On the menu today: This morning, a whole lot of people in right-world want to argue that last night’s debate didn’t go as well as it should have for Donald Trump, because the moderators were unfair in their questioning and challenging of Trump’s assertions while giving Kamala Harris a pass. Eh, the biggest problem for Trump last night was Trump.
I find myself genuinely curious to see if the poll numbers shift at all in the coming weeks. On paper, Kamala Harris’s campaign got exactly what it wanted. She appeared poised, calm, cool, collected — the experienced prosecutor. Trump was a teapot boiling over — fuming, scowling, and shouting through most of the night.
So — again on paper — Trump was terrible, and you would think his poll numbers, nationwide and in the swing states, would nosedive. But what we saw Tuesday night wasn’t all that different from the same Trump we’ve seen year after year. And remember when Trump’s conviction was supposed to be a game-changer? The numbers barely budged.
Trump isn’t neck-and-neck in this race because Americans are charmed by his personality. He’s neck-and-neck in this race because of the national exhaustion with the Biden administration status quo, and frustration with inflation and the high cost of living, an insecure southern border, and a sense of growing chaos overseas. So, yes, in theory, this should have been a Harris knockout blow. But if this sort of contrast works, and one sort of performance is so much better than the other . . . why is Trump still so close to reaching 270 or more electoral votes?
Buckle up. This is a long one.
The ‘Illegal Aliens Are Eating Our Pets’ Debate
Yes, you can make fair gripes about ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. Harris’s favorite topic, abortion, came up early when the audience was most tuned-in. But in the end, it was Trump’s job to go up there and make the best case for his election that he possibly could with the time he had — and instead he turned in a temper tantrum of a performance, taking the bait that Harris laid out every single time.
Judge for yourself. Here are all the questions asked by the moderators last night; I’ve left out the times the moderators said to either candidate that they had two minutes to respond to the other candidate.
To Harris: When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?
To Trump: Do you believe Americans can afford higher prices because of tariffs?
To Harris: The Biden administration did keep a number of the Trump tariffs in place, so how do you respond?
To Trump: Vice President Harris says that women shouldn’t trust you on the issue of abortion because you’ve changed your position so many times. Therefore, why should they trust you?
To Trump: Would you veto a national abortion ban if it came to–
To Trump: But if I could just get a yes or no. Because your running mate J. D. Vance has said that you would veto [it] if it did come to your desk.
To Harris: Vice President Harris, I want to give you your time to respond. But I do want to ask, would you support any restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion?
To Harris: Why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act [on illegal immigration and the border] and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?
To Trump: Why did you try to kill that [immigration reform] bill and successfully so? That would have put thousands of additional agents and officers on the border.
To Trump: You also said you would use local police. How would you deport 11 million undocumented immigrants? I know you believe that number is much higher. Take us through this. What does this look like? Will authorities be going door to door in this country?
To Harris: A really quick response here, Vice President Harris, on this notion of weaponization of the Justice Department.
To Harris: Vice President Harris, in your last run for president you said you wanted to ban fracking. Now you don’t. You wanted mandatory government buyback programs for assault weapons. Now your campaign says you don’t. You supported decriminalizing border crossings. Now you’re taking a harder line. I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed?
To Trump: Mr. President, on January 6 you told your supporters to march to the Capitol. You said you would be right there with them. The country and the world saw what played out at the Capitol that day. The officers coming under attack. Aides in the West Wing say you watched it unfold on television off the Oval Office. You did send out tweets, but it was more than two hours before you sent out that video message telling your supporters to go home. Is there anything you regret about what you did on that day?
To Trump: Mr. President, for three and a half years after you lost the 2020 election you repeatedly falsely claimed that you won, many times saying you won in a landslide. In the past couple of weeks leading up to this debate, you have said, quote, you ‘lost by a whisker,’ that you, quote, ‘didn’t quite make it,’ that you ‘came up a little bit short.’ Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?
To Harris: This was a post from President Trump about this upcoming election just weeks away. He said, “When I win, those people who cheated,” and then he lists donors, voters, election officials, he says “Will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.” One of your campaign’s top lawyers responded saying, “We won’t let Donald Trump intimidate us. We won’t let him suppress the vote.” Is that what you believe he’s trying to do here?
