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Donald Trump lost the debate to Kamala Harris, and while he may be able to bounce back from a bad night, the more worrying trend is that he’s struggling to mount even the most basic counterarguments against her.
With more than 67 million Americans watching, Trump missed out on one of the final key moments of the campaign, and Harris has now had several days of attention, a welcome development as her summer momentum fades.
Democrats want nothing more than to turn the 2024 election into a decision on Trump, bringing up a message from four years ago. Trump and Republicans want to exploit voters’ apathy about the economy and a broader yearning for a pre-COVID-19 world, linking Harris to the unpopularity of President Joe Biden.
Trump addressed the theme head on, questioning why Harris was promising to improve immigration and the economy when she is already president.
“Why wouldn’t she do it? She’s been there for three and a half years,” he said.
But it was his final statement, the political equivalent of a garbage-time touchdown, that really got him there.
“His final remarks, I think, were the defining part of the debate, because he hammered home the entire message up to that point, which was, Kamala Harris wants to do all these great things, and Kamala Harris is now the vice president of the United States, so why not do it now?” Sen. J.D. Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Thursday morning.
While Vance praised his running mate’s performance, not everyone in Trump’s circle was as enthusiastic. The New York Times reported that some of Trump’s advisers “viewed the night as a major missed opportunity.” Publicly, some of Trump’s regular defenders also voiced criticism.
“What I expected was, ‘When I left office we had the toughest border in 40 years, mortgage rates below 3 percent, gas prices at $1.87, the Abraham Accords, energy independence, you screwed all that up,'” Sen. Lindsey Graham told Politico.
Ms. Harris’ provocations sent Mr. Trump off the rails, as he fudged even the most basic attacks linking Ms. Harris to Mr. Biden, at one point claiming that Mr. Biden “hates” his own vice president. (Just don’t ask Mike Pence about that.)
According to the New York Times, Harris spent 46% of her time attacking Trump, while Trump spent 29% of his time doing the same. This statistic caught the attention of Karl Rove, a prominent Bush adviser, who called the night a “disaster.” Just when Trump needed it most, a Roy Cohn devotee, he forgot the controversial lawyer’s most famous maxim: “Attack, attack, attack.”
Trump spoke more than five minutes longer than Harris, but how he spent his time makes it hard to say that advantage mattered: He talked about the size of the rally’s audience (“We have the biggest rally”), his Ivy League education (“Look, I went to the Wharton School of Finance”), Hunter and Joe Biden (“They get a lot of money from Ukraine”), and even why people he fires write negative tell-alls (“If you stick with me, they can write a book”).
And indeed, he has pushed the bizarre and debunked theory that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in a small town in Ohio.
“They’re eating the pets of the people who live there,” he said.
At his first big post-debate rally, Trump was still talking about animals.
Harris made the most of Trump’s missteps
Incredibly, despite Democrats having controlled the White House for most of the past decade, and of course currently, Harris has been flying the flag for generational change.
“It’s important that we move forward and leave this old, tired rhetoric behind,” Harris said.
Trump’s biggest hope is that Ms. Harris leaves voters still confused about where she stands: A pre-debate New York Times/Siena poll found that 28% of voters wanted to know more about Ms. Harris, while their perception of Mr. Trump was largely set.
As expected, the debate moderators pressed Harris to change her stance on fracking, gun buybacks and immigration. Harris promised to “debate at least every point you made.” But she briefly spoke about changing course on the fracking ban and ended by attacking Trump’s legacy. And Trump took the bait all night, spending the first part of his rebuttal defending the money his father gave him.
Harris is set to launch a fierce offensive in battleground states this weekend.
Harris and running mate Tim Walz are on the Democratic nominee’s “New Way Forward” tour, with their spouses touring a handful of states that could decide the outcome of the election. Harris visited North Carolina and Pennsylvania, while Walz stopped in Michigan and Wisconsin. The couple, Doug Emhoff and Gwen Walz, have visited Nevada, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, New Hampshire and Maine.
According to Politico, Harris plans to give more interviews during the height of the campaign.
Trump, meanwhile, campaigned in Arizona on Thursday and Michigan on Friday, both states he won in 2016 but lost to Biden four years later.
Harris continues to hold a slight lead in the average of major national polls, but the race is closer in key battleground states.
There may not be a bigger head-to-head showdown in the race. Waltz and Vance are scheduled to debate on Oct. 1, but vice presidential debates traditionally don’t attract much attention. After multiple changes of heart, Trump declared before the weekend that he would never debate Harris again.
It remains to be seen whether Trump can hold his own in his often lengthy and disjointed rally speeches. If he can’t, Nov. 5 could be his next big night of disappointment.