Last night was the first presidential debate between Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. I listened to the debate and it was kind of crazy.
Donald Trump’s MO has always been to name call and then overwhelm his opponent with a random stream on ridiculous statements and then constantly switching the topic so that the opponent does not know which statement to respond to. This worked well with Biden (especially in the last debate). Preparation was never Trump’s strong suit.
Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden. She was on her college debate team and she worked as a prosecutor – she is not easily rattled and preparation is one of her strengths. She obviously knew that Trump performs worse when he gets flustered, so she made sure to make him flustered, and she did so by attacking his ego – for example, she said that his rallies were boring and that people leave early.
The result was pretty dramatic. He said a lot of really stupid things and visibly deteriorated as the debate continued. Post debate fact checkers say that Trump told over 30 lies, whereas Harris told between 2 and 4 (depending on whether an overestimate counts as a lie). Unlike previous debates, the moderators did some minor fact checking in real time.
I think that Trump’s behavior was silly and it showed how ludicrous he is, but I was surprised by a Twitter thread where MAGAs said that the debate proved that it’s not Trump vs, Harris, but the fact checking proved that it’s Trumo vs. Harris + ABC. Trump has repeated this claim.
I went back and re-read the debate transcript (found here) to see how bad it was. There were three times where he was corrected.
The first time was when Trump claimed that the governor of West Virginia was killing babies and that Tim Walz was also in favor killing babies, and that new laws were needed to stop this. The moderator simply said: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
The second time was when he claimed that Springfield, Ohio was so overrun by immigrants that they were eating the resident’s pets. This led to the following exchange:
DAVID MUIR: I just want to clarify here, you bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community —
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I’ve seen people on television
DAVID MUIR: Let me just say here this …
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.
DAVID MUIR: I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.
DAVID MUIR: Again, the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We’ll find out
The third time was when Trump claimed that crime was down all over the world except for the USA and the reason is because of illegal immigrants and that it’s happening at levels that nobody thought possible. The led to the following exchange:
DAVID MUIR: President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country, but Vice President the…
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: use me, the FBI — they were defrauding statements. They didn’t include the worst cities. They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime. It was a fraud. Just like their number of 818,000 jobs that they said they created turned out to be a fraud.
I should point out that Trump told many other lies that were not fact checked, but these three particular lies seemed very easy to verify and should not be controversial.
There was at least one other heated exchange between Trump and the moderators, however, which had nothing to do with fact checking. Trump recently made a statement regarding the 2020 election that he had “lost by a whisker” and the moderator asked him about that, which led to the following exchange:
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I said that?
DAVID MUIR: Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020?
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, I don’t acknowledge that at all.
DAVID MUIR: But you did say that.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I said that sarcastically. You know that. It was said, oh we lost by a whisker. That was said sarcastically. Look, there’s so much proof. All you have to do is look at it. And they should have sent it back to the legislatures for approval. I got almost 75 million votes. The most votes any sitting president has ever gotten. I was told if I got 63, which was what I got in 2016, you can’t be beaten. The election, people should never be thinking about an election as fraudulent. We need two things. We need walls. We need — and we have to have it. We have to have borders. And we have to have good elections.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: 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.
DAVID MUIR: I did watch all of these pieces of video. I didn’t detect the sarcasm, lost by a whisker, we didn’t quite make it, and we should just point out as clarification, and you know this, you and your allies, 60 cases in front of many judges. Many of them —
So I get that Trump did very poorly in the debate last night and that his followers are upset by that, but it’s the moderators job to ask hard questions (and they asked hard questions to both candidates). It’s not our fault if Trump is so thin skinned that he can’t handle being questioned.