It seems like in their debate prep, the Harris team researched everything that they knew would get under Trump’s skin, and Harris practiced weaving them all into her answers. And it’s working. Trump is clearly upset, and Harris looks calm and collected.
The moderators should never have gotten into the business of fact checking if they weren’t going to apply it equally. Harris invented a brand new context for the “bloodbath” comments which, crude though they were, were not related to his outlook on electoral outcomes.
The image of Trump and Kamala rolling Biden out of bed to sign a border order made this debate worth watching.
Kamala Harris attacks Trump’s “very fine people” comments on Charlottesville, but remember that she said of pro-Hamas protesters that, “They are showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.”
Harris deploys both the Charlottesville and bloodbath lies
Muir has asked Trump a simple question several times: Does he regret any of his actions and statements on January 6? Donald Trump never expresses any regrets over anything he ever does, so the long, rambling, angry answer scapegoating Nancy Pelosi amounts to “no.”
Trump is, in a strange way, on message tonight insofar as he has cursorily answered the questions he’s asked directly before pivoting to his themes on crime, immigration, and inflation. The pivots aren’t precisely graceful, but they are disciplined.
Trump runs through a partial list of the left-wing positions Harris has taken in the past. It’s not the cleanest deployment of such a list, but the ABC moderators scramble to change the subject to January 6.
And now Trump is insisting that January 6 was “peaceful and patriotic.”
We’re forty-four minutes in, and Kamala Harris is lining up in victory formation and taking a knee.
Trump, in his attack on solar power, said, “I’m a big fan of solar.”