The Beginning of the End for Trump
Last night’s debate wasn’t even close.
Yesterday, Donald Trump was the candidate pushing for two additional debates, while Kamala Harris was taking a “wait and see” posture.
In the wake of last night’s pummeling, they’ve switched places: Harris wants to go another round, while Trump is hemming and hawing: “I don’t know that I want to do another debate,” he said on Fox News this morning.
Remarkably, the candidates have already crossed paths once again: Joe Biden, Harris, and Trump all attended a ceremony at Ground Zero in Manhattan today to commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Harris and Trump shook hands. Happy Wednesday.
Never Again Trump
—Bill Kristol
On June 27, at this year’s first presidential debate, Joe Biden lost his chance for a second term. Last night, at this year’s second presidential debate, Donald Trump may well have lost his chance for a second term.
The evident fact is that last night Kamala Harris did well, and that Donald Trump was awful. As Trump surrogate and sycophant Lindsey Graham admitted to Tim Miller in the spin room, the debate was a “disaster” for Donald Trump. Even the talking heads on Fox News agreed.
Could Trump recover from the disaster? Sure. It’s possible. His support seems immovable, meaning he’ll probably never be very far behind.
Could Harris still falter? Perhaps. Does winning the debate mean winning the election? Of course not. There are eight long weeks left. There will still be plenty of moments in this campaign that will make us—or at least that will make me!—nervous.
But we can’t unsee what we saw last night. And what we all saw is how radically unfit Donald Trump is to be president again.
Indeed, media focus groups and private dial tests alike showed not merely that Harris won the debate; it also seems to be the case that the debate pushed a number of undecided voters, and even some soft Trump supporters, to shift towards Harris.
Given how few undecided voters there are these days, this may amount only to a few percentage points of the electorate. But those few percentage points are obviously very important. The next week or two should see Kamala Harris benefiting from the momentum from the debate and opening up a lead in the presidential race.
And so I think we can now say that it’s no longer a 50-50 proposition that Donald Trump will be our next president. Given how unhinged he showed himself to be last night, that is a very good thing.
In light of what we all saw last night, I want to do something unusual here. I want to make a direct appeal to readers who don’t much like the Biden administration, who aren’t crazy about the Democratic Party, who aren’t sold on the Harris-Walz ticket, and who have been toying with sticking with or going back to Trump.
You may have been Weekly Standard readers. You probably remain Wall Street Journal editorial page readers. You certainly aren’t Never Trump. You have been Maybe Trump or Reluctantly Trump or Perhaps-He-Wouldn’t-Be-So-Bad Trump.
I say to you: Earnestly consider what happened in Philadelphia last night. Heck, watch the debate again, or read the transcript. And ask yourself: Do you honestly believe this man can and should lead the country for the next four years?
Joe Biden did the right thing after his debate disaster and stepped aside. Donald Trump won’t do that. So he needs to be defeated. You who’ve been tempted to support him can still be anti-left and anti-woke. You can still be a believer in the virtues and even the glories of conservatism. But you also can do what you know is the right thing: Vote against the unhinged guy you saw yelling last night. Vote for sanity and decency on November 5th.
You don’t need belatedly to become Never Trump. But after last night, you really should be Never Again Trump.
A Man You Can Bait With a Tweet
—Andrew Egger
So. How did Kamala Harris win last night? Simple: She got under Trump’s skin.
Over and over, Harris deployed the same formula. She’d answer a question from the moderators on her terms, hitting her marks and making the points she wanted to make. But along the way, she’d make a quick digression: dangling some shiny object for Donald Trump to fixate on.
And time after time, he couldn’t help but take the bait. The result: He was perpetually embroiled in rhetorical dead ends while she was already onto the next thing.
The first such moment may have been the most important, as it came during a segment on immigration—generally strong turf for Trump. Harris made an extended point about the bipartisan border security bill that fell apart earlier this year because Trump opposed it. But then she swerved: “I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies,” she said, noting that “you will also see people leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
The moderators then went to Trump. Here was his moment to uncork one on a bill he previously described as a “horrible open borders betrayal of America.”
“First let me respond as to the rallies,” Trump said:
She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people who do go, she’s bussing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So she can’t talk about that.
