‘Disaster’: Allies go feral on Donald Trump
Dismayed Donald Trump supporters have hit out at his debate performance - yet with just five words he showed what could have been.
Within the Trump campaign the wheels of spin have been spinning furiously in the hours following the debate with Kamala Harris.
He delivered “a masterful performance”, the campaign has insisted. And besides, the moderators from the US’ ABC network – which hosted the debate – were at fault. Yet it wasn’t the moderates that forced Mr Trump to talk about eating dogs.
But conservative commentators and politicians haven’t been so willing to see the bright side after Mr Trump failed on several occasions to punish Ms Harris and was repeatedly goaded by her into focusing on tangents.
South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham said the debate, which Ms Harris is widely considered to have won, was a “missed opportunity”.
To one reporter, he was more succinct calling the almost two hour event a “disaster” for Mr Trump.
“Do you need me to lie to you and tell you this was a brilliant performance,” another pro-Trump commentator said.
Five words
But there were moments in the debate where Mr Trump’s arguments were far more powerful and went straight to his rival’s weaknesses.
And it can summed up in five words uttered by Mr Trump in his closing statement.
“Why hasn’t she done it?”
It was probably Mr Trump’s strongest line and zeroed in on accusations that Ms Harris can hardly present herself as a candidate of change when she’s been the second most powerful person in the US for almost four years.
“She just started she’s going to do this, she’s going to do that. She’s going to do all these wonderful things,” Mr Trump continued.
“Why hasn’t she done it?
“They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and a half years to create jobs.
“Why hasn’t she done it?”
“She should leave right now, go down to that beautiful White House, get everyone together and do the things you want to do,” he said.
“But you haven’t done it, and you won’t do it because you believe in things that the American people don’t believe in”.
It was his best two minutes in an almost two hour debate.
But preceded by meandering monologues on rally crowd sizes, that Democrats wanted abortion up to birth and debunked theories that immigrants are eating pets – it could be two minutes too late.
‘Disaster’
“I told him: ‘Your closing was great,’” Senator Graham said to reporters after the debate.
“If you do another debate,” he said, as if he was talking directly to Mr Trump, “Just effectively prosecute what you had and where we’re at (with Mr Biden and Ms Harris)”.
“She said, ‘We inherited a mess,’” Senator Graham said, quoting Ms Harris in the debate.
“I was yelling and screaming, ‘No you didn’t — you inherited low gas prices, a secure border, a vaccine for Covid, you inherited the biggest Mideast change of my lifetime, the Abraham Accords, and now everything is to s***.’”
Right wing pundit Matt Walsh echoed the senator’s views.
“Trump’s closing statement is his best moment by a million miles,” he wrote on Twitter/X.
“He should have been hammering ‘why haven’t you already done it?’ the entire time, relentlessly.
“(Harris) came off as phony and rehearsed the rest of the way,” he added.
“But Trump missed a lot of opportunities to land a blow, rambled too much, and took the bait repeatedly throughout”.
When a follower of Walsh pushed back on his analysis, he replied: “Do you need me to lie to you and tell you this was a brilliant performance by Trump? Would that make you feel better?”
Another commentator from the right, Fox News’ Brit Hume was also blunt.
“Make no mistake about it, Trump had a bad night”.
‘Masterful performance’
Mr Trump’s debate performance will likely heap further pressure on the campaign’s two top advisers, Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita.
After the head to head, Ms Wiles and Mr LaCivita released a glowing statement that appeared at odds with most assessments of Mr Trump.
“President Trump delivered a masterful debate performance tonight, prosecuting Kamala Harris’ abysmal record of failure that has hurt Americans for the last four years, they wrote.
There have been numerous calls for the pair to be pushed aside in the campaign.
The day before the debate Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025 at right wing think tank, said just that.
Project 2025 is a document, written by many officials who were in the former Trump administration, that sets out how a new Trump administration could transform the US government.
Among its proposals include further decreasing abortion access and action on climate change.
So successful have the Democrats been in latching Project 2025 to Mr Trump that the Republican candidate has had to continually distance himself from it while Mr LaCivita said it was a “pain in the ass”.
Mr Dans’ said Ms Wiles and Mr LaCivita were responsible for “malpractice” in not preparing Mr Trump for Ms Harris’ becoming the Democratic nominee and that the election was now an unnecessary “race to the wire”.
Trump's’ debate prep
But there may have been little the two senior advisers could have done given Mr Trump reportedly eschewed traditional debate preparation.
In the days leading up to the debate his campaign said Mr Trump liked to chat “unscripted for hours at a time,” to reporters and voters and that was all the preparation that was needed.
On Fox News, Mr Trump said his strategy was to “let Harris talk”. Many Republicans saw this as an effective ploy in the belief the more the Vice President soaked up podium airtime, the more she would stumble, ramble, and put voters off side.
Yet it was Mr Trump who talked at length- on distractions – rather than the Republicans’ strong points.
On a question about immigration, which Ms Harris turned into an accusation spectators at Trump rallies often got bored and walked off, he instead talked about crowd sizes.
Nonetheless, despite Ms Harris’ debate win, it may not make much difference to the election result.
Most voters are rusted in at this point. Despite Joe Biden’s derisory performance in the June debate, the polls didn’t shift much away from him.
It was only when Ms Harris became the nominee that the polls evened up. Some Republicans have suggested this is less to do with centrist voters shifting to the Democrats and more to do with Democrats who were reluctant to vote for Mr Biden coming home for Ms Harris.
Hillary Clinton was said to have won all three of her debates against Donald Trump. She still lost the election.
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