It didn’t take long for Donald Trump to take the bait and go off script and unhinged during his first presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris Tuesday evening.
We lost count of the former president’s fabrications, exaggerations and outright lies in Philadelphia.
Where do we begin?
He continued pushing his lies that he won the 2020 elections — our “elections are bad,” he said — that Democrats are trying to allow undocumented immigrants to vote, that other countries have emptied their “insane asylums” and are sending those people to the U.S., that “migrant crime” is out of control even though several studies show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than those born in the U.S.
We’ve heard most of that before, but Trump — maybe set off by Harris’ suggestion that his supporters are leaving his rallies early out of boredom — was in even worse form on Tuesday. Angered and aggressive, Trump displayed what happens when he feels cornered: spew misinformation. If it’s repeated enough, it will eventually become true, the thinking seems to go.
On two issues close to South Florida, Trump’s claims were especially harmful.
On abortion, he falsely said “every legal scholar” wanted the constitutional right to an abortion under Roe v. Wade overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. He then descended into baseless claims that Democrats want so-called ninth-month abortions and that Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, “says, ‘execution after birth ’— execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born — is okay.”
Harris responded forcefully: “Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion. That is not happening. It’s insulting to the women of America.”
ABC News moderator Linsey Davis had, at one point, to clarify that there’s no state in the country where it is legal to kill babies after birth. That’s infanticide.
Trump’s debate comments came on the heels of his recently saying that Florida’s six-week abortion ban is too short. Facing conservative backlash, he later said he would vote against Florida’s Amendment 4 in November, which would restore the right to an abortion up to the point of fetal viability, usually around 24 weeks. That’s the same standard the U.S. Supreme Court used in 1973 in Roe v. Wade — and it’s the standard Harris said she supports.
And then there was the second issue. Debate moderators had to fact check Trump again when he repeated the debunked claim — which his VP pick J.D. Vance has helped spread — that Haitian migrants are eating people’s dogs in Springfield, Ohio. “They are eating the pets of the people who live there,” Trump said.
It feels surreal that a presidential candidate would use the debate stage to utter this type of vitriolic, xenophobic and dehumanizing rumor about migrants who helped build Miami. But here we are. For the record, police in Springfield have said there’s no evidence of migrants abducting and eating pets. The claim has been disseminated with help from far-right activists and on neo-Nazi social media channels, NPR reported. It figures.
Maybe just as absurd and desperate was Trump’s assertion that Harris wants to perform “transgender operations” on “illegal aliens” in prison. It looks like he was trying to hit all culture-war buttons with one statement.
America has been down this road with Trump in 2016 and 2020. The issue isn’t just Trump’s tortured relationship with the truth. If the facts are ignored — or seemingly made up on the spot — how can presidential debates yield real policy debate that will inform voters?
If one candidate believes he can win an election by misleading the public, then what’s the point of a debate? Perhaps Tuesday reminded voters who Trump really is. Maybe they will shrug off his lies. We hope the truth hasn’t become irrelevant.
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