Trump Beats Trump
It’s Not Fatal, But Millions of His Supporters Must Have Been Doing Face Palms
By Mark Strand
What is it about a person who has risen to powerful heights in the business world, already served a term as President of the United States, and is, by all accounts, an intelligent man (maybe not a super-genius) that makes him incapable of resisting the urge to jump down someone else’s rabbit hole? Watching the debate, I could hear millions of Trump followers pleading with him to stay on topic. But no, when Kamala Harris goaded him, Trump forgot the plan and messed up his strategy.
I like to wait 24 hours before giving my opinion about a presidential debate (unless it was my own boss, in which case he clearly won). So, my thoughts might be a little later than others, but hopefully more objective.
Having been around politics since I was a teenager (a long time ago), I have seen many candidates prepare for debates. The goal is to have a plan of attack based on tested phrases and sharp examples, ready to go when the opportunity presents itself. Often, someone fills in and plays the opponent in a mock debate. The opponent throws their most vital positions and devastating attacks at your candidate – and then the team practices different approaches to neutralize the effectiveness. Sometimes, the opponent has a winning argument, so the candidate gives a quick one-liner and deflects to a different topic.
A well-prepared candidate plans to defend against their weaknesses, exploit the opponent’s weaknesses, and highlight their strengths. This is Campaign Debating 101.
One of the books that greatly influenced my thinking on campaigns was Playing to Win by Jeff Greenfield. Thousands of candidates and campaign managers have studied his discussion about how to win a debate.
After Tuesday’s debate, Greenfield wrote in Politico:
Harris 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. …
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.
That’s a long quote, but it’s from one of the best, so it’s worth sharing. The debate was Trump’s to win, and Trump’s to lose.
Imagine if Trump opened the debate by saying, “I want to congratulate my opponent on her historic candidacy. And that’s something I can take credit for – if I hadn’t beaten her boss so badly in June’s debate, she wouldn’t be here today. (smiles and winks).
Well, probably only Ronald Reagan could have pulled off turning on the charm while also turning the knife.
Polls consistently show, like this one from Pew Research, that the issue matrix favors Trump. Voters consistently say that jobs and the economy are the most critical issues. And voters trust Trump to “make good decisions on the economy” by a 10 percent margin. Another top issue is immigration, where voters trust Trump to “make wise decisions about immigration policy” by a 7 percent margin. He scored similar margins on foreign policy, the influence of money in politics, and law enforcement and criminal justice.
Harris scored highest on abortion policy (+11 percent), issues around race (+9 percent), and health care policy (+2 percent).
Here comes the two-part quiz. If you are Trump’s campaign manager, what do you want to spend most of the night talking about? If you guessed the economy, immigration, foreign policy, and crime, you would be right.
The second part? If you were Trump’s campaign manager, what issues would you prepare to defend against and then pivot back to your best issues quickly? If you guessed abortion, race, and healthcare, then you might be a Machiavelli in the rough.
It’s not quite that simple, but as a debate calculus strategy, it is not complex to design.
So when Harris was asked a challenging question about the Biden Administration’s record on immigration, she gave a short response, pointed out that Trump had opposed a Senate compromise, and then mocked him, saying, “People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
Immigration is perhaps Trump’s signature issue. It certainly was in 2016 and remains so today. But instead of dismissing her little dig, he started a defense of his rallies and then somehow started talking about the disputed charge that migrants were eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. Maybe they are, perhaps they aren’t. But there are countless examples of human victims of migrant crime, including rape and murder. Why not talk about that? Maybe he thought he would appeal to “childless cat ladies?” He could have spoken about fentanyl. He never uttered the word all night.
Trump whiffed on his best issue. Strike one.
The moderators then asked about Trump’s deportation plan. I’m not a fan, but it polls well. However, Trump never discussed it. He made some points about violent and criminal migrants and then went into a thing about how all the world is sending us their criminals. He didn’t have to. The former President could have discussed his plan to work with local police and state governments to deport criminals, but he never did. He could have talked about how people on the terrorist watch list got into the country. He could have more clearly discussed drug gangs and the trafficking of women and children. He didn’t. Do you know who did in her remarks? Harris did.
