Tuesday night’s debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was…a thing.
Members of the press appear in the spin room during a presidential debate between Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump, on screen at left, and Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, right, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
By Denise Clay-Murray
There aren’t a lot of instances in politics where you find yourself feeling sorry for people who are otherwise unlikable.
But following Tuesday night’s presidential debate at the National Constitution Center here in Philadelphia, there were more than a few otherwise unlikable people for whom I felt a little bad.
Why? Because I’m pretty sure many of the surrogates representing former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump left the debate’s spin room at the Pennsylvania Convention Center dizzy to the point of nauseousness.
Prior to Trump taking the stage against Democratic Presidential candidate and current Vice President Kamala Harris, the spin room at the Pennsylvania Convention Center was filled with Republican surrogates touting their candidate and believing that the voters would return him to the White House based on his debate performance.
“Honestly, I think that tonight’s debate is going to continue a trend line that we’re already seeing,” said Florida Congressman Byron Donalds, one of Trump’s most enthusiastic surrogates. “The support strength for Kamala Harris is going to start leaking. The durability of that support is not strong. Donald Trump’s support is strong. If you look at polling, half of the country is still trying to figure out what she stands for.”
Meanwhile, Harris’s supporters said that all the vice president would have to do is be herself to illustrate the contrast between her and her opponent.
“I think the vice president needs to be herself,” said former Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, an MSNBC contributor. “If she is, she’ll win the American people over. She’s incredibly knowledgeable, incredibly prepared for this job, incredibly qualified and the contrast is pretty extreme.”
And it took approximately 30 minutes and a comment about crowd size during the debate for that contrast to show itself. Giving a performance that did more to generate internet memes than it did anything else, Trump made things so incredibly hard for his surrogates that he wound up coming to the Convention Center himself on a spin-it-yourself mission.
The debate began with a discussion of the economy and so, as it turned out, did the things that made this debate different from the CNN presidential debate between Trump and President Joe Biden. I’ll get to that in a minute.
While Harris touted an “opportunity economy” that would benefit the middle and working classes — poverty wasn’t addressed, of course — Trump blamed immigration for what he called “a disaster for the people.” While he didn’t use his familiar catchphrase “Black jobs” when saying this, he accused the “open border” that Biden and Harris have allegedly manifested for taking away “African American jobs.”
Although he kept wanting to land on immigration so that he could get into yet another monologue on how immigration has made America a failing nation and that the only thing that could save it was full-scale mass deportations, the topic didn’t come up right away.
But when it did, and Trump got his chance to give his monologue, he continued connecting what he saw as a bad economy to the advent of immigration. While the internet memes his diatribe created have made people laugh, it also created a situation that led to the evacuation of schools in Springfield, Ohio, and to Haitian parents keeping their kids at home.
Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) speaking during a television interview 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)
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!” Trump proclaimed. “The people who came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”
It was at that moment when we got an indication of how ABC News’s moderators David Muir, anchor of World News Tonight, and Linsey Harris, anchor of ABC News Now, were going to do things differently than CNN moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper did during the first presidential debate.
While they had let Trump tell whatever lie he wanted to tell, it wouldn’t stand unchallenged.
“I want to clarify here,” Muir said. “You bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community…”
While Harris’s facial expressions were also pretty meme-worthy, she managed to keep her quips connected to the topic at hand. For example, as Trump continued to blame everything wrong with the economy on immigrants, she reminded the audience that the former president’s schtick was in no way new.
Harris also reminded the audience that they might want to take everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth with a large grain of salt.
“In this debate tonight, you’re going to hear from the same old, tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances, and name-calling,” she said. “I believe very strongly that the American people want a president who understands the importance of bringing us together knowing we have so much more in common than what separates us.”
The real-time fact-checking was something that was missing from the previous debate, and it led to accusations from Trump and many of his supporters that the debate was actually a three-on-one contest.
When asked about that later, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro had a response worthy of any Philadelphia sports fan.
“Any time a team is whining about the refs,” he said, “it’s because they lost.”
While what was discussed was pretty significant, what didn’t come up was as well. There were no questions about education. No questions about alleviating poverty. No criminal justice reform questions.
And it looks like this might be the last debate between Trump and Harris since the former president has said he won’t participate in another one.
Now, back to the spin room. Trump surrogates ranging from Donalds to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to Senators Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott came to try and declare him the winner of the debate.
From left, Sen. Tim Scott(R-S.C.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Vivek Ramaswamy speak to FOX News host Sean Hannity in the spin room after a 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)
One of my former classmates from Temple, Tim Murtaugh, was one of the people given that task. Murtaugh was communications director for Trump’s 2020 campaign and is currently a columnist for the Washington Times.
“I think Donald Trump carried the night,” he said. “Coming in here, the entire election and the entire framing of this election set up really nicely for Donald Trump. Everyone who is going to vote in this election has lived through both administrations. With Donald Trump, people experienced a great economy, they experienced low inflation. They experienced a southern border that was secure, and they experienced a world that was largely at peace. Under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, inflation is through the roof, and they’re the first administration to actively unsecure the border.”
Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Gov. Shapiro had a different response.
“It was kind of a reminder of the chaos of Trump in the past, so that stood out to me,” he said. “The other thing that stood out to me was the way Kamala Harris not only prosecuted the case against Trump, but also made clear what her vision was for moving us forward. I think she did an excellent job.”
The last day to register to vote in Pennsylvania is Oct. 21 and the last day to apply for a mail-in ballot for the Nov. 5 election is Oct. 29.
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