President Donald J. Trump addresses his remarks Saturday, Dec. 21, 2019, at Turning Point USA’s 5th annual Student Action Summit at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
In The Spectator, Kate Andrews explains that Donald Trump was his own worst enemy at the debate. She writes:
Tuesday was about swaying undecided voters against the other candidate. If you haven’t made your mind up about your voting intention yet, it’s not because you are so taken with both candidates, oscillating between who is the better public servant, that you haven’t been able to pick. The question, rather, is crude and simple: between two highly unpopular candidates, which one can you simply not bring yourself to vote for?
So did the debate create more NeverTrumpers or never-progressives? I suspect it will have tipped more people into the former camp, though perhaps not by as much as Harris’s team currently think (they’ve already come out championing the result, calling for a second debate). Trump never landed the definitive blow on Harris’s ideological leanings. He almost certainly could have: when he called her “Marxist,” her famous giggle fast came out, and she offered no counter to his claims. He brought up her support for a fracking ban and single-payer healthcare a few times, but never as a question she had to answer. Her most recent plans for price control on groceries — right out of the socialist playbook — were never even mentioned. It’s a particularly bad failing from the Republican nominee: after all, Harris has held virtually every policy position in the book. But there wasn’t one she was ever forced to defend.
Harris’s answers on January 6, 2021 were particularly strong: instead of going for a full-blown attack on Trump, she instead offered up her party as a vehicle to “turn the page” and move on. The point of unity was a stark contrast to Trump continuing to insist he won in 2020, making glowing remarks about Viktor Orbán, and coming across as someone who was not only stoking, but generally enjoying, the chaos that his political style conjures.
The obvious comeback to this message of unity is that it sounds eerily familiar: indeed, it was exactly Biden’s message to the public back in 2020. How did that go? Biden’s antidote to healing the nation was to spend trillions of dollars, which did very little to bring the country together, apart from giving people the shared scepticism that Bidenomics was a good idea.
“Why hasn’t she done it?” Trump asked at the start of his closing speech, bringing into focus that every promise of policy or nation building made by the vice president could have been put into practice three and a half years ago. It was his strongest point of the evening, made far too late.
Last night won’t be the end of the road for that messaging. It’s not the end of the road for either campaign. This debate may well give Harris a bump in the polls, but there is plenty of time for them to even back out. Harris had the night she needed. Trump got through it as his own worst enemy: not too badly beaten up by Harris, but instead let down by his own rash impulses. Most importantly, nothing that happened last night can declare this race over.
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