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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?
Trump chased every rabbit down every hole. Harris totally got under his skin. Criticizing the size of his rallies is a juvenile move, but Trump acted like she had just kicked him in the balls with a stiletto heel. Then a parade of nonsense. Relitigating J6. "Executing babies". "Eating the dogs". "Transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison". "I have the concept of a plan".
The only upside for Trump is that this debate was relatively early in the cycle, so hopefully for him people will have mostly forgotten about this by the time voting comes around.
The 'transgender' stuff was a recent CNN expose, and the 'babies' pretty explicitly bit about this (and that's the spin claim!). Edit: and this
Yeah, but it's refuge in audacity. They can say that stuff and if their opponents call them on it, it's too crazy to believe (especially with the media running interference).
Fair, but too crazy to believe has included the idea that a sitting President would hesitate to call Benghazi a terror attack.
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