Trump's delusional debate spin speaks volumes
The contrast with Biden is telling.
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Kamala Harris clobbered Donald Trump during their first (and likely only) presidential debate on September 10. She humiliated him by smirking and laughing at his offensive buffoonery. She appeared strong and presidential, while Trump looked weak and confused, often reduced to incoherent babble.
It was a total reversal from Trump’s June 27 debate with Joe Biden, which was uniformly considered a disaster for the president. But how Biden and Trump responded to their defeats further highlights the stark differences between the two men and their parties.
One party acknowledges reality and aspires toward furthering the public good even when it involves personal sacrifice and wounded egos. The other is a cult of personality that would rather lie to its supporters than admit their dear leader is fallible.
Winners don’t usually complain about rigging
Biden’s debate performance resulted in a crisis of confidence about his ability as a candidate. Although some Biden supporters complained about the moderators or tried to minimize the event’s significance, they at least acknowledged that the president didn’t come off well.
Supporting Trump, however, is like taking up permanent residence in Lewis Carroll’s storybook Wonderland where you must believe nine impossible things before breakfast, no matter if they contradict each other.
Trump’s post-debate narrative is barely coherent. He claims the ABC moderators conspired with the Harris campaign to rig it against him, but he also insists he won. He’s gone as far as to compare himself to a prizefighter who scored a resounding knockout.
“Comrade Kamala Harris is going around wanting another Debate because she lost so badly — Just look at the Polls! It’s true with prizefighters, when they lose a fight, they immediately want another. MAGA2024,” Trump posted on Truth Social just hours after the debate.
Trump wouldn’t let up on the prizefighter fantasy. In another post the next day, he cited an online poll on a right-wing site to make an absurd case that he was the true winner:
“In the World of Boxing or UFC, when a Fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream, ‘I DEMAND A REMATCH, I DEMAND A REMATCH!’ Well, it’s no different with a Debate. She was beaten badly last night. Every Poll has us WINNING, in one case, 92-8, so why would I do a Rematch?”
The simple, obvious reason Trump should want a rematch is that he lost the first debate badly. But he’ll never admit that.
Democrats started having difficult conversations about Biden almost immediately after his debate loss. They understood the president’s performance had reinforced a damaging narrative about his cognitive fitness and would be tough to come back from. The Biden campaign might’ve initially painted anyone sounding alarms as “bed wetters,” but the post-debate polls were a sobering reality check.
The current post-debate aftermath is just as alarming, if not more so, for Trump. Harris now leads Trump in at least six polls conducted after she laughed in his face on live TV. A YouGov poll found that voters overwhelmingly believe she won the debate (56 percent to 26 percent). Even better for Harris and our representative democracy, 41 percent of independents say they learned positive information about her.
In the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, polls showed Harris performing significantly better against Trump among voters who saw the debate. Harris managed to win over some voters who initially had a negative view of both major candidates. According to an ABC/Ipsos poll, 37 percent of voters said the debate made them feel more favorable about Harris while voters by an almost two-to-one margin left the debate with a less favorable view of Trump. A Data For Progress survey found that voters after the debate saw Harris as the better “candidate of the future” and more honest, intelligent, and composed than Trump.
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Harris isn’t the first candidate to ever get the best of Trump at a debate. During the 2016 GOP primary debate before Super Tuesday, Marco Rubio hammered Trump relentlessly, mocking and taunting him in ways that Jeb Bush never could. When Rubio accused Trump of having no concrete policy plans (sound familiar?) and just mindlessly repeating himself, Trump defensively snapped, “I don’t repeat myself! I don’t repeat myself! Here’s the guy who repeats himself” as the audience roared. (Watch below.)
This wasn’t the West Wing, though, so that wasn’t the moment when Rubio clinched the nomination. The momentum behind Trump was too great by that point, and he would ultimately dominate the Super Tuesday contests and never look back.
But Trump needed to do more than just remain standing against Harris. His primary objective in the debate was to halt Harris’s momentum and negatively define her. He clearly failed while Harris succeeded in presenting a positive, presidential image to undecided voters. Focus groups conducted after the debate agreed that she outmaneuvered Trump at every step.
Unlike the GOP primaries in 2016 and 2024, Trump is only running away with the election in his own twisted imagination. He needs to repair the damage inflicted on him, but first he must concede that he’s injured. Instead, he’s acting like the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail shouting, “It’s just a flesh wound!”
Biden’s selfless, reality-based decision
Biden was initially resolute after the June debate, repeatedly stating without equivocation that he intended to stay in the race.
