According to the New York Times/Siena poll released over the weekend, about 28% of people said they needed to learn more about Vice President Kamala Harris, while only 9% said the same about Donald Trump with the race pretty much tied within the margin of error. Consequently, the conventional wisdom going into last night's debate was that Harris had much more to lose — and gain — than Trump, who is thought to have a pretty solid 46% no matter what. Harris could conceivably go up or down pretty substantially. The debate was therefore seen as make or break for her while for him it would probably change nothing. Could she rise to the occasion?
Indeed she did.
That 28% of people who needed to learn more, learned that Harris is quick-witted, highly qualified, very confident and well prepared. Yes, she has a very winning smile and exudes a joyful radiance, but she also has a spine of steel which she demonstrated by walking right up to her opponent at the outset of the debate and then standing and staring him down for over an hour and a half as she dominated poor, spent Donald Trump. It was hardly a fair fight.
I would imagine that even that 9% who've apparently been in a coma for the past decade and needed more information about Trump came away knowing everything they needed to know about him. He's an angry, delusional man who obviously spends way too much time on Truth Social and watching Fox News. He may not have more than a concept of a plan on health care or know much of the Constitution but he's an expert on right-wing conspiracy theories which he seems to believe are absolutely true.
His favorite conspiracy theory is one which he has personally propagated: Immigrants are coming to kill us all in our beds which seems to be the only thing he was really interested in talking about. In his very first answer about the economy, he said:
You see what's happening with towns throughout the United States. You look at Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They're taking over buildings. They're going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they're destroying our country. They're dangerous. They're at the highest level of criminality. And we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast.
The next question was on tariffs and there was more of the same: criminal migrants pouring across the border and "she's destroyed the country with a policy that you'd say they have to hate our country."
A couple of questions later, after defending his crowd sizes, he let fly with this:
And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk — not going to be Aurora or Springfield. 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. And this is what's happening in our country. And it's a shame.
Moderator David Muir fact-checked that one, saying that ABC checked with the city of Springfield and there were no reports of immigrants eating pets. Trump still insisted that he'd seen someone on TV say it had happened.
Omg Trump takes the bait and starts rambling about crowd sizes and repeats baseless claims about immigrants eating pets and gets fact checked
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 11, 2024
Kamala Harris immediately capitalizes on it pic.twitter.com/naaXf1GFiq
You read that right. Trump actually repeated a ridiculous internet conspiracy theory, advanced by his running mate JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants are eating pets of residents of Springfield, Ohio. The memes had been flying all over social media and on right-wing cable and apparently, like the most gullible QAnon believer, Trump took it seriously.
Some right-wing commentators like Erick Erickson were not amused. He blamed the people spreading the racist meme, not Trump, who apparently has no agency at all:
YOU STUPID MF’ers JUST GOT TRUMP TO REPEAT YOUR LIE ABOUT THE PETS. CONGRATS ON SETTING THE NEWS STORIES TOMORROW BY LYING SO TRUMP PICKS IT UP AND SAYS STUPID SHIT.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 11, 2024
It may have been the weirdest thing he said all night but it was hardly the stupidest. Trump also regurgitated one of his favorite conspiracy theories saying that Democrats, specifically Gov. Tim Walz, believe in executing infants after they're born, and falsely claimed that in six states it's legal to do so. Moderator Linsey Davis set him straight on that — not that he'll ever stop saying it.
When asked whether he had any regrets about his behavior on January 6, he pushed another conspiracy theory about former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi being responsible, which is also nonsense. The speaker had no power to stop the insurrection that Trump incited and then sat in his office watching unfold on his big screen TV. He clearly has no regrets and went on to spew more conspiracies about Ashli Babbit, the young woman who was shot as she breached the doorway, threatening the members of Congress. Trump then started braying about immigrants invading the country again, saying they are killing many people "unlike J6."
And, of course, he once more proclaimed that he didn't lose the 2020 election, repeating the Big Lie at length. And yes, it led to immigration:
Our elections are bad. And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. They can't even speak English. They don't even know what country they're in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote. And that's why they're allowing them to come into our country.
Donald Trump's team had been bragging all week that he didn't need to prepare for debates the way the allegedly stupid Kamala Harris did. Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, who faced off against Harris in the Democratic presidential primary during the 2020 cycle, was giving him some pointers on how to beat her and he was having some policy chats with various advisers, but that was all he needed. Well, that didn't work out too well.
That debate was a total debacle for Donald Trump and his surrogates knew it.
Picture worth 1k words: pic.twitter.com/uFlBJpEuFV
— John Heilemann (@jheil) September 11, 2024
In fact, he had so little trust in their ability to spin his disastrous performance that he personally went into the spin room afterward to boldly lie to the news media and proclaim he actually won the debate, quoting silly Twitter polls as proof. If it had been anyone but Trump it might have even been a little bit sad.
The usual right-wing suspects are all angry at the moderators for fact-checking Trump which they did three times. But they could have spent hours doing that. CNN's Daniel Dale fact-checked the debate in real time and found that Trump had lied 33 times and Harris lied once. The moderators allowed Trump to jump in and speak at the end of Harris' answers resulting in him getting five more minutes than she did. He ended up speaking 39 times while she only spoke 23 times. The problem wasn't the moderators, it was Trump's big mouth.
Trump relentlessly hammered on migrants which will probably play well with his base, along with all the other lies and conspiracy theories, but to anyone else he sounded like a lunatic, surly, rude and out of his depth. His laziness and inability/unwillingness to learn anything new caught up with him last night. He lost this debate, as he would say, bigly.
