‘Confused about fact’: Harris capitalizes as Trump clings to 2020 fiction

Kamala Harris spent Tuesday night’s debate trying to win the 2024 election. Donald Trump was still fighting for 2020.

The former president distanced himself from comments he made in recent days acknowledging that he lost the 2020 race “by a whisker.” At the debate, he claimed he was being “sarcastic” and returned to his well-worn — and false — claim that he won four years ago.

It’s a refrain that generates applause lines at rallies stacked with his fiercest supporters but has in recent years flopped with a national audience and reminded them of the collective horror the nation felt on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump’s insistence that he was actually the winner in 2020 came amid a longer exchange in which he also defended his handling of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump refused multiple opportunities from moderator David Muir to acknowledge any “regrets” for his actions on Jan. 6, when he encouraged a crowd of supporters to march on the Capitol and then remained silent for hours when thousands of them stormed Congress, many assaulting police and disrupting the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

Trump’s comments prompted Harris to deliver one of her sharpest rejoinders of the night: “Perhaps we do not have, in the candidate to my right, the temperament or the ability to not be confused about fact,” Harris said.

Rather than chastise his supporters who bludgeoned police on Jan. 6, Trump instead attacked the Capitol Police officer who fired the shot that killed rioter Ashli Babbitt as she attempted to clamber inside the Speaker’s Lobby near the House chamber, as lawmakers were being evacuated. Trump called that officer “out of control.”

He also falsely accused then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi of rebuffing an offer to secure the Capitol with 10,000 National Guard troops. And he said he had nothing to do with the violence that broke out.

Harris noted that she was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, though didn’t mention that she departed for the Democratic National Committee headquarters before the violence broke out. She went on to compare Trump’s handling of the mob to his comments about the racist and antisemitic marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. And she noted that Trump delivered a rallying cry to the far-right Proud Boys in 2020 — telling the group to “stand back and stand by” — three months before its leaders formed the vanguard of the Jan. 6 mob.

In addition to Trump’s continued effort to mislead about his supporters’ actions on Jan. 6, he also revived false claims about his campaign’s courtroom efforts to overturn the 2020 election results — which uniformly failed across the country.

Trump falsely claimed that judges refused to look at evidence of fraud when they rejected roughly 60 lawsuits filed by him and his allies, suggesting that it remained possible he did win four years ago.

“No judge looked at it. They said we didn’t have standing,” the former president said. In fact, many of the suits were rejected due to flaws in the legal claims or lack of evidence of fraud.