My Quick Thoughts On The First Trump/Harris Debate

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris entered yesterday’s debate pretty much deadlocked in the polls, and in this deeply polarized environment, the presidential race is still likely to remain very close. With that said, voters got their first look at Harris going toe-to-toe with Trump, and she held her own.

This debate was more important for Kamala’s electoral chances of becoming president than Trump’s. This is mainly because she didn’t see any DNC convention bounce in the polls and her enthusiasm seems to have stagnated since she first announced. Also, in a recent poll, 31% of surveyors said they needed to learn more about Harris, and of those, 63% said they wanted to know more about her policies/plans.

The majority of the focus coming into yesterday’s debate was about how Harris would handle her first-ever presidential discussion with someone with as strong of a personality as Trump, how she would answer questions about her recent policy position shifts, and balance taking credit for what she feels are successes of her current administration while trying to separate herself from her boss, President Biden.

It pains me to say it, but Harris did pretty well and did what she needed to do during this debate. She probably had the best performance out of all Trump’s debate opponents since he began running for president in 2015.

At first, Harris seemed nervous, but she quickly found her footing and gave well-thought-out answers. One effective strategy that the Harris team used was distracting Trump by exploiting his weaknesses and turning them against him, knowing that he would not stay focused. She did it first by invoking his rally crowd sizes, then his criminal charges on the Central Park Five, and over and over again. She got in his head from then on.

Donald Trump appeared off-balanced, distracted, and frustrated throughout the debate, and in many ways, he had a right to be. It wasn’t just that Kamala Harris bruised his ego regarding his crowd sizes, but also how disgraceful and biased the moderators were.

Trump’s last debate against Biden was moderated somewhat fairly. Although Trump didn’t perform amazingly, he stayed composed and was able to expose Biden’s glaring ineptitude and force him out of the race.

This debate was far from being moderated fairly. This was by far the most biased Presidential debate I had ever seen. Vice President Harris was aided and abetted by the two ABC News moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, who seemingly felt the need to fact-check virtually everything former President Donald Trump said.

This bias against Trump came in the form of hostile “gotcha” questions while allowing Harris to evade answering some questions altogether and lie with impunity.

Kamala lied about Trump’s “fine people on both sides” comment he made during the Charlottesville March, which has been debunked many times due to being used out of context. She also lied about Trump supporting Project 2025. A project Trump has disavowed and stated he isn’t associated with. The Heritage Foundation, which published the initiative, also has stated that it has no connections to Trump or his campaign. These are just a couple of lies that could have easily been fact-checked by the moderators.

While it is obvious that the mainstream media has resumed its job as the right arm of the Democrat politburo since Kamala was appointed as the Democratic presidential nominee, my biggest disappointment comes not because of last night’s three-against-one. That honestly didn’t surprise me. However, given Trump’s debate performance, it surprised him and his prep team. It was a huge missed opportunity and a fumble in a high-stakes game.

Regardless of this debate, this will remain a very tight race. Going forward, Trump has to establish how Kamala is a far-leftist who can’t be trusted and who lies about what she stands for. He must make this election a referendum on this administration’s incompetence. Trump must also make the case that Kamala Harris is the current VP and should at least be partially responsible for the current mess and degrading state of our country. We can’t take a chance on another four years of this kind of governance.

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