Tipsheet

Trump's Biggest Missed Opportunity in the Debate

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  September 12, 2024 10:05 AM

One of my main take-aways during and after Tuesday's debate in Philadelphia was how many rhetorical punches Donald Trump failed to land against Kamala Harris, including obvious swings that he didn't even have the wherewithal to attempt. The most dramatic and costly example of this played out in the opening sequence of the event. ABC anchor David Muir — and yes, the network moderators were awful and unfair, but Trump could have mitigated or overcome that issue with a better performance — opened with perhaps the most important question of the night for Harris. Here is what he asked, and how she responded:

MUIR: Your opponent on the stage here tonight often asks his supporters, are you better off than you were four years ago? When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?

HARRIS: So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people. And that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy. Because here's the thing. We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing, and the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people. We know that young families need support to raise their children. And I intend on extending a tax cut for those families of $6,000, which is the largest child tax credit that we have given in a long time. So that those young families can afford to buy a crib, buy a car seat, buy clothes for their children. 

My passion, one of them, is small businesses. I was actually -- my mother raised my sister and me but there was a woman who helped raise us. We call her our second mother. She was a small business owner. I love our small businesses. My plan is to give a $50,000 tax deduction to start-up small businesses, knowing they are part of the backbone of America's economy. My opponent, on the other hand, his plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America's deficit. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that Trump's sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.

After she wrapped up this non-answer, one of many non-answers she offered, Muir turned to Trump and said, "President Trump, I'll give you two minutes." This moment was a wide open invitation to call her out and drive home the central messages of the his campaign, the very first time he opened his mouth. He could have set the tone by saying anything resembling this:

David, you asked her if Americans are better off today than they were four years ago.  You know what we didn't hear there?  An answer.  She said a lot of words about how she loves small businesses, and she falsely attacked me on my record, which we can get to later.  But she didn't answer your question because we all know the answer to it.  We are worse off under Biden and Harris than we were before they took over.  Prices are way up, as anyone who buys groceries can tell you.  They spent trillions of dollars that we didn't have and turbocharged inflation, and we're still dealing with that pain.  She cast the tie-breaking vote on that spending. We've seen concerning jobs reports over the last few months, with downward revisions, including a big one that was announced during her convention in Chicago.  They were telling us how 'joyful' they were while the Labor Department admitted more than 800,000 jobs they claimed had been created on their watch actually didn't exist.

Look across the country and the world.  The border has been a disaster.  Several new wars have started around the world, with bad people sensing American weakness in Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.  In so many important respects, we are worse off than we were four years ago, and that's why she didn't want to answer that direct question, because she can't admit the truth on this stage.  As for all of her supposed 'plans' she referenced, we know most of them are just a retread of what Biden has already said.  And where she differs from Biden, she's running away from her many extreme views, which I'm sure we'll discuss later, without a single explanation for all of these phony supposed changes of heart.  But if she has these great ideas, she and Biden have had almost four years to get the job done for the American people, while they're in office.  But they haven't.  She hasn't.  She is more of the same, and worse.  We can't afford four more years of it.

For what it's worth, I wrote that off the top of my head, with very little editing. Then I timed myself reading it out loud. It was almost exactly two minutes long. How Trump actually answered was to take her bait on tariffs (although he did make the fair point that the Biden-Harris administration have kept many of those tariffs in place) as the lead point in his very first answer. He unevenly weaved in some criticisms of her record, but it was all scattershot and unfocused, veering into immigration and other topics. He was presented with an early, conspicuous chance to blow up her bad answer and ram home his core messaging against her. He didn't capitalize because he was not prepared to do so, having done little work in advance of the critical showdown, and because he was not nimble or disciplined enough to let certain barbs slide, in order to assert some control over the flow and terrain of the debate.  

She noticed this failure, breathed a sigh of relief — realizing he wasn't going to be able to effectively hold her to account (also understanding that the moderators were going to help her) — and got comfortable enough to execute her game plan, which was making as much of the evening about him as possible. He often played right into her hands, displaying an incapacity to let needling slide or avoid pointless or self-destructive rabbit holes. By contrast, he didn't have a discernible game plan at all. On immigration, quite possibly her greatest and richly-deserved vulnerability, Harris was asked if she'd have done anything different than Biden at the border. It was, in short, an “any regrets?” type challenge. She replied by dodging the question, recycling part of her canned answer on this issue, and impotently blaming Republicans. At the end of her answer, though, she slipped in this line:

He's going to talk about immigration a lot tonight even when it's not the subject that is being raised. And I'm going to actually do something really unusual and I'm going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump's rallies because it's a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.

She might as well have said, out loud, “David, I wouldn't like to about the border crisis, so let me poke Donald about his rallies and try to get him to chase me down that unrelated road instead.” And Trump...did exactly what she wanted:

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First let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don't go to her rallies. There's no reason to go. And the people that do go, she's busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can't talk about that. People don't leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That's because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We're a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what's going on here, you're going to end up in World War 3, just to go into another subject.

Harris had just refused to say she'd have done anything differently on her catastrophic and historic border crisis, having presided over 10 million illegal crossings, including countless criminals, gang members, and suspected terrorists. And Trump's instinct was to latch onto the point about his rallies and insult hers. The smile on her face said everything. Mission accomplished. A friend also made a point related to this: Harris probably didn't even think of the risk she was taking by ridiculing him about his rallies. If he felt it was absolutely necessary to chase her down this path, he could have at least had the presence of mind to say how low it was for her to mock the people attending his rallies after several of them were shot at one of them, just weeks ago. Turning that around on her would have made her look petty and cheap. He could have defended his rally-goers as patriots, noting how it's brave that they continue to wait in line for hours and attend, even after the shooting. He could have said they do it because they know something is very wrong in this country, and they know Kamala Harris can't fix it because she caused so many of the problems, along with Joe Biden. That would be the jumping off point to pivot back to immigration — and perhaps mention Laken Riley, rather than disputed and sensationalistic-sounding claims about migrants eating people's pets in Ohio.  

I understand that hindsight can be 20/20, and people can dream up all sorts of perfect answers when they're not in the heat of the moment. But an even slightly more focused and disciplined Republican wouldn't have needed hindsight to bust through the many, many openings Trump squandered. With so much on the line, the GOP nominee didn't adequately prepare for a pivotal forum, and didn't seem to have any cogent plan of attack. And it showed. Trump is crowing that Tuesday was his best debate yet, but that's transparently absurd cope and bravado. He didn't do well. The wider question is whether it will cost him. That's more of an open question, to which the answer may well be “no.” As I said yesterday, if he loses the election, June 27 and September 10 will be seen as major mile markers on that path to defeat. But as I pointed out on “America's Newsroom,” if he wins, it will be because of the facts on the ground that angry, disaffected and hurting voters have seen and felt under Harris and Biden: