Huge danger sign for Donald Trump after disastrous debate against Kamala Harris
ANALYSIS
Never before, in his near-decade-long political career, has Donald Trump been so ruthlessly exposed on a debate stage.
The deficiencies in his performance today were quite excruciating to witness. The lack of any discernible preparation. The gobbledygook answers to questions he should have expected. The inability to mount anything resembling a consistent, coherent case, either for himself or against his opponent.
Theoretically, all that stuff could have been fixed with a little more diligence and focus in the lead-up, but Mr Trump has always been a fundamentally lazy politician. He doesn’t care about details, and he doesn’t do his homework. He’s the kid at school who shows up on the day a book report is due and wings it without having read a single page.
That was fine when the person opposite him was Joe Biden, himself too blunted by age to provide a challenge, or Hillary Clinton, reviled by a hefty chunk of the country, or even when he faced the other candidates for the Republican nomination in 2016, most of whom had as much charisma as a toaster.
It wasn’t fine today. Kamala Harris, as you would expect from a former prosecutor, had quite obviously prepared meticulously for the debate. Of course she had. When you are a woman at the highest level of politics, you don’t get to skate by on bluster alone.
So Mr Trump could have, and should have, prepared more thoroughly. But there was another problem he could never have fixed – not in a dozen intensive training sessions, nor a hundred, nor a thousand. Ms Harris exploited not just his policy positions but his personality.
Mr Biden, the cranky old grandfather barking “come, on man” through his gums, was a bludgeon. His Vice President is a scalpel. She knew just where to nick Mr Trump to trigger his ego, and to induce the sort of self-sabotage that has always threatened to undo him.
Again and again, Ms Harris baited her opponent, and every single time, he lacked the self-discipline required to avoid the trap.
An example. After being asked about immigration, a blatant political weakness for the Democrats, Ms Harris needled Mr Trump on one of his most famous obsessions (and one completely unrelated to the question): the crowds at his rallies.
“You will see, during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills causing cancer. And what you will notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” she said.
Mr Trump, who had been glowering straight ahead – his default facial expression throughout the evening – reacted immediately. And when it was eventually his turn to speak, he could not resist the bait.
“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,” Mr Trump said.
“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.”
To reiterate: the question that sparked this exchange was about immigration, one of the subjects on which Mr Trump could have hammered Ms Harris. She managed to distract him with the consummate ease of a childless cat lady wielding a piece of string.
Palpably unsettled, he eventually wound his way back to an immigrant-related conspiracy theory, repeating baseless rumours that Haitian migrants had been killing and eating people’s pets in some small American towns – a particularly bizarre product of the right-wing social media cesspit.
“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!” said Mr Trump, as Ms Harris stood a few metres away from him, laughing.
“This is unbelievable,” she said, in words picked up by the television coverage even though her microphone was muted at the time.
Ms Harris kept laying these traps, and Mr Trump kept stumbling blindly into them. It happened when she said world leaders were “laughing” at him. When she said autocrats could win him over with “flattery and favours”. She cited military leaders, and former Trump administration officials, who had said he was “a disgrace”.
He just could not remain focused. And it all fed into a key attack line: that Mr Trump is easily manipulated, and hence, his strongman image is built on sand.
It is a deeply worrying sign, for Mr Trump, that his surrogates and media allies have spent the immediate aftermath of the debate focusing on the performance of the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis.
“I thought the moderators were very unfair. Basically, it was three-on-one. But I thought they were very unfair,” Mr Trump himself said.
No one ever blames the referee when they’re winning. No one.
You may recall that after the debate between Mr Trump and Mr Biden back in June, many Democrats complained that CNN’s moderators had failed to properly fact-check Mr Trump. As though that were the problem and not their candidate’s sputtering incoherence.
Now we have Republicans complaining that the moderators fact-checked Mr Trump too much.
This was a nonsense excuse when Mr Biden used it, and it’s no better now.
Mr Muir and Ms Davis did follow up on Mr Trump’s answers more often than Ms Harris’s. That much is true.
Perhaps it has something to do with just how outlandish some of Mr Trump’s claims were. You won’t catch Ms Harris saying migrants are eating people’s pets.
The reflexive assumption from Republicans is always that the media is biased against Mr Trump, to the exclusion of a much simpler explanation, which is that he happens to lie and fantasise more often, and so much more brazenly, than any other politician.
There’s a more important point here, though. Just as Mr Biden proved hopelessly incapable of rebutting Mr Trump in June, Mr Trump was an embarrassingly inadequate foil for Ms Harris today.
It isn’t David Muir’s fault that the former president of the United States couldn’t manage to stay on topic, effectively prosecute his opponent’s hypocrisies, or form anything resembling a coherent, sustained argument.
Donald Trump got outplayed. Outwitted. Outworked. And thoroughly out-debated. He can wallow in facile, pointless complaints about the moderators, or he can try something new after 78 years on this earth and engage in a little self-reflection.
