In my piece yesterday, I was pretty rude about Kamala Harris’s embarrassing inability to speak in public, describing her as “Charles Dickens’s futile Circumlocution Office in its final, human form.” That she is. But I ought to note as an addendum that it does not follow from this that her opponent, Donald Trump, is better. He isn’t. In different ways, he’s just as bad, and at this evening’s debate, his flaws will be every bit as much on display.
Because the debate on June 27 of this year was such a monumental disaster for Joe Biden that he ended up dropping out, many of Trump’s fans have concluded that Trump “won” — or even that he delivered an impressive performance. He did not. Biden lost, and Trump was mostly incidental to that defeat. Objectively speaking, Trump is not a good debater, and he wasn’t a good debater on June 27. He’s chaotic, belligerent, vague, ill-disciplined, and obsessed with esoteric things that voters don’t care about. That Kamala Harris needs to hide behind media fluff to have a chance at winning election to the presidency is, by this point, indisputable. This does not imply, however, that, when debating Donald Trump in a formalized setting, she will come off worse. Weird things happen when two bad teams play.