Strike two.
He then got into a no-win banter on the criminal charges against him and the January 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol. It is a reasonable, if rhetorical, point that an incumbent administration filing criminal charges against its political opponents sounds a whole lot like Putin in Russia and Maduro in Venezuela. But back to the quiz: Class, what should Trump have done? Answer: He should have pivoted to the economy, immigration, foreign policy, or crime. (I knew you would get that one right too.) Crime would have been a natural. But no, he engaged in a five-minute back-and-forth with Harris and the moderators on this issue (it did seem at times that Trump was debating three people on that stage), only at the tail end of the segment, finally pivoting back to immigration with a reasonably effective zinger about waking Joe Biden up at 4 four o’clock to sign an executive order closing the southern border.
The ABC moderators returned to the peaceful transition of power. And, as campaign aides tore their hair out with weeping and gnashing of teeth, Trump launched into a rant about how he did not really lose the 2000 election. Look, I think he believes that. Consequently, millions of people in his base do, too. But he already has those votes. A simple “I will support the results of a free and fair election. But I want to ensure the integrity of this and future elections by making sure illegal migrants are not allowed to vote – and then pivot back to immigration. But he didn’t. Instead, he launched a long-winded thing about how Hungarian leader Victor Orbán says he is the best leader. Let me say, if you were on trial for crimes against democracy, Victor Orbán would not be your best character witness.
There is no joy in Mudville–mighty Casey has struck out. Strike three. (p.s. That’s from the classic poem, Casey at the Bat)
Trump did better, not great, on the question about the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Harris gave a well-practiced answer that supported Israel, decried Hamas terrorism, and then called for a two-state solution. If I were her campaign manager, I would smile but wait for Trump’s hammer to fall.
Instead, Trump should have stated the obvious, that you cannot have a two-state solution if Hamas is still the effective ruler in Gaza, and that he agreed with Netanyahu’s determination to defeat Hamas. Nor did he bring up Harris’ refusal to condemn the ugly anti-Semitic protests on college campuses. Instead, Trump started by talking about Russia and Ukraine, then said, “She hates Israel,” and that if she is elected, Israel “would not exist” in two years. Presumably, but left unspoken, was that Iran might launch a nuclear attack. Why not say that and point to the dangerous policy the Biden Administration has pursued with Iran by removing sanctions and releasing hundreds of billions of dollars in assets and new oil revenue under the misguided hope (also shared by the Obama Administration) that the U.S. could win over a theocracy led by an Ayatollah whose email signature is “Death to America.” Trump made a strong point when discussing Iran, but had he planned and practiced it, he could have delivered a much more devastating blow and forced Harris to defend the indefensible.
After a commercial break, the debate returned to Ukraine. Trump was more assertive on this (if partially wrong – Europe has contributed as much as the U.S. to the war effort, though much of their aid has been cash assistance (soft power) that the American public would never tolerate). But here, you could almost see him being presidential, knowing that if he said he favored a Ukrainian victory, he would ruin his position as a neutral mediator between Russia and Ukraine. He went on to express his concern about not stumbling into a world war with a nuclear power – not an unreasonable fear if Ukraine, with our help, backed Putin into a corner.
I am very pro-Ukraine, and I want Ukraine to win. That’s one of the reasons I voted for Nikki Haley in the Virginia Republican primary. But it does not appear that Ukraine will win this war but will instead, God willing, survive it. It is running out of people to fight. There has to be a peace agreement at some point. Biden could never negotiate it, and Harris never indicated she wanted to. This was a more robust section for Trump.
When Harris was asked if she had ever met Putin, she could not give a yes or no answer. Probably for a good reason – if she met with him, why didn’t she persuade him not to invade Ukraine? She could be considered a foreign policy lightweight if she had never met him. She started dancing so hard I thought we would get a spontaneous rendition of “The Significance of Time.”