On and on he went—and he wasn’t done there. Even when he tried to bring the answer back to immigration, he was rattled and angry enough that whatever disciplined message he’d planned went out the window. Instead of a takedown of the proposed border bill, what Trump offered was this:
Look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States . . . In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.
Incredibly, he then spent the rest of his allotted time for that answer circling back around on how great his rallies are. Again, this during a section on immigration, supposedly his top focus.
This happened repeatedly throughout the night:
During a potentially treacherous answer about how she no longer believes in banning fracking, Harris slipped in a non sequitur dig on relatability: “Not everybody got handed $400 million on a silver platter and then filed bankruptcy six times.” Did Trump leap to the attack on the fracking flip-flop? Nope: “Well first of all, I wasn’t given $400 million. I wish I was. My father was a Brooklyn builder—Brooklyn, Queens—but I was given a fraction of that, a tiny fraction, and I built it into many, many billions of dollars. Many many billions. And when people see it, they are even surprised. So we don’t have to talk about that. Fracking? She’s been against it for 12 years.” That’s the extent of the fracking attack Trump could muster.
Moments later, Trump was going after Harris for wanting to “defund the police.” But from the corner of his eye, he noticed she was shaking her head and mouthing the word “no,” and he broke off: “Wait a minute, I’m talking now. If you don’t mind. Please. Does that sound familiar?” True politics sickos like us recognized the reference to Harris’s “I’m speaking” clap-back at Mike Pence in 2020; everybody else was probably just left confused.
In the midst of a stemwinder about how Trump has spent decades inflaming racial tensions in America, Harris mentioned Trump’s 1989 calls for the death penalty against the since-exonerated Central Park Five. Trump couldn’t help himself: “They come up with things like what she just said going back many many years, when a lot of people, including Mayor Bloomberg, agreed with me on the Central Park Five. They admitted, they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty, they badly hurt a person, killed a person, ultimately, and if they pled guilty—then they pled ‘we’re not guilty.’”
In fact, four of the five individuals in the Central Park Five case recanted their confessions (saying they were coerced) and pleaded not guilty. But beyond the inaccuracy, what larger political gain did Trump make by going down that route?
The answer, of course, is he made no gain at all. Americans know how they feel by now about Donald Trump; the person they’re still sizing up is Kamala Harris. And by constantly redirecting Trump back to his favorite topic—himself—she robbed him of a number of significant opportunities to go on the attack.
Obviously, this all barely scratches the surface of last night’s two-hour shellacking. Have a favorite moment we didn’t discuss? Let us know in the comments.
Quick Hits
SPIN BABY SPIN: Look, it’s always hard to polish a turd. So we don’t envy the role that Trump’s surrogates had to play last night. But we do thank them for providing ample fodder to our own Tim Miller, who was there at the spin room and appeared to be overly enjoying himself. Byron York, no need to use such language! One of the more remarkable spin room moments came from JD Vance, who was confronted about spreading fake stories about Haitian migrants eating pet cats in Springfield, Ohio. “The media didn’t care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats,” Vance exclaimed—providing, what surely is, the first presidential campaign ode to memeing. CNN’s Kaitlin Collins seemed more than ready. “If someone calls your office and says they saw Bigfoot, that doesn’t mean they saw Bigfoot,” she replied.
CHECK THE PEARLS: Our favorite conspiracy to emerge from last night is this one, flagged by The Washington Post’s Will Sommer. Harris, folks on the online right believe, was secretly being coached by someone through an earpiece she was wearing that was disguised as a pearl earring. It brings us back to those more innocent days when people thought George W. Bush was “packing Wi-Fi” at his debate against John Kerry.
Cheap Shots
Shout out to David Muir and Linsey Davis for how well they moderated this debate. I think we saw that not every single lie needs to be corrected, but chiming in when especially egregious untruths were uttered by Trump made a difference. It's quite rich that conservatives are upset because David Muir corrected Trump's ridiculous assertion that immigrants are eating pets, instead of being upset that Trump made the claim in the first place.
Kamala crushed it last night. Blew away my expectations. Absolutely wrecked that guy and did everything she needed to do. I just hope it trickles out to that 5-8% of undecided voters--many of whom are largely checked out of politics--in the 3-4 states that will determine this election. I'm very positive on Harris, I just don't know if I'm positive about these checked-out voters yet until we see some shifts in the polling data and focus groups. This is still going to be a tight election, even if it really shouldn't be.