PHILADELPHIA ― Former President Donald Trump had a rough first debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night in large part because he could not help but revert to some of his worst rhetorical habits . He invoked bizarre, debunked claims about immigrants eating pets in an Ohio town; took Harris’ bait on his rally crowd sizes; doubled down on the 2020 presidential election being stolen; and wasted valuable airtime falsely arguing that Democrats have legalized baby murder in parts of the country.
But soon after the ABC News debate came to a close, Trump’s allies began flowing into the post-debate spin room to put their best gloss on it.
The best they could do? Pointing out that the rare parts when Trump stayed on message actually were effective.
Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate who is now a Trump campaign surrogate, even touted Trump’s effort to get Harris to say at what point late in a pregnancy ― seven, eight or nine months ― she believes abortions should still be legal.
“For the portion of the debate that was focused on policy, which is the most important part of a presidential debate, I think in that area of it, I’m not going to make an overall claim, but with respect to the policy aspect of this debate, Donald Trump won hands down,” Ramaswamy said.
Ramaswamy also maintained that Harris benefited from low expectations.
“Did she exceed the low expectations of her? Perhaps she did,” he said. “We heard a lot of words better delivered than usual, I will admit, from Kamala Harris,” Ramaswamy added. “But actions speak louder than words.”
Of course, Harris had her own arguments to make against Trump’s economic record, including faulting him for botching the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“He mismanaged a pandemic that caused thousands of businesses to shut down and dismissed that it was a real thing, and millions of people died, and it also crashed the economy,” Ian Sams, a Harris campaign spokesperson, told HuffPost. “These are facts that she wanted to make sure that people remember.”
And presidential debates are rarely ever exclusively about policy. Harris was well within her rights to zero in on Trump’s character and authoritarian tendencies.
Former President Donald Trump speaks with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in the spin room after the ABC News presidential debate on Tuesday. Trump praised his own performance in the debate to reporters.
Sams watched a livestream of battleground voters responding to the debate in real time and said Harris elicited some of her most positive responses when she was highlighting Trump’s denial of the 2020 election result and his role in instigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
“That’s something that a lot of people still care a lot about,” Sams said. “They see him as re-litigating his own past grievances instead of focusing on issues that matter to them.”
Tim Murtaugh, the communications director for Trump’s 2020 campaign, who recently joined Trump’s third election bid, argued that Trump succeeded in underscoring Harris’ vulnerability as someone who is now running away from more progressive positions she took either as a presidential candidate in 2019 or earlier on in her political career.
“Her problem is she is a San Francisco liberal pretending not to be one. She has a record that stretches back decades from being a district attorney in San Francisco, the attorney general of California, U.S. senator from California and now vice president,” Murtaugh said. “She doesn’t want to acknowledge or grasp any parts of that record. She has been systematically, rather, her staff has been systematically attempting to reverse these various policy issues.”
Notwithstanding Harris’ reversal on the topic, Murtaugh, a Pennsylvania native, predicted she would lack credibility in parts of the state where fracking is important, noting she sued the Obama administration to stop fracking off the coast of California.
“How on earth is she now going to stand in western Pennsylvania and tell the natural gas workers there, ‘I love you guys’?” Murtaugh said. “No one could possibly believe that.”
Finally, Trump argued that the ABC News debate moderators were biased against him.
“I thought they were very unfair ― the moderators ― everybody did,” he told reporters upon entering the spin room himself, an unusual step for a presidential candidate. “But, despite that, they’re saying that the debate was a great victory.”
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) had a retort for complaints about the moderators.
“I’m a sports guy, and I think any time a team is whining about the refs, it’s because they lost,” Shapiro told reporters. “And so that’s what I see that as ― he’s just whining about the refs.”
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