeing was Trump In Full.
My admittedly irrational exuberance deserves some explanation: I went back and watched most of it again and read the transcript. And it’s even more devastating the second time around.
After Harris mocked his performance at his rallies, suggesting “that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom” — this happened:
DAVID MUIR: Let me just ask, though, why did you try to kill that [immigration] bill and successfully so? That would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: First let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don't go to her rallies. There's no reason to go. And the people that do go, she's busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can't talk about that.
People don't leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That's because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We're a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what's going on here, you're going to end up in World War 3, just to go into another subject.
What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk -- not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating -- they're eating the pets of the people that live there.
And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame. As far as rallies are concerned, as far -- the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It's a very simple phrase. Make America great again. She's destroying this country. And if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success. We'll end up being Venezuela on steroids.
DAVID MUIR: I just want to clarify here, you bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community --
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I've seen people on television
DAVID MUIR: Let me just say here this ...
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that and maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager.
DAVID MUIR: I'm not taking this from television. I'm taking it from the city manager.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.
DAVID MUIR: Again, the Springfield city manager says there's no evidence of that.
And millions of voices cried out as one: WTAF?
**
A few quick points (and warnings):
Because he will never admit that he lost, Trump refuses to take the L. Remember that, come November.
Trump and his MAGA followers are more online than ever, increasingly addicted to their fake online memes, and unshakable in their resolve to stick with lies even when they have been thoroughly debunked.
The bigotry is the point. Trump spent much of the day of the debate hanging out with a racist conspiracy theorist and posting fake internet memes about Haitians eating cats, complete with AI-generated art depicting a improbably muscular and heavily armed Trump rescuing animals from scary black men.
Unlike the Democrats two months ago, the Republicans are not feverishly, searching for an alternative to their delusional nominee.
He could still win.
Trump blames everyone but himself
You can read my latest in The Atlantic here:
Even some of Trump’s most reliable sycophants had to recognize that the fault lay neither in the stars nor in the moderators but rather in the candidate himself. Others in the former president’s universe, though, have refused to acknowledge that truth. During the debate, the conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk posted on X: “Did you really think they were going to give Trump a fair debate? Trump got shot on July 13th, and now a drive by shooting on September 10th.” …
As soon as he got offstage, Trump grasped onto his supporters’ line of defense. “I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!” Trump wrote on Truth Social, echoing phrasing used online during the debate. Trump must be aware on some level that last night, tens of millions of voters watched a bitter, confused, and diminished elderly man fall apart in front of their eyes. At his rallies, Trump can get away with his signature lies and tantrums of grievance—and with not saying much at all about actual policy plans. In his softball interviews with fawning right-wing hosts, he can ramble and lie without fear of being challenged. At the presidential debate, though, it didn’t work. So he has decided to blame everybody but himself….
But it wasn’t the moderators or the network, or even Harris, who forced Trump to begin ranting that “they’re eating the dogs!” That was all Trump.
You can read the whole thing here.
About that debate…
Matt Labash in his brilliant newsletter, Slack Tide:
Combing over the transcript more carefully this morning, what becomes clear is that Trump was beaten like the village piñata. And that’s not my anti-Trump bias talking. (For the record, I had Trump trouncing Biden in their debate, mentioning in the Times back in June that Biden “sounded like a dying humidifier or my great grandfather giving his last will and testament.”)
The polls seem to back me up on last night’s results. As The Washington Post noted, a YouGov poll showed that Kombucha (which Trump has not yet called Harris, but probably will) won 54-31 percent among registered voters who watched at least some of the debate. While CNN had her winning 63-37 percent. In an evenly-divided electorate, those are true bloodbath numbers — a bigger margin than 20 other post-debate polls CNN has done going back to 1984. And as the Post added, it gets worse for Trump, in that even 31 percent of Trump supporters said he lost.
