OPINION:
Former President Donald Trump’s preparation for Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on ABC need consist only of watching two short videos: Chuck Wepner knocking Muhammad Ali on his keister in their 1975 heavyweight championship fight, and Ms. Harris castrating Joe Biden in a June 27, 2019, Democratic primary cycle debate.
The point: Anyone can land a devastating blow in a fight. Here are some more Trump-friendly pointers.
Stop calling her Kamala.
This first-name crap humanizes what is otherwise a poll-driven word salad. Address her as “my opponent.”
Raise debate expectations instead of lowering them.
The lower the expectations, the easier it will be for Ms. Harris to declare victory. Raise expectations by reminding viewers that Mr. Trump is walking into a liberal star chamber. ABC News is CNN in a tuxedo.
Can you imagine how much the Harris campaign would squeal if Sean Hannity were a moderator in the debate? Yet Mr. Trump is supposed to grin and bear it when Mr. Hannity’s polar opposite, Harris Sister Linsey Davis, moderates.
Memo to ABC debate viewers: Ms. Davis is a slick, Harris-style radical steeped in the racism of identity politics and notorious for her diversity, equity and inclusion proselytizing, including authoring DEI propaganda for kids. Since Ms. Harris can’t bring running mate Tim Walz along, expect Ms. Davis to act as her lifeline.
Don’t take the KamaBait.
Ms. Harris wants Mr. Trump to bully her. Ms. Harris urgently needs to distract Mr. Trump from the inflation and border chaos — the top two swing voter issues where Mr. Trump wins in a landslide. Ms. Harris must, therefore, relentlessly attack Mr. Trump’s character, hit him with the F-word (felon) and otherwise try to rattle his cage.
Each time Ms. Harris throws such chum in the ABC waters, all Mr. Trump needs to do is pull a Ronald Reagan “there she goes again” or a “only Rosie O’Donnell” and then pivot with a smile back to inflation or the border.
Expect and ignore the Hollyweird zingers.
Ms. Harris has a Hollyweird-assisted team of comedians and speechwriters, likely including Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, to draft clever sound bites and zingers. If she tries a one-liner, Mr. Trump needs only to remind Americans that there is nothing funny about being forced by Ms. Harris to choose between food on the table, medicine in the cabinet and a roof over your head. And there is nothing funny at all about Iran and its proxies attacking Israel or Ukraine because the Biden-Harris White House is seen internationally as weak.
It’s not about abortion or race, stupid.
Ms. Harris’ best chance to win the debate and the election is to make it about “identity politics” — read race — and what she will call “reproductive rights” — read abortion. Ms. Harris will thereby try to do what then-President Barack Obama did to his challenger, Mitt Romney, in 2012: Divert the campaign from the economy and the border back to abortion and race.
If Ms. Harris plays the race card, Mr. Trump can respond for putting young, proud Black men in prison for dealing nickel bags during the day as a district attorney and then lighting up a joint and laughing about it at night. Or, to pivot back to the economy, Mr. Trump can remind the audience that Ms. Harris’ border crisis is stealing jobs and driving down the wages of Black, brown and blue-collar Americans.
On abortion, Mr. Trump need only note the Dobbs decision sent the issue back to the states where the abortion decision more properly belongs constitutionally and politically — mentioning Roe v. Wade has no upside.
More aggressively, Mr. Trump can correctly note Ms. Harris is the extremist who supports late-term abortion while he is the moderate who supports in vitro fertilization. Moreover, the vast majority of women today are far more worried about inflation, our border and getting raped and killed by illegal aliens than whether they can get an abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy. Mr. Trump could say:
“And by the way, Vice President Harris, your running mate, Mr. Walz, lied to the American people about IVF, which I strongly support. That’s what you radical Democrats do. You’ll do and say anything to win. Flip-flop on any issue to fool swing voters so you can keep doing what you’ve been doing: Destroying our economy, border and country.
If Mr. Trump wants to try even more edge, there’s this: “Vice President Harris, the issue is abortion, not choice. If you believed in the slogan ‘my body, my choice,’ you wouldn’t have forced everyone from soldiers and children to government bureaucrats to take a vaccination that should only have been administered voluntarily to seniors and people with comorbidities.”
Ms. Harris’ big border fib.
Ms. Harris (or Ms. Davis, the ABC moderator) might falsely claim Mr. Trump killed a bill that would have secured the border. Mr. Trump can truthfully note that the bill would have institutionalized “catch and release,” allowed millions more immigrants to cross the border illegally, forced taxpayers to pay their legal bills and shipped billions more tax dollars to sanctuary cities and states such as Minnesota, where your running mate, Mr. Walz, comes from.
Tulsi Gabbard’s coup de grace.
If my old boss wants a good laugh and final confidence boost, he can watch then-Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s vivisection of Ms. Harris in a July 31, 2019, candidates debate, which effectively knocked Ms. Harris out of the 2020 race. It’s good to have both Ms. Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on board.
• Peter Navarro directed the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy in the Trump administration and is the author of “The New MAGA Deal: The Unofficial Deplorables Guide to Donald Trump’s 2024 Policy Platform.”
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