Donald Trump went into Tuesday night’s presidential debate with a simple strategy: limit the craziness. “We’re expecting the ‘disciplined Donald Trump’ to emerge,” a prominent Republican close to the campaign told me Monday afternoon. According to sources, Trump’s advisers want the former president to focus on policy so that the vice president can Kamala Harris will be forced to defend Joe Bidenrecord of.
After just a few minutes of debate, it was clear that Harris had succeeded in inciting Trump to scrap the plan.
Trump’s out-of-control performance could be called American Carnage: The Sequel. He fumed about the (false) social media conspiracy theory that pet-eating Haitians are flooding crime-ridden American cities. He angrily denied Harris’s claim that MAGA fans leave Trump rallies early because they’re bored. He warned about doctors delivering babies only to execute them. He defended extending an invitation to Camp David to an unknown Taliban leader named Abdul. Abdul When the conversation turned to health care, he stammered that he had “a concept of a plan” to replace Obamacare.
In the post-debate discussion room, even longtime Trump allies Lindsey Graham diplomatic call The former president’s erratic night was a “missed opportunity.”
By Wednesday morning, those in Trump world had retreated to two lines of defense. First, they blamed the referees. They said the debate was unfair, because the ABC moderators David Muir And Linsey Davis dared to call out Trump’s lies in real time. “ABC News Fact-Checked Trump 7 Times; Never Fact-Checked Kamala Once,” a Breitbart headline read. has explodedSecond, Trump surrogates insist that Harris’s performance will not win over undecided voters in battleground states. “Harris won on performance, but she emphasized that she is really, really liberal,” said a veteran of Trump’s 2020 campaign.
Reclassifying his grievance-heavy, truth-light record as a victory is classic Trump style. Since he flirted with a presidential run in 1988, Trump has relied on Three Winning Rules from Mentor Roy Cohn: attack, attack, attack; admit nothing, deny everything; and always claim victory. “I think that was my best debate, EVER,” Trump posted on Truth Social about 20 minutes after leaving the stage.
Trump’s fellow campaign managers Susie Wiles And Chris LaCivita told people that the trajectory of the race had not changed, according to a former campaign official. On Truth Social, Trump posted a series of rapid-response polls showing him doing better with undecided voters. Trump was favored by 6 in 10 undecided voters in a Reuters poll. A C-SPAN poll on X (formerly Twitter) showed Trump winning 64-36. “Their view is that Harris had one goal, which was to win undecided voters, and she didn’t achieve that goal. She doubled down on being extremely liberal. That’s being drowned out today by the talk about Trump’s performance. But by day two and day three, that’s going to be the story,” said a top GOP strategist. (The first high-quality post-debate polling won’t start until later this week at the earliest.)
The Trump campaign declined to comment.
On Tuesday night, Harris’s campaign issued a statement calling for another debate. Whether Trump will accept the offer remains an open question. Officially, Trump has agreed to appear at the NBC News debate on September 25. But Trump has said Fox and friends on Wednesday morning that he might not debate Harris anymore.
“The first thing they do is ask for a debate, because when a boxer loses, he says, ‘I want a rematch,’” Trump said. “I would be less inclined to [debate again] because we had a great night. We won the debate.”