To Harris: Now an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead. Nearly 100 hostages remain. Just last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said there’s not a deal in the making. President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?
To Trump: How would you negotiate with Netanyahu and also Hamas in order to get the hostages out and prevent the killing of more innocent civilians in Gaza?
To Harris: Vice President Harris, he says you hate Israel
To Trump: You have said you would solve this war [in Ukraine] in 24 hours. You said so just before the break tonight. How exactly would you do that? And I want to ask you a very simple question tonight: Do you want Ukraine to win this war?
To Trump: Just to clarify the question, do you believe it’s in the U.S. best interests for Ukraine to win this war? Yes or no?
To Harris: As commander in chief if elected, how would you deal with Vladimir Putin and would it be any different from what we’re seeing from President Biden?
To Harris: Vice President Harris, have you ever met Vladimir Putin, can you clarify tonight?
To Harris: We witnessed a poignant moment today on Capitol Hill honoring the soldiers who died in the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. I do want to ask the vice president, do you believe you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal played out?
To Trump: President Trump, your response to her saying that you began the negotiations with the Taliban.
To Trump: Mr. President, you recently said of Vice President Harris, “I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as black.” I want to ask a bigger-picture question here tonight: Why do you believe it’s appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity of your opponent?
To Trump: This is now your third time running for president. You have long vowed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. You have failed to accomplish that. You now say you’re going to keep Obamacare “unless we can do something much better.” Last month you said, “We’re working on it.” So tonight, nine years after you first started running, do you have a plan and can you tell us what it is?
To Harris: Vice President Harris, in 2017 you supported Bernie Sanders’s proposal to do away with private insurance and create a government-run health-care system. Two years later you proposed a plan that included a private insurance option. What is your plan today?
Initially to Harris: President Trump, with regard to the environment, you say that we have to have clean air and clean water. Vice President Harris, you call climate change an existential threat. The question to you both tonight is what would you do to fight climate change? And Vice President Harris, we’ll start with you.
There are some tough questions in there for Harris on the state of the economy, on flip-flopping, and on Afghanistan. And every Republican presidential candidate should expect tougher questions the moment he steps on a debate stage. We’ve lived through Gwen Ifill moderating a debate with then-senator Obama, after signing a deal to write a book about him. We’ve lived through CNN’s Candy Crowley incorrectly “correcting” Mitt Romney. We’ve lived through George Stephanopoulos asking about a nonexistent Republican intent to ban birth control.
No, in the end, the problem is that every single time, Donald Trump talks about what he wants to talk about — whether or not it’s in his interest, whether or not it’s in his party’s interest, and whether or not it is what the moment requires.
If he’s giving a nomination-acceptance speech, he’ll ramble about the Green Bay Packers, how much money Kid Rock makes, and the time he saw Hulk Hogan “lift a 350-pound man over his shoulders and then bench press him two rows into the audience,” and nickname CBS News’ morning show “Deface the Nation.”
If he’s up on stage for what is likely his only debate against his current opponent, he’ll say that he doesn’t get enough credit for urging the crowd on January 6 to be “peaceful and patriotic,” that he regrets nothing he said or did that day, and that those who have been prosecuted for crimes committed on January 6 “have been treated so badly,” and he’ll cite Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham as reporters who verify his version of events, and he’ll quote Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as evidence that he’s respected on the world stage. He’ll insist the 2020 election was stolen: “I’ll show you Georgia and I’ll show you Wisconsin and I’ll show you Pennsylvania and I’ll show you — we have so many facts and statistics.”
And he’ll contend that Americans’ pets in Springfield, Ohio are being eaten by migrants.
“A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said.
Muir responded, “ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community—”
“The people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food,’” Trump insisted. “So maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.”
Our Haley Strack actually did some reporting with specifics about the claims of pet-eating migrants marauding through Springfield, Ohio:
An Ohio woman, Allexis Telia Ferrell, was allegedly arrested for killing a cat and eating it in front of her neighbors. . . .
