The bully got bullied.
The old football coach who could not adapt his playbook to compete against a different opponent got exposed.
Those are the overarching takeaways from the Tuesday night debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
After the Tuesday night debate, it was clear that Trump was on the losing side. He is like that aging battle rapper whose zings no longer zing.
It seemed like Trump yearned for the days when he locked horns with President Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, putting them on the defensive by wielding baseless, sensational claims meant to incite fear and inflame.
For too long, it was a formula that appeared to have worked.
Trump’s Familiar Playbook Fails Against Harris
But that all collapsed Tuesday night against Harris, the former California Attorney General, who relentlessly needled Trump on his complicity with the Jan. 6 attacks and attempted to overturn the 2020 election. She brought up his lingering criminal cases and flipped the tables on him by attacking his reputation, which he had done to so many others so many times before, from the “Central Park Five” to former President Obama.
“I have traveled the world as vice president of the United States, and world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump,” she said.
“I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you, and they say you’re a disgrace,” she added before turning to a scowling Trump, a gesture that poured even more kerosene onto the fire.
Harris Delivers the Line of the Night
She even offered the line of the night, borrowing and repurposing a phrase that Trump often used on his reality show, “The Apprentice: “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” she said, “and clearly he’s having a very difficult time processing that.”
Yes, Trump was the more unprepared candidate who brought a wooden stick to a gunfight—against a litigator’s litigator.
One of the few plays he had in his pocket, conflating Harris with Biden’s perceived presidential shortcomings, didn’t seem to work. Rather than clearly articulating his arguments, all he had in his quiver were claims with no evidence.
Yes, we Americans are being assaulted by inflation, but Trump failed to illustrate how the Biden-Harris administration was to blame clearly.
“People can’t go out and buy cereal or bacon or eggs or anything else. The people of our country are absolutely dying with what they’ve done. They’ve destroyed the economy,” said the former president, using “they” to talk about Biden and Harris.
How?
Racial Fearmongering Returns to the Fore
And speaking of old playbooks, the rhetoric that Trump, running mate JD Vance, and others spew about immigrants sounds familiar, from the How to Stoke Racism and Xenophobia Among Whites (and even Blacks) Toward People of a Different Color and Ethnicity” edition.
Everyone will fixate on what Trump said during the debate about Haitian immigrants in Ohio:
“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he exclaimed, answering an immigration question. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
During the presidential debate Tuesday night, former Pres. Donald Trump doubled down on the false claim that migrants from Haiti are stealing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. #ABCdebate https://t.co/b3zX6WaR1K
— ABC News (@ABC) September 11, 2024
But those remarks, wild as they are, come from the old “Willie Horton” playbook that George H.W. Bush employed against Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign. Bush used a campaign ad to show that Dukakis was “soft on crime” and a supporter of prison release programs.
The ad featured a grainy picture of a Black man and the true story of his heinous crimes—propaganda weaponized to make White Republicans fearful, racist and even hateful of people of color.
Sound familiar?
The narrator of that infamous commercial stated, “Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime.”
The ad was a game-changer. Bush’s Republican allies repeatedly invoked Willie Horton’s name on the campaign trail. It helped Bush defeat Dukakis and usher in a “tough on crime” era that even Democratic politicians seeking office soon adopted.
On Tuesday night, we all witnessed that tactic employed to lousy effect. The critical difference, as ABC News anchor and moderator David Muir insinuated, was that those claims of Haitian immigrants eating pets were lies.
Debate Reflects a Nation at Odds
But no matter how old or trite that playbook has become, it remains in circulation because it can be effective under the right conditions.
To a reasonable person, Trump’s rants from the debate could sound illogical. Harris positioned herself as the more composed, coherent and competent candidate.
But with national polls projecting a tight race heading into the November election, we are living in irrational times where racism, hate and xenophobia have been normalized—an outcome from a playbook, tried and true, that ain’t never going out of style.
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