Donald Trump said today that he had agreed to the September 10 debate against Vice President Kamala Harris and proposed two additional debates. A lot of conservatives are confident that once Harris is forced to speak in an unscripted environment, she will unravel. But I am not so sure. If Trump doesn’t sharpen his attacks in the coming weeks, he could very well get smoked when they face off.
One of the things people forget about the first debate is that Biden’s performance was so bad that it overshadowed the fact that Trump actually didn’t do that well himself. He was often incoherent in his answers. He spoke using a sort of MAGA shorthand that is comprehensible to those who already support him or who spend a lot of time online, but not to persuadable voters. When Biden confronted him on the story about his calling members of the military “suckers and losers,” Trump said it was false. He then said, “It was made up by him, just like Russia, Russia, Russia was made up, just like the 51 intelligence agents are made up, just like the new thing with the 16 economists are talking. It’s the same thing. Fifty-one intelligence agents said that the laptop was Russia disinformation. It wasn’t. That came from his son Hunter. It wasn’t Russia disinformation.”
Those who regularly watch Trump’s rallies or get their news from Sean Hannity likely knew exactly what he meant. But for those who don’t already agree with him, Trump didn’t make an actual argument. If voters weren’t well-versed in his jargon, it wouldn’t be obvious that by “Russia, Russia, Russia” he was talking about the disproven charges that he colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election; they might not immediately recall the media censorship surrounding Hunter Biden’s laptop prior to the 2020 election, the role of the intelligence community, or the details of what was on the laptop; they wouldn’t have known that 16 left-leaning economists predicted Trump policies would lead to inflation ahead of the debate.
The same sort of inability to marshal facts in a way that would persuade the unconverted was obvious throughout his Thursday news conference. One example was how he talked about Tim Walz. After Walz was picked, many Republicans were cheering because as governor of Minnesota, Walz has advanced a long list of radical positions. These include issues that should be slam dunks for Trump, such as putting tampons in boy’s bathrooms and giving illegal immigrants driver’s licenses and free health care. Yet here’s how Trump spoke of Walz:
She picked a radical left man that is — he has things done that — he has positions that are not even possible to believe that they exist. He is going for things that nobody has even heard of. Heavy into the transgender world. Heavy into lots of different worlds.
“Heavy into lots of different worlds.” Anybody who isn’t already familiar with the Walz record is likely thinking, what the heck is he talking about?
Harris has well-documented problems speaking extemporaneously. But the Trump campaign would be wise to assume that she will come to the debate well-equipped with many talking points on all of the issues most likely to come up and she will stick largely to script. There are a lot of avenues for Trump to challenge Harris and get her off her game, but that requires a command of details that he can use to make arguments in a comprehensible way. If Trump decides to wing it and thinks he can get away with the type of performance he did at the first debate or Thursday’s press conference, he will get his clock cleaned.
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