It’s unknown if Ferrell, who resides in Canton, which is almost a couple of hundred miles away from Springfield, is an immigrant, let alone an illegal immigrant. And if Vance and Trump believe that Ohio’s Haitian influx should be publicized and addressed, they should be more judicious in how they publicize and address it, especially if they’re going to accuse people of abducting and eating kittens. One of the photos that supposedly corroborates the “immigrant-eats-domesticated-animal” story line, a photo of a black man holding a goose, was posted to Reddit in July. Although social-media users have said that the photo was taken in Springfield and that the man is a Haitian immigrant, the Reddit user who posted the photo said that it was taken in Columbus and added that “I think it’s awful that right-wingers including Ohio’s Republican senator will take a random picture from the internet and use it as a weapon to further their agenda. The garbage they are spreading has been completely debunked, yet they continue to spread it.”
A Springfield city spokeswoman said that “there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” Springfield’s police department hasn’t received credible reports of pets being stolen and eaten, it said.
Now, think of how many legitimate criticisms can be made of the Biden administration’s border policy and our failing asylum system. It’s put an unbearable strain on limited resources. The backlog is insane, with asylum seekers told to show up for court dates in 2033. New York City has spent nearly $1.5 billion on caring for migrants this fiscal year alone. Since public schools must enroll minors regardless of immigration status, the Heritage Foundation estimates that unchecked illegal migration over the past three years has possibly cost the public-education system about $2 billion per year. And yes, noncitizens commit violent crimes, and the numbers have jumped compared to three years ago.
But instead of emphasizing any of that, Trump made Haitian migrants sound like Alf or the V aliens.
The 78-year-old Donald Trump is so, so, so angry that he isn’t running against Joe Biden anymore: “We’re playing with World War III. And we have a president that we don’t even know if he’s — where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s a president. They threw him out of a campaign like a dog. We don’t even know, is he our president? But we have a president that doesn’t know he’s alive.”
Trump also got conspiratorial: “This is the one [meaning Harris] that weaponized. Not me. She weaponized. I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me.”
So far, the shooter in Butler, Pa., appears to be a garden-variety nut, just another angry, screwed-up kid who thought he could achieve some sort of fame or notoriety by murdering someone famous. The shooting was terrible and reflected egregious failures on the part of the U.S. Secret Service. But so far, there’s no evidence that the shooter was particularly left-wing. As reported in August: “Crooks’s online activity indicates ‘a mixture of ideologies,’ said Kevin P. Rojek, the FBI special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh field office. ‘We see no definitive ideology associated with our subject, either left-leaning or right-leaning.'”
Trump insisted that Harris’s rallies are smoke and mirrors: “People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that.”
Asked about his comments at the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump insisted that he doesn’t care how Kamala Harris identifies herself. “I don’t care. I don’t care what she is. I don’t care. You make a big deal out of something. I couldn’t care less. Whatever she wants to be is okay with me.” And then, moments later, “All I can say is I read where she was not black, that she put out. And, I’ll say that. And then I read that she was black. And that’s okay. Either one was okay with me. That’s up to her. That’s up to her.”
He takes the bait, every . . . single . . . time.
You might not like Harris, but she turned in exactly the performance she wanted to turn in. To my ears, it was polished and rehearsed to the point of inauthentic phoniness — but I’ve skeptically pored over Harris’s record for a long time; I’m not the target audience here. Harris probably thrilled the soccer moms and white-collar dads watching in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Atlanta, Raleigh, Milwaukee, Detroit, Las Vegas, and Phoenix.
Finally, I want to go back in time and tell my 2004 self that within 20 years, the Democratic nominee will be bragging about her endorsement from Dick Cheney.
ADDENDUM: Hey, remember what I wrote in yesterday’s Morning Jolt? Never mind. Taylor Swift endorsed Harris immediately after the debate. (Somewhat weird timing, as you figure the Harris campaign wouldn’t want that news to step on the “Kamala did so well in the debate” hubbub; perhaps this was an insurance plan in case Harris botched it last night.)