Trump’s Trainwreck

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Wednesday, September 11, 2024

 

You know who cares about the notorious bias of the media-Democrat complex? Conservatives. You know who was not the relevant, target audience for last night’s debate between presidential candidates? Conservatives.

 

If you’re obsessing over how bad, how in the tank for Kamala Harris, the two ABC news moderators were, it’s because you don’t want to come to grips with the brute fact that Donald Trump was a disaster last night. He was unhinged, often incoherent, incapable of completing thoughts and sentences when he had points to make, and led into self-absorbed rabbit-holes — claims that he won the 2020 election, the size of his rallies, whether “migrants” are eating stolen pets — that diverted him from opportunity after opportunity to expose Harris as a radical leftist now pretending to be a pragmatic centrist who suddenly loves her some guns.

 

Trump had one job: stay on message about Harris’s dizzying renunciations of her positions — so inexplicable that Harris has dribbled them out through nameless campaign sources rather than addressed them in her own voice. All he needed to do was reduce to the punchline it deserves to be her claim that her “values” have never changed. It is simply impossible to maintain an immutable core while ushering millions of illegal aliens into the country on one day then posing the next as a border hawk; while casting the deciding vote on legislation that spiked inflation to 40-year highs on one day, then posing the next as a champion of financially battered families; while defunding the police and bailing out riotous criminals on one day, then posing the next as the tough-minded law-and-order prosecutor; while enriching Iran and making common with its pro-Hamas agitators one day, then posing the next as a staunch defender of Israel.

 

Trump couldn’t do it. And yes, that’s largely because he is an undisciplined solipsist so effortlessly drawn into railing about rally attendance when the subject at hand is Harris’s indefensible border record — and if you think last night’s target audience cares whether the interlocutor steering Trump off course was Harris or the moderators, then you’re missing the point.

 

But there’s more to it than that. Trump also couldn’t stick to deconstructing Harris’s “values” bunk because his own values are always negotiable. Because he’s an opportunist with some conservative leanings, rather than a conservative in search of opportunities to advance the cause, Trump often can’t decide whether to deride Harris’s cynical policy shifts or try to get to her left.

 

Harris may be a cipher, and a demonstrably subpar one at that, but she’s enough of a trained lawyer that she can lock herself in a room for a week and learn her lines. The question was whether she could deliver them convincingly enough. On that, the secret sauce was . . . Trump.

 

This was the first debate all over again — the Trump-Biden debate. This time, though, the less-than-stellar Democrat wasn’t senile.

 

Trump fans, naturally, spout their man’s delusional version of the first debate, to wit: Trump was a force of nature who annihilated Biden through his dazzling debating skills. The truth of the matter is that Trump was terrible that night. Biden lost — not just the debate, but his candidacy and, in effect, his presidency — because he is a senescent old man who had a couple of brain freezes, which might have been less apparent to the country except for debate rules (opposed by Trump, of course) that deadened Trump’s mic and prevented him from stepping on Biden’s implosion.

 

This all happened in the first 20 minutes of the debate. As the legendary New York sportscaster Warner Wolf liked to say, “You could’ve turned your sets off right there.” Biden was toast. But here’s the thing: If you didn’t turn your television set off, if you kept watching the debate, you saw that Biden, despite his diminished state, smacked Trump around for the next hour. Inevitably, Biden faded in the closing minutes, but only after he’d goaded Trump into ranting and raving.

 

What energized Biden during that forgotten stretch was Trump. His flailing, his inability to get over himself and stick to issues, helped Biden get his footing. Debating can be reactive. A debater who can’t remember his canned lines often finds a comfort level by responding pointedly to the opponent’s missteps, whereupon he suddenly starts remembering his canned lines, too.

 

That’s what happened last night, except Harris is not non compos mentis. It was shrewd of her to take the initiative of approaching a surprised Trump to introduce herself as he slid behind his podium, having assumed there’d be no pleasantries. But then the vice president had to begin speaking extemporaneously, which is not her strong suit — her voice wasn’t strong and she seemed nervous.

 

Soon, though, Trump settled her right in. As she saw how poorly he was performing, and as she was buoyed by the realization that the moderators would carry her through any rough patches and contradict Trump themselves if she’d missed a point, her increasing confidence was manifest. She wasn’t great, but she didn’t need to be. She just needed the debate to be about Trump rather than herself. Mission accomplished.

 

As regular readers know, I’ve never given Trump much chance of winning. Democrats — rightly, however deviously — wanted to run against him because they believed even Biden (or, as it turns out, Harris) could beat him. They orchestrated lawfare to rally the Republican base to Trump — to prevent more electable Republicans from gaining traction in the primaries — because they wanted him to be nominated. This wasn’t rocket science; Republicans have steadily lost ground at the state and national level ever since Trump took over the party, and Democrats have thrived by supporting Trump-backed candidates in intramural GOP contests, knowing they’d beat the Trump candidates in November — when the relevant electorate is the broad public, in which Trump is unpopular, rather than Trump’s devoted but small base of supporters.

 

Democrats have been running this play since 2018. It works.

 

I’ll admit it: The Biden-Harris administration has been so bad — on the economy, on the border (and the nationwide spread of mass illegal immigration and its resulting stresses on states and cities), on national security, on alliances with Islamists and the insane campus left — that a Trump win has not been as implausible as I believed it would be by this point in the campaign. Democrats didn’t get the bounce they’d anticipated out of lawfare phase two — the string of trials, convictions, and sentences of Trump. Biden’s mental and physical deterioration became a shocking albatross.

 

All that said, though, there have always been Trump’s incorrigible problems: his hard ceiling, his unpopularity with suburban voters that Republicans need, his penchant to play to his base rather than build out his support, his bad breakups with former advisers who authoritatively brand him as unfit, and his schtick — more exhausting than ever in Trump Era year nine. As a result, the race has never been about whether Trump can break out — he can’t; he’d be lucky to stay at 46 nationally, and we’re at the point where his slight, within-the-margin-of-error lead in battleground states can easily become a deficit.

 

No, the X-factor in the race is: How much of the narrow Obama-era majority Democrats can claw back, after years of steering the country into a ditch. I’ve assumed all along they’d claw back enough, especially if — with Trump’s self-destructive help — they made the election about him rather than about Biden-Harris.

 

The diminishing pool of undecided voters are not people obsessed with politics; they are people who tune in, a bit, after Labor Day. By then, the election is only weeks away and they can no longer go about their nonpolitical lives without being inundated by campaign ads. Those people don’t care about media bias, and if they watched the debate they may not have noticed it — certainly not the way that we, who are watching like hawks for it, notice and are incensed by it. What those voters are curious about is this: Can we imagine Kamala Harris — until recently, unpopular but little known or cared about — as president of the United States?

 

Last night, Donald Trump helped them answer, “Yes.”