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Well, this is the Trump experience. I mean this debate. He started out really strong, was totally defeating Harris for the first ten minutes or so. Then he just couldn't help but start rambling and making unforced errors. Why decide to bring up abortion and ramble about ninth month abortion? That's not one of the Republicans' strengths. Why bring up Marxism? Outside of the highly online left and right, people generally think of Marxism as some boring thing from decades ago, not as an important issue. Why bring up the Springfield pets thing? That's another highly online issue that plays weird to normies.
Why not just focus on your strengths of crime, the economy, and immigration? He's starting to try to pivot more back to those now, but now he's rambling and raising his voice and acting defensive, which looks bad.
This guy has always sucked at debates other than in the 2016 primaries and when he got to go up against Biden a few months ago, but almost anyone could have won that debate against Biden.
Kamala is a competent but relatively weak debater, a strong debater could easily run rings around her. But Trump has learned nothing, it seems, from past debate performances. He keeps making the same kinds of unforced errors and making himself look bad. He can't stop himself from getting defensive and rambling and bringing up stuff that most people don't care about, or even stuff that favors his opponent.
If he could have just stayed calm and focused, he would have this debate in the bag by now. Instead he is fumbling it. How the fuck can a man have nine years of experience at politics and political debating and not learn the simple lesson of staying calm and looking calm and tough when the context makes it the right decision, instead of getting flustered and emotional all the time?
Eh, winning the first ten minutes counts for more than winning the last eighty. Most people turn out early. I agree he's doing worse than against Biden.
Much worse. He is constantly allowing Harris to set him up for typical leftist or moderate establishment framings of things like foreign policy and racism and he has little ability to get out of those traps other than by raising his voice, thus looking defensive, and repeating the same talking points about how the Democrats are destroying the country and so on - which I happen to agree with to some extent, but I don't think repeating it and rambling about it plays well to the electorate. He failed to figure out some kind of judo or direct assault to get out of some very typical leftist traps, such as accusations of racism, in a way that would make him look good. He has allowed Kamala to look like the calmer one of the two. He brought up abortion for absolutely no reason before Kamala even did. He is shitting the bed so hard that even a bunch of people on /r/conservative are criticizing his performance. Which is unfortunate for me because, while I hate both sides, on the whole I would prefer Trump to win because I live in a Democrat-run city and I can see close-up the consequences of Democrat policies.
To be fair, the deck is stacked against him if for no other reason than that leftist attitudes are more prevalent in the public mind than right-wing ones, and the moderator might be a bit unfair. But he did not do a good job of preparing for this debate.
That's a ridiculous standard though. In that setting, those are superweapons. There is no judo counter and no defense, the only thing you can do is absorb the hit and press forward.
Well to be honest, I can't think of any great ones off the top of my head. But surely there must be some out there, and Trump has people funded by millions of dollars working to help him with these things. At the very least, maybe he could point out that Kamala was picked for Vice President for racist reasons. On the other hand, to explain to normies why that is a bad thing would probably take some calmness and sustained intellectual ability at explanation that Trump might simply not be capable of.
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