After his campaign-ending debate in June, allies of President Joe Biden — those who had not yet come to terms with the gravity of what had happened — were adamant: If he’s to have any chance of winning in November, we can’t be doing this again. The 81-year-old Democrat had appeared frail and sounded incoherent, undermining confidence that he could do the job for another four years, much less another televised contest with his Republican opponent.
“We didn’t even need this debate,” one California Democrat assured reporters. “You have a debate so that you can learn about a candidate. There’s nothing else to know.”
“I probably wouldn’t do it,” another Democrat from Ohio said, arguing the format would have to change for them to even consider it. “I’m not his advisor, but I probably wouldn’t advise him to do it.”
Following Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, it was the 78-year-old Donald Trump asserting that the time for conversation was over.
“Why should I do another debate?” the former president asked Fox News host Sean Hannity, trying to spin the Harris campaign’s desire for one as evidence he’d won the showdown on ABC News. “She immediately said we want another debate … You know what happens when you’re a prizefighter and you lose? You immediately want a new fight.”
Speaking to Hannity, Trump said he would only consider another debate if the format were to change. “Maybe if it was on a fair network, I would do that,” he said. Later on Truth Social, he would repeat his boxing analogy, citing a web poll from the far-right Newsmax to a victory so massive he wouldn’t bother doing it again.
Trump lost the 2020 election by millions of votes and still claimed to have won in a landslide. The Republican candidate lies as a matter of course; that ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis actually called him on it — no, Democrats are not aborting babies after they are born; no, Haitian immigrants are not eating people’s cats and dogs — is one reason he got flustered and flopped on prime-time television. Claiming he won this contest might not even work with his base.
And it was Harris, not the moderators, who repeatedly baited Trump into being the worst version of himself. Instead of lying about the economy, Trump, scowling and shouting for all 90 minutes, was forced by his own ego into defending the crowd sizes and the brilliance of his oratory. The vice president made it look easy, as Trump fell for every obvious trap.
“Unlike Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, the loaded-for-bear vice president knew exactly where to aim and what the reaction would be,” noted an analysis of the debate from Deadline editors Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson. “By the end of the 90-minute debate and its closing statements, Trump looked haunted and, frankly, old.”
Not even Trump’s allies could spin this one, most not even attempting to claim that he won but redirecting their anger to ABC News’ moderators, who were "so in the tank for Harris that it was repulsive,” conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt declared (Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, called on prosecutors to "criminally charge" them).
“Let’s make no mistake. Trump had a bad night,” Fox News’ Brit Hume conceded. “We just heard so many of the old grievances that we all know aren’t winners politically.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was more blunt: “Disaster” is how he described Trump’s debate performance to The Bulwark’s Tim Miller.
“I’m just sad,” one House Republican told The Hill. “She knew exactly where to cut to get under his skin.”
Other Trump surrogates retreated to the comforts of conspiratorial insinuation.
Vivek Ramaswamy, who himself sought the 2024 GOP nomination, said on Fox News that “Kamala Harris exceeded the very low expectations that were purposely set for her,” as if that were the fault of a biased mainstream media trying to help a Democrat and not the Republican candidate himself, who repeatedly claimed that Harris was avoiding a debate with him because she isn’t smart. If Harris benefited from low expectations, at least among viewers of Fox News and users of Truth Social, then it was awful dumb for her opponent to set them there.
There were also low expectations for Trump. All he had to do was seem kind of normal — to restrain himself just enough that a swing voter could believe they were casting a ballot for a savvy businessman who’s actually a moderate on abortion, not the unhinged, visibly declining version that appears at rallies and on right-wing media claiming that liberals literally murder babies.
Trump failed to clear the exceptionally low bar that has been set for him since 2015. When he first entered politics, he could, for better or worse, credibly claim to be the candidate of “change.” In 2024, facing an opponent a full generation younger than him, the former president was successfully portrayed as the candidate of yesterday — a man who had already been given the chance to govern, failed and just can’t come to terms with his own defeat (“clearly he’s having a very difficult time processing that,” Harris said of the 2020 election).
In June, Trump came across as relatively youthful, if only because he delivered the usual nonsense with more energy than his opponent; in September, he just seemed angry, elderly and easily manipulated into being the worst version of himself, which isn’t very good at all.
“Donald Trump looked old,” as Chris Wallace put it on CNN, summing up the former president's performance against his 59-year-old opponent, who was the only one on stage who even hinted at a positive vision for the future. The previous debate ended one candidate’s political career, the former Fox News anchor observed. “I think tonight was just as devastating.”