He remained defiant at rallies over the following weeks. And yet he didn’t try to gaslight his supporters by insisting his lousy performance was anything but that.
Calling his performance a “bad night,” Biden declared during a July 5 rally that “you get knocked down, you get back up.” (Watch below.)
Contrast Biden’s realism with Trump, who’s fundamentally incapable of presenting himself as an “underdog.” He’s always on top, dominating his opponents. It’s only the rigged system that tries to pull him down.
Despite Biden’s efforts, his polling remained bleak and it looked increasingly likely that Trump might win decisively, flipping control of the Senate and expanding the GOP’s House majority. Democratic leaders understood that a course correction was necessary. They met with Biden and urged him to reconsider his decision to stay in.
Yet, even at his lowest point politically, Biden held all the leverage. No one could force him to step aside. The pressure from Nancy Pelosi, Democratic donors, and allies was effective only because Biden cared about the party defeating Trump. Defending democracy was more important than his ego. This was the ultimate test of character and Biden passed it with flying colors.
“I love the job, but I love my country more,” he said at the DNC, explaining his decision to step aside and endorse Harris. (Watch below.)
Donald Trump, by contrast, has no character to test. The GOP has known this as far back as 2015 when the Republican National Committee asked the 2016 primary candidates to sign a loyalty pledge declaring that they wouldn’t run a third-party spoiler campaign if they lost. The pledge was targeted at Trump, who’d refused to say that he’d support the eventual nominee. This was previously an unspoken commitment. The RNC’s key error was thinking that loyalty was something you could “negotiate,” especially with someone like Trump, who signed the pledge but later abandoned it.
Trump would never graciously step aside for the benefit of the GOP because there’s no longer a functioning Republican Party in a traditional sense. MAGA is a cult of personality devoid of a coherent set of beliefs and objectives. Whenever the current GOP has come close to a similar epiphany about Trump (e.g. the Access Hollywood tape, January 6), the backlash from the base sends elected Republicans crawling back to their orange leader. The moral event horizon has long since passed.
Losing is a bad look for Trump
As Harris enjoys a polling bump, Trump is sinking deeper into delusion. During a rally last Friday in Nevada, he spread ridiculous conspiracy theories that Harris was given the debate questions in advance and fed responses through her space-age James Bond-style earrings. (Watch below.)
Trump also claimed the debate was “rigged” during a Monday interview with fringe right-wing conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root.
This is the worst of both worlds for Trump as a candidate: He’s the quintessential bully who thrives when he’s actually beating his opponents, but he’s so pathologically insecure that while he won’t accept defeat, he still lashes out like the loser he is. That’s why he keeps making vicious sexist attacks against Harris and posting unhinged all-caps anti-Taylor Swift screeds.
Republicans are now stuck with a candidate whose sole interest is himself and who believes the party should have the same priorities. Rubio, who’d once bested the man he’d called a “con artist,” was reduced to defending Trump’s feeble performance.
“A lot of the things he said tonight are part of the persona,” Rubio told ABC News right after the debate. “If he hadn’t done those things, a lot of people watching would’ve been saying, ‘Oh, that’s a different Donald Trump! It’s not the same guy.’”
The obvious response to Rubio’s pathetic argument is that Trump lost the 2020 election. Staging a successful comeback might realistically require that Trump present a different version of himself than the one who oversaw a coup attempt. Trump, however, has never operated as if 81 million people fired him in 2020, and as a result the MAGA party must reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.
That’s it for today
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When will MSM start beating the “dementia” drum about Trump, following its takedown script for President Biden? While he likely isn’t diagnosed with this disease, he certainly repeats delusional — and deeply destructive — lies every day which are easily debunked. The MSM has abandoned its core purpose in a functioning democracy: speak truth to power and doggedly present the facts to support an informed electorate. This clear and obvious pro-Trump imbalance at legacy media is beyond disheartening. It is dangerous for us all.
The funny thing is that Trump was beaten so soundly in the debate were he rational he'd be looking for a rematch. That way he could at least hope to come about even and not leave the bad impression of him in the minds of voters. But that would take a degree of courage and self discipline (he'd need to prepare and listen to his coaches) that he utterly lacks. Hopefully the Harris campaign can make hay out of his refusal to have another debate despite convention.
Finally I respectfully suggest that Trump's problem is not that he lacks charchter. He surely has a very marked and obvious charachter. It's just a very bad one.
If Harris wins Biden will go down as a particularly great President, not only for the legislation he helped put through but that he had the wisdom and humility to pass the torch in a crucial election. History will judge him kindly and he'll look like a moral giant compared to Trump.