Yeah, that was a boat race last night. Harris started a little uneven but once she saw ABC would turn on Trump’s mic if he said anything, she went with what was clearly a prepared game plan. Once he lost his composure, she was in control and he never had a chance to get it back. My biggest takeaway from this was that her goal wasn’t to reinforce the ‘weird’ attack line, it was instead to go after the reason that tagline has hurt MAGA so bad. It was to send a message to MAGA voters that no one had been able to send.
“I have nothing but contempt for MAGA, and Trump is incapable of making me pay for that fact.”
MAGA at its core is driven by the feeling that ‘liberal elites’ look down their nose at them. That the left doesn’t respect them or their world view and thinks they’re better than them. As sick as that is, anger from that feeling has been a source of resiliency for the Trump’s supporters. Its let them shrug off bad news, knowing that ‘they’ll show us!’ They’ll have the last laugh when all is said and done.
The only laughing anyone is doing over last night is at them and their never popularly elected god-king.
Harris laughed at him and made him look weak. His attempts to ridicule her devolved into childish ‘I know you are but what am I?’ nonsense. He looked lost, confused, and when the moderators did their job of ‘keeping the candidates talking about things that are actually real’, he was completely unprepared for it. He was never on the attack, never able to land a solid blow. He came in with no plan, he gave the same stump speech he’s been giving for weeks, and he got crushed for it.
On a side note, the real capper on the evening for me was when he want for the line that was obviously suggested by Tulsi Gabbard. “I am talking now — does that sound familiar?” was not even a line one percent of the audience would get the reference for. Hell, I don’t think Harris even got that reference. The only person who remembers a primary debate that happened in 2020 is the person who experienced their last shred of relevancy back then.
He failed to make the liberal elite pay for looking down at him. He failed to defend the honor of his adherents from the west coast snob. Yes, one night is not going to change the diehards support of Trump, but it is going chip away at the core driving principle for many of them. Maybe Trump can no longer make the ‘left wing commies’ pay for disrespecting ‘Real Americans’. Maybe Trump is actually weak. And in the world of MAGA, the weak get eaten.
