The issue of timing — from the decision regarding muted mics and response time to wild declarations of victory — was on full display during last Tuesday’s presidential debate and later in the spin room.
Yusef Salaam, center, a member of The Exonerated Five, speaks to reporters in the spin room after a presidential debate with Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
By Amy V. Simmons
Current Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and former President and Republican candidate Donald Trump met up last Tuesday in Philadelphia for a 90-minute-long debate after considerable back and forth between both campaign teams about the terms.
The major sticking point revolved around whether both candidates’ microphones would be muted or open during their timed responses to moderator questions, as well as their responses to challenges and fact-checking. The Trump team wanted them muted, while the Harris team wanted them left open. Both teams eventually agreed that the mics would be muted.
So much for that.
Trump ended up Trumping with far more response and rebuttal time than Harris, and the attempt to build up any sort of dam of defense against his rantings failed, as his stream of consciousness — predictably — became a raging river full of lies, grandiosity, and stochastic terror.
Clearly rattled by the precision strikes delivered by a confident and hyperfocused Harris — former California prosecutor, attorney general, and current vice president — a man who has never been successfully confronted in real-time during his nearly 80 years on this planet finally met his match.
Then came the post-debate spin room antics.
The combined effect of having his lies challenged by the moderators and Harris’s relentless pushback on those lies drove Trump into the post-debate spin room located in the Pennsylvania Convention Center nearly six blocks from the debate site unannounced, sending security and reporters scrambling.
Even his daughter-in-law, RNC co-chair Lara Trump, who was on the other side of the room at the time, seemed caught off guard by the unscheduled appearance.
Realizing what had happened, several surrogates and guests from both sides stopped speaking to reporters to hear what the former president had to say and rushed over. Others kept speaking to reporters, unfazed.
Someone particularly interested in this unexpected appearance was New York City Councilman Yusef Salaam, a member of the Exonerated Five, who Trump threatened via full-paged advertisements in several New York newspapers calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty and execution of the then-teenaged boy and his four friends accused of raping a woman jogger in Central Park in 1989. Their names were cleared when convicted rapist and murderer Matias Reyes confessed to the crime in 2002.
Olivia Troye, left, and Anthony Scaramucci, right, speaking to reporters in the spin room before the presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
Five innocent men lost valuable time — time they can never reclaim.
To this day, Trump remains unrepentant, which was evident when Vice President Harris brought the incident up as part of an established pattern of racism that the former president has displayed throughout his public career.
According to the Grio, after Salaam identified himself, Trump outdid himself in the hubris department by asking whether the man who he advocated executing as a teenager was now supporting him, to which Salaam replied, “No!”
Salaam reflected on everything that had taken place that evening, and over the last 35 years.
Trump will never change, he told the SUN.
“If a person, like Dr. Maya Angelou said, is showing you who they are, and they are consistently showing you that they are the same person they are today as they were yesterday, we have to believe them,” Salaam said. “We can’t hold out hope thinking that they’re going to be somebody different.”
Salaam called Harris’ response illustrating Trump’s longstanding history of racism a full circle moment.
“The beautiful thing about today’s debate is that Kamala Harris showed us the legacy of Donald Trump — she laid it all out,” he said. “In that legacy was the Central Park Jogger case, to which he brought out that full-page ad [just] two weeks after we were accused of raping the Central Park jogger in a country that says you’re innocent until proven guilty. He saw us and said “guilty,” because he saw the color of our skin, and not the content of our character.”
Other surrogates and supporters spoke with the SUN after the debate.
“Vice President Harris’s answers were presidential,” said Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who spoke out forcefully about Trump’s proposed Muslim ban during the 2016 election cycle. “She was respectful, she was dignified, she was detailed, she was for the future. He (Trump) kept dragging us back into the past.”
Trump’s whole manner was disrespectful, unpresidential, and an embarrassment, Khan said. Furthermore, the military deserves a commander-in-chief who honors veterans and heroes like those buried at Arlington National Cemetery, he said.
Trump’s “thumb’s up” during a photo op in the cemetery’s revered Section 60 was especially offensive, Khan said, given that it was the second time that Trump disrespected the sacred area. Among the servicemembers buried in Section 60 is Humayun Khan, Khan’s son who died in an explosion in Iraq in 2004.
“In 2017, on Memorial Day, he went to same Section 60, and he stood with retired General Kelly, who is a Gold Star father, at his son, young Lieutenant Kelly’s, grave and said, ‘What was in it for them?’ meaning he has no concept of service and sacrifice,” Khan said.
The nation will never forget how Trump referred to those buried in France “losers and suckers” during remembrance ceremonies marking World War I’s end in 2018, Khan said.
Trump has no respect for the military, veterans, or their families, he said.
“Everything is for himself,” Khan said. “We saw that in today’s debate, in every issue that was raised.”
U.S. Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana’s short take on Trump’s tone at the debate was that it was filled with open hostility, he said.
“He (Trump) is trapped in this grievance stage of his life where he just wants retribution and revenge,” he said.
By contrast, Harris focused on the strength found in unity, Richmond said.
“We can all succeed together,” he said. “We can all achieve our wildest dreams. We can all prosper. And we don’t have to pit people against each other based on a race agenda, or on anything else. …It’s going to be a uniting presidency, bringing all people together. I think it’ll be a historic moment in this country to have a woman as the leader of the free world, who will lead by example, and who will lead with values.”
Former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci, who has known Trump for many years, told the SUN that the only reason the former president showed up unexpectedly in the post-debate spin room was that he got crushed, and was trying to defend himself.
Scaramucci believes Trump possesses great political instincts, so he was not surprised by the impromptu appearance and hyperbolic assertions that he had won the debate that evening, he said.
“He’s on “super spin” right now,” Scaramucci said. “You’ve got different Trump spin cycles. We’re on super spin. He walked off that debate stage sweaty and disconsolate, and he got crushed. That’s why he’s here. If he had beat her, he’d already be on his way home.”
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