Donald Trump’s debate performance was far worse than even his inner circle anticipated.
While Donald Trump’s team is publicly pushing a postdebate victory lap, many in his camp were privately disappointed in the Republican candidate’s performance on Tuesday.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported Wednesday night that several Trump insiders were “stunned” by his poor performance and by just how easily he fell for all of Kamala Harris’s attempts to provoke him.
“I’m told that as soon as Donald Trump exited that debate stage, he immediately began quizzing those waiting in his viewing room about how the last 90 minutes had gone,” said Collins. “While several people praised him to his face, telling him they did a great job, that’s not what a lot of them are saying privately today.
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Apparently, all that practice with members of his team, such as former Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard, had ultimately amounted to very little when it came time to debate.
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I agree partially, but he also did reasonably well perception wise against Hillary Clinton. I understand that she was kind of wooden, and that she is very much not a gifted orator, and that she had 30 years of media hatred beamed directly at her, but there were a lot of people saying the debates were going to be a blowout against Trump and they never were.
Harris worked her strategy in the debate nearly perfectly. She told the audience what they were going to see before they saw it (a hostile, out of touch, out of control liar), and later referred back to what she said when he became exactly that.
Hillary had canned lines like “A person who can be baited with a tweet should not have control of the nuke codes”, but she was telling instead of showing.
Kamala told the audience exactly what to expect, laid the bait out for him and completely knocked him off message, and then when the buffoonery arrived she pointed out that there he was, exactly as characterized. She showed everyone how easy it was to rile him up instead of just telling them, and by the ending portion where she was saying things similar to “Putin would eat you for lunch” and “strongmen want you to win because you’re weak and easily manipulated” it was clear that she was correct even to audience members who had no additional context about Trump.
Kamala told the audience what to expect and then demonstrated to them that what she was saying was accurate.
It wasn’t just anyone that could’ve executed this strategy so brilliantly against Trump. Many others have tried, and although I think most people suspected it would be possible to bring Trump the miserable, angry racist couch potato up onto the stage during a debate, we got only a tiny glimpse of it during a debate once before (when Trump had active COVID).
Despite it looking easy to manipulate him on a stage, in actuality I think it is pretty difficult to not get sucked into the non-sense vortex when someone’s feet away from you spewing out vile bullshit, and Harris was the first one to be able to not only trigger a storm exactly on cue, but also stand back calmly, get out of the way of the swirling debris, and stay focused on what she wanted to communicate with the audience.
When he debated Hillary, he was also 8 years younger than now and still had more reasonable people around him. Now he is surrounded by lunatics in an echo chamber. For a person that can‘t keep a thought for more than half a sentence, this is really bad.