**
Susan Glasser, in the New Yorker:
By the end of the evening, prediction markets and the instant polls were calling Harris a big winner, Pete Buttigieg was dunking on Trump’s “crazy uncle vibe,” and, adding insult to injury, Taylor Swift decided to pick this night to endorse Harris in an Instagram post to her two hundred and eighty-three million followers. The historian Michael Beschloss concluded, “From start to end, Kamala Harris has just delivered what is easily one of the most successful Presidential debate performances in all of American history.” No wonder Trump’s son Don, Jr., was reduced to tweeting his fury at the moderators: “The Fake News is the enemy of the people!”
**
Luntz joined Wednesday’s edition of Piers Morgan Uncensored and offered his assessment.
“Do you think Kamala won and does that mean she may now win the election?” Morgan asked.
“I think more accurately is that Donald Trump lost,” Luntz replied. “And this is not the worst debate performance I’ve seen in my career, but it’s very close to it. The conversations about people eating dogs and cats, calling the leader of Hungary one of the greatest world leaders, repeatedly missing the opportunity to focus on inflation and affordability, and the complete inability to present his point of view without completely tearing into her, into Joe Biden, into whomever was in his sights.”….
“It was a pretty negative performance, pretty pessimistic, cynical, contemptuous,” Luntz added. “And I think that this will cost him, yes. I’m trying to decide if I wanna go on record, and the answer’s yes. I think that he loses because of this debate performance.”
But, but, but… Some words of caution.
Charlie Mahtesian in Politico:
[There’s] a widespread perception that Trump did serious damage to his chances of winning with his undisciplined and largely incoherent debate performance.
It’s a dangerous assumption. Worse for Democrats, it’s a misread that risks breeding the kind of complacency that put him in the White House in 2016. It’s worth remembering that snap polls conducted after every presidential debate in 2016 and 2020 also judged Trump to be the loser — and by wide margins. Public opinion polls in general underestimated the level of support for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Trump has been impeached twice, been held liable for sexual abuse, faced 88 criminal counts — been found guilty of 34 — effectively ended Roe v. Wade, insulted the sacrifices of soldiers, and punctured nearly every shibboleth in politics. All the while, the GOP lost the House, Senate and White House on his watch. And yet despite all that and more, here we are, 55 days out from the election, and Trump still remains in a photo-finish race. He is either in the lead or within striking distance in every battleground state.
**
Have we learned nothing from the past, oh, decade of Donald Trump? This is a guy whose has been declared politically DOA (including by me!) more times than I can count.
Remember how Trump destroyed his campaign when he attacked John McCain for being a prisoner of war?
Or how Trump was definitely going to lose after he was judged to have lost all three general election debates against Hillary Clinton?
Or how he had to drop out of the race — because he would not only lose but drag Republicans down with him — after the “Access Hollywood” tape?
Or how after he lost the 2020 election Republicans would turn on him and push him to the side?
Or how after he helped incite a riot on January 6, 2021 Republican voters would walk away from him?
Or one of a thousand other things Trump has said or done in the past decade that the chattering class insisted was finally-really-we-mean-it-this-time the end for Trump?
The boys are taking all of this in stride
Eli and Auggie keeping track of the turkeys and deer in the woods. (That’s my foot.)
Finally
I do not think enough attention has been given to the fact that Trump threw out as much bait to Kamala as she did to him, and she did not take any of it. Imagine how different the debate would have been if she had engaged defensively on turning black, her father is a Marxist, buses people to her rallies, late term abortions, Biden’s incapacity, immigrant crime, etc. instead, she pivoted to offense each time he tried to put her on the defense.
The Man and I rewatched last night -- and it was so much more fun because we weren't nervous. It was also even worse than I remembered because I was laughing so hard the first go round that I missed a few things -- like David Muir pushing back hard on the pet eating and Trump doubling down.
I also loved Harris's "fine lets get into it" attitude on foreign policy. It made me so joyful to hear forceful language about America's role in the world from a messenger younger people will listen to.