OPINION:
The first and quite possibly only debate of the 2024 presidential election season between former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris is in the books. At the conclusion of every presidential debate, the one question that everyone asks and the two campaigns try to control the answer to is, “Who won the debate?”
In this particular debate, the better question is, “Who failed?”
The former president leads the list. He failed to call out Ms. Harris on a variety of weak positions. He failed to keep his composure. He failed to remember the goal of the night was to win over new and undecided voters. We’ll explore each of those in a moment.
Mr. Trump wasn’t alone in his debate failure. ABC’s moderators failed miserably. While they felt the need to interrupt and correct Mr. Trump in what they referred to as “fact-checking” a total of six times, they failed to correct Ms. Harris even once. Even the most ardent Harris supporters won’t suggest she didn’t make an error or misstatement or two (or five) along the way, but zero corrections were made.
Likewise, if Mr. Trump evaded a direct answer, as he did on the abortion question, the ABC team continued to press him. That’s not the problem, that’s their job. The problem was they failed to do it for both candidates. When the moderators listed several examples and asked the vice president about shifting her position on so many issues and why voters should believe her, Ms. Harris promised to address each of the specific issues, but instead launched into a rehearsed answer about growing up in the middle class with a single mom. No answer to the question. No follow-up by the moderators.
When Ms. Harris was asked a variation of the old “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” question, she gave no direct reply. Instead, she said she had a plan and rattled off some catch phrases like “opportunity economy” and talked about a small business tax credit. The moderators didn’t push for an answer as to whether people are better off.
The greatest failure of the night was Mr. Trump’s inexplicable failure to pounce on opportunities continually provided by Ms. Harris. Only twice in the nearly two-hour debate did Mr. Trump successfully counter-punch. At one point as she promised a change when she becomes president, Mr. Trump asked Ms. Harris why she hasn’t done it for the last three and a half years. He should have been asking that question all night to virtually every answer. Border? Where have you been for 3.5 years? Inflation? Where have you been for 3.5 years? Foreign policy? Where have you been for 3.5 years? It could have become the theme, and a memorable one, for voters tuning into this race for the first time.
To his credit, Mr. Trump did try to turn the tables on the abortion issue. Democrats have been effectively using the issue against Mr. Trump, claiming he wants a complete federal ban. That’s poppycock, of course, but they keep saying it anyway. Mr. Trump asked Ms. Harris to clarify her position. Does she want abortion legal up until the ninth month? It’s an effective argument. Most Americans don’t support abortion minutes before a baby is due to be born. The ABC moderators ignored Mr. Trump’s question and moved the discussion on.
Ms. Harris labeled Mr. Trump as weak on foreign policy and national security. Mr. Trump missed the chance to point out that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine happened on the Biden/Harris watch. Ms. Harris claimed to have tipped off Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with U.S. intelligence five days before Russia invaded. Mr. Trump failed to point out it was already common knowledge that an invasion was imminent. He failed to point out, in a simply worded reply to her claims he was weak on foreign policy, that it was under Biden/Harris that Israel was attacked by Hamas.
When asked about the border, the vice president launched into her standard “I am the only one on this stage that has prosecuted transnational criminals” response. Mr. Trump failed to lay out factual information as to how many people have crossed the border. He failed to contrast his “Stay in Mexico” policy results with the Biden/Harris record.
In response to Ms. Harris’ proclamation that, as president, she would work to bring prices down, Mr. Trump should have recited month-by-month inflation statistics during the Biden/Harris administration. He failed to. When she repeatedly uttered the line about creating an opportunity economy, he should have pointed out she’s had an opportunity to build the economy for nearly four years. Mr. Trump simply missed chance after chance to call her out.
Perhaps the biggest fail of all was the mainstream media’s coverage after the debate. ABC, NBC and CNN all played clips of Mr. Trump and then said he was making “a baseless claim,” which is the very same term they used to describe Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 campaign. We all now know the laptop story wasn’t baseless at all, so how can we trust the news networks when they use that term now?
The far-left publication The Atlantic declared in its headline, “Kamala Harris Broke Donald Trump.” She didn’t. Mr. Trump looked angry. He seemed petty at times. He failed to call her out repeatedly, but he wasn’t broken. President Biden showed us what broken looks like back in June. Mr. Trump missed a chance in this debate, but the race is and will continue to be tight.
MSNBC and CNN both spent a significant amount of their coverage after the debate discussing Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Ms. Harris. To them, apparently, that was the heaviest piece of debate news available.
Mr. Trump performed poorly at this debate. The moderators were embarrassingly bad in this debate. The mainstream media, in their zest to cheerlead the Democratic nominee, made a variety of claims that were simply absurd. All of the above can be described as failing on debate night.
Ms. Harris, while failing to fill in any details of an economic plan, how she would negotiate peace in Ukraine or Gaza, or how (or if) she would stem the tide of illegal immigrants pouring over the southern border, was successful in poking and prodding the 45th president. If failing the least is grounds to declare a winner of this debacle, Ms. Harris would grab the prize.
The biggest disappointment of all may have been the American voters failing to see anything new or different from Mr. Trump, failing to learn a single detail of what Ms. Harris would do as president and having to tolerate a total failure by the mainstream media to force anything meaningful from either candidate.
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