Trump won the question on Afghanistan with some solid answers and a rapid rebuttal of the new Democratic talking point that Biden was merely carrying out Trump’s agreement with the Taliban in Doha. His line about showing Abdul (a Taliban leader) a picture of his own house in Afghanistan was clever. It was as if to say, if you kill any more Americans, we know where you live. Maybe it was too subtle for the audience, but any military-minded person knew what he was talking about.
Harris notably announced, “I agreed with President Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan.” Expect to see that again in commercials since Harris essentially said she owns the administration’s disastrous withdrawal.
The debate then shifted to race. This was never going to be a good section for Trump, running against a black woman. But Trump once again responded by taking the bait, getting involved in a discussion on redlining by his father, something about the Central Park Five, and Trump’s ill-considered remarks on Harris’ racial identity. All he could do was talk about his respect for Harris – well, maybe he couldn’t go there – or at least make a quick defense and then launch into a list of his accomplishments as President – the lowest Black unemployment in history, the lowest Hispanic-unemployment rate in history, his support of Historically Black Colleges, his criminal justice reform bill, and believe (here comes a pivot opportunity) in how inflation and uncontrolled immigration threatens the most vulnerable working-class Americans trying to achieve the American dream.
My goodness that would have been beautiful. But no luck. My friend Kelly Johnston said the moderators were like “Candy Crowley on steroids,” fact-checking Trump but consistently letting Harris off the hook. ABC never fact-checked the Charlottesville canard that Trump called the white nationalists “good people.” He never did, and that falsehood has been consistently debunked.
Trump initially took a smart approach to health care, which is one of the most important issues for every family. He could either let Obamacare rot or try to improve it. He chose to improve it. That was good stuff. But then he could have discussed three points on how to improve it. Instead, he said, “I have concepts.” It was not a great moment. It sounded like someone got tired of studying their briefing books.
Trump’s closing argument on just what Harris has been doing for the last three and a half years was compelling if anyone was still watching. He practiced that one. Harris’ closing was one big cliché. But at that point, she had survived the debate. It did not have to be anything else.
If this were a boxing match, Harris would win on points. Counting the jabs Harris landed, in addition to Trump punching himself in the face, Harris would win on the questions asked. There were no knockdowns, and Trump did win some rounds. However, Trump did too much to help Harris and did not do enough to make his points.
Will it matter? We’ll see next week in the polls. Never believe the instant polls following a debate. We will have to see how the public digests it. Trump lost the first debate to Biden in 2020 and won the second debate. He probably narrowly lost the first debate to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Four years earlier, President Obama got his derriere handed to him by Mitt Romney.
Presidential debates may not determine who wins, though there is an intangible factor in the 2024 race. Kamala Harris is essentially an unknown to the American public. On Tuesday, Trump was Trump. What we see is what we get. But many people were undoubtedly studying intangibles about Harris, like her body language, smiling at weird times, (ironically) interrupting Trump, etc. These impressions are not easily measured in polls but are very real nonetheless.
Will we see another debate? Maybe. Harris probably has enough confidence to step back into the ring if the polls remain close. Trump has always done better in his second debates. By the time that debate happened, however, half of the country was likely to have voted, meaning the risk to both sides may have been diminished. However, if either side shows a significant gain next week, what would be their incentive to debate again?
As a side note, ABC may have killed the presidential debate series—at least by the big three networks—with its blatant bias… Why in the world would Republicans want to put the fate of their campaigns in the hands of people who actively oppose their candidacy under the ruse of objectivity? I can’t think of a good reason.
As a side note, ABC may have killed the presidential debate series—at least by the big three networks—with its blatant bias. That might be another intangible factor in the polls next week. Why in the world would Republicans want to put the fate of their campaigns in the hands of people who actively oppose their candidacy under the ruse of objectivity? I can’t think of a good reason.
But here is the bottom line. Trump did not use his time wisely. It probably did not move the needle much one way or the other, but it was a lost opportunity. The real problem is that Trump continues to whittle away his supporters' enthusiasm while Harris continues to increase hers. That makes a difference with turnout on election day. People can say whatever they want to pollsters, but nothing matters until those people show up (or mail in) to vote. In a base election, enthusiasm matters. A lot.