A new week found me searching for a column topic. By Tuesday evening, the concepts of a plan began to take shape.
Watching Vice President and former prosecutor Kamala Harris toy with Donald Trump in their first and likely only presidential debate reminded me of a master angler working a stocked pond. Harris hooked Trump with every nearly rhetorical cast, then with a bemused expression watched him as he took the bait and struggled furiously. When she released him, he couldn’t help rising to the bait again and again. On debate night, Harris caught her limit of large-mouth bass.
Harris was sharp, and Trump’s own vitriolic bungling made her job easier. I’m no debate coach, but he might have been smart to avoid boot-polishing autocrats such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.
“Let me just tell you about world leaders,” he gushed. “Viktor Orbán. He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it wasn’t. Why is it blowing up? He said because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him.”
Trump doesn’t seem to understand that shining the shoes of dictators isn’t presidential. No wonder millions of Americans are afraid of him, too.
He might have mentioned that he would prefer U.S. ally Ukraine to defeat Russia. Seems pretty simple, unless you’re a Vladimir Putin fanboy. He lied about millions of deaths and claimed he would have a peace deal within a day — even before taking office. He declined to say how such a thing would happen.
Trump has long postured with pride about his role in overturning Roe v. Wade, which has predictably had an impact on abortion rights and important reproductive treatment such as in vitro fertilization (IVF). Now that he’s cratering with moderate women voters, during the debate he blurted out his supposed universal support for IVF: “I’ve been a leader on it. They know that and everybody else knows it. I have been a leader on fertilization, IVF.” That comment, according to Politico, now has him losing support from “swaths of the Republican Party.”
Trump was only too happy to ridicule the Affordable Care Act, which a decade after its creation provides insurance for 45 million Americans, but stumbled and dissembled when asked whether he has a plan to repeal and replace it. When pressed by moderator Lindsey Davis of ABC News, he pointed fingers at Democrats before mewling, “I have concepts of a plan. I’m not president right now.”
Harris so dominated Trump that she didn’t even need to remind the national audience that her opponent was standing in the same city whose officials he had repeatedly accused of conspiring to steal the 2020 election. He smeared Pennsylvania election officials with baseless voter fraud conspiracies that a federal judge blasted out of court, saying his campaign presented “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by evidence.”
For her part, Harris focused on actual plans to bolster small businesses and new homeowners, spoke passionately about her personal story and about the need to protect reproductive freedom. She made her case with a decidedly upbeat tone and a focus on the future. There weren’t a lot of specifics, but she offered far more than concepts of a plan.
For the life of me, I never thought I’d live to see the day that a candidate for president — a former president, no less — would spread false rumors that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are dining on residents’ pets. But that’s the race-baiting Trump.
“They’re eating dogs. They’re eating cats,” he said. “They’re eating the pets of the people that lived there.”
By the end of the debate, Trump was exasperated. Harris had easily exposed him as a blowhard incapable of staying on a coherent message.
Trump’s children and surrogates immediately tried to blame moderators David Muir and Davis for his awful night, but the ABC News veterans had been pros. Trump, who never accepts responsibility for anything, then did something quite in character.
He sought out those reporters that he maligns at every public appearance in the post-debate spin room. He denied the undeniable by declaring victory. At one point Trump said, “It was my best debate ever, I think. … Now she wants do to another one because she got beaten tonight, but I don’t know if we’re going to do another one.”
Just as predictably, he spewed a litany of supposed poll numbers that said he was the winner, not the loser, on Tuesday night.
By Thursday we learned that Orbán’s fanboy had decided he wasn’t interested in a second debate, which is a good thing. Harris didn’t just bloody the bully Trump’s nose. She took his lunch money.
Instead, he returned to the campaign trail and on Friday addressed a MAGA rally in Las Vegas, where megadoses of grievance and self-aggrandizement are always on the menu. Perhaps he finds comfort in the company of fawning Republican state party officials and co-conspirators in his criminal plan to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.
After a flopping and foundering performance, I’d like to think that undecided 2020 Trump voters who watched the debate are considering new concepts and a different plan in November.
John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.
