close
close

first Drop

Com TW NOw News 2024

    • Who won the debate? Trump took a chance and lost easily to Harris
    news

    Who won the debate? Trump took a chance and lost easily to Harris

    Vaseline Posted on

    Conservatives blame the moderators for Trump’s faceplant during the presidential debate. They should blame the man in the red tie.

    play

    If you want to know who wins an NBA game, look on social media to see which fans are attacking the referees.

    I mean, you see it in every game.

    The winners are happy. The losers are hunting zebras.

    On Tuesday night, American conservatives complained and whined about the referees.

    “This is the new record for worst debate moderation. It is disgusting in the extreme,” wrote Mollie Hemingway of the Federalist.

    “Trump needs to debate both Kamala and the moderators,” complained U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).

    “These moderators are an abject failure and this is one of the most biased, unfair debates I have ever seen. Shame on you,” wrote former Fox host and podcaster Megyn Kelly.

    Come on, Megyn Kelly. You of all people. You’re the pundit who shoots straight, even when Republicans are in the crosshairs.

    Don’t blame the debate moderators for this debacle

    The referees didn’t steal this debate. Donald Trump lost it as soundly as anyone can lose.

    He lost because he was outclassed, out-played and out-performed for 90 minutes at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

    He lost because Democrats built a stage in Pittsburgh and staged Kamala Harris for a week with a former Hillary Clinton adviser, while the “stable genius” posted memes on Twitter.

    I was confident that Trump would lose this debate. I told my colleagues that in our daily meetings, more than a week before the debate. Trump can’t string two coherent sentences together.

    Few remember that Trump was terrible in his decisive victory over Joe Biden, in which the incumbent president succumbed to his mental weakness. An undisciplined, blithering mess.

    On Tuesday night, he was still the same person, only this time he was facing Kamala Harris, who is 22 years younger than Joe Biden and, as a career prosecutor, makes her living by marshaling arguments.

    Harris outperformed Trump on every count

    Though she has been largely silent over the past month, she has been portrayed by Trump and his surrogates as the nutcase who fell from the coconut tree, the cackling champion of the cat ladies, the walking, talking salad of words.

    She certainly wouldn’t be taking on Trump, now in his seventh, in her first presidential debate.

    But there she was, and this was no word salad. She was throwing an elegant Waldorf while Trump was throwing back the same old hash.

    Not only did she not laugh, she also listed one, two, three, and four sentences full of facts and coherence. That was four times as much as Trump could say.

    Towards the end of the debate, I got a three-word text message from one of my Republican friends, who planned to vote for Trump.

    “He’s an idiot.”

    I answered in three words.

    “Yes, that’s him.”

    Trump was given more speaking time than Harris

    No, it wasn’t the referees. And you conservatives who complain that ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis tipped the scales are missing the 43 minutes of garbage Trump dished up Tuesday night.

    The moderators may have been checking in on Trump in real time (who is in charge of this convention?), but they did so so politely as to be nearly invisible.

    If Harris needed fact-checking, Trump had plenty of time for it. After all, he got five minutes more speaking time than Harris, CNN reported. Now that’s going overboard.

    Trump came across as he always does — as if he were just taking a chance. He couldn’t even prepare a closing statement, for God’s sake. He was still growling and playing the visual aid to Harris’ larger theme — “We’re not going back.”

    Back to what?

    Back to that pile of hash with the red tie.

    Harris was most outspoken on abortion

    What makes Trump worse is that he is not running on one of the most important issues for female voters, the group where he is weakest.

    The abortion issue came up early in the debate, when the viewing audience of millions of Americans was still alert and focused.

    Harris knew this was her moment and was at her most eloquent.

    “Understand what has happened under Donald Trump’s abortion ban. Couples who pray and dream of a family are being denied IVF treatments. What’s happening in our country is working people, working women who work one or two jobs, who can barely afford childcare, have to travel to another state to get on a plane and sit next to strangers to get the health care that they need.

    “…That is why in every state where this issue was on the ballot, in both red and blue states, the people of America voted for freedom.”

    How Trump Should Have Responded

    The obvious response for Trump should have been, “Then the vice president agrees with me that it was a good thing to finally give those red and blue states the chance to vote on abortion.”

    Democrats are pushing abortion extremism that would allow the procedure up until birth. When ABC’s Linsey Davis asked Harris, “Would you support restrictions on a woman’s right to abortion?” she replied, “I absolutely support restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade.”

    In other words, no, given the ambiguity of Roe.

    Responding to that requires a certain amount of sophistication, and frankly, Trump is incapable of that.

    It would go something like this:

    “Republicans don’t want control over women’s bodies. Republicans believe that the specific human being that becomes viable in a woman’s womb, that has its own DNA, its own heartbeat, its own central nervous system, is a life that has dignity and deserves protection because it can’t protect itself. The Republican position on abortion has never been about control. It’s about compassion.”

    Can you imagine Trump using this argument?

    Republicans can win on some issues

    When Harris presented her economic plan, Trump should have seized on the part she left out. Something like this:

    “What the vice president hasn’t told you is that she plans to give Washington bureaucrats the power to set the prices of milk and eggs in your neighborhood grocery store. Do you know why she hasn’t told you that? Because everywhere it’s been tried, whether in North America, Latin America, or the old Soviet Union, it has led to food shortages and empty store shelves and lines for bread.”

    Such a response would have required some foresight and preparation, far beyond Trump’s skills.

    Trump’s ‘dog’ statement made us laugh: But it’s not funny

    Trump has one big advantage in this election. The issues. The American people are not happy with the direction the new progressive Democrats are taking the country.

    That’s why Harris has fled many of her old positions. That’s why she’s fleeing the identity politics that Democrats have been dishing out for decades.

    Unfortunately, Trump’s pride stands in his way

    Unfortunately for conservatives, we are stuck with a candidate who is so sure of his own genius that he does not prepare, improve or adapt.

    That was the reason for the faceplant in Philadelphia. Not the referees.

    According to an ancient scripture, “Pride goes before a fall.” But with Trump and the Republicans, it’s even worse than that.

    Pride also follows a fall.

    Asked about his performance, Trump told Fox News: “I think this was our best debate ever.”

    Phil Boas is a columnist at The Arizona Republic. Email him at [email protected].

    Vaseline
    View all posts

    You Might Also Like