It was just late June when Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off in the first presidential debate of the season. As it turns out, thanks to his disastrous performance, it was Biden’s last presidential debate ever.
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Tomorrow is the second presidential debate, but it might as well be the first. Kamala Harris will be making her debate debut as a presidential candidate. She and Trump have never faced off before. Indeed, the two have never even met because Trump skipped the 2021 inauguration festivities after his failed coup attempt.
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Debates are all about expectations and spin. The expectation for the June debate was that Biden would show Trump up for the blowhard he is, which is why the Biden campaign pushed for a debate so early in the election cycle. We all know how that worked out.
However, it’s hard to imagine that Harris isn’t in a much better position going into the debate than Trump is. For one thing, Trump can’t stop himself from vomiting his inner dialogue, which rightly disgusts a lot of voters. He digresses, he rambles, he struggles to put a coherent thought together. Biden’s poor performance was the spectacle at the last debate. This time out Trump won’t have that foil.
At the same time, Harris is used to arguing her case. After all, she was a prosecutor, where her job was to convince a jury. She knows how to lay out her argument and draw people into it. She knows that this time the voting public is her jury, and she will argue accordingly.
Moreover, Harris can deliver a killer line. People don’t remember much from any debate, but they do remember how in 2019, when she was a presidential candidate, Harris eviscerated Biden for his long-ago opposition to busing as a solution for school segregation. Harris also did a number on Mike Pence during the 2020 vice presidential debate. When Pence tried to interrupt her multiple times, Harris put him in his place with a firm, “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.”
Trunp won’t have a chance to interrupt Harris because the candidate’s microphones will be muted when they aren’t talking. But what Harris can do is get under Trump’s skin. In fact, she’s already taken up residence there.
An angry Trump is an uncontrollable Trump. In typical Trump fashion, he’s not doing any hard work for the debate. “President Trump doesn’t do debate prep,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who is helping Trump get ready for tomorrow, told The New York Times. Instead, Gaetz said that he “regularly assembles advisors” to talk about key issues.
In short, Trump rants while his campaign staff tries to get him to talk about policy. The catch is when Trump talks about policy, he sounds as if he’s phonetically reciting a foreign language, which, to be fair, he is, as he cares nothing about policy.
After twice struggling with how to respond to Trump, Harris seems to have struck on the right approach. She doesn’t dwell him as a threat, she doesn’t brand him a misogynist. She treats him as a weird old man who has overstayed his welcome. That’s exactly the kind of treatment that will send Trump into orbit. Whether he can hold it together through the debate remains to be seen.
But ask yourself this question: would you want to go head-to-head against Kamala Harris in a debate? It’s no wonder that Trump tried so often to back out of the debate. Even he knows he’s got a lot more to lose tomorrow besides his temper.
