Edit: added comment for correction of tweet

@MaxBlumenthal

*Linsey Davis co-hosted the debate, not Kristin Welker. I watch political coverage on ABC maybe once every 4 years, so forgive the mistake.

@MaxBlumenthal

Trump supporters are deluding themselves if they think he won the debate. Trump fell for the bait Kamala’s handlers set for him at every possible point, spent much of the debate on the defense, stammered, spewed references that only extremely online members of his base would recognize, and got clobbered on abortion. When Kamala taunted Trump about the size of his rallies, he stumbled cluelessly into her trap.

If Trump had entered the debate with an actual strategy, he would have responded that after Kamala’s massive, elaborately staged campaign launch in Oakland in 2020, she failed to win a single delegate, wasted tens of millions of donor money, and was only installed as the Dem nominee by the media and party elites. (That critique only came in latter half of the debate, when it was too late, and most viewers’ perceptions had solidified). Similarly, when Kamala cited Goldman Sachs and Wharton to tout her economic credentials, Trump had an easy opportunity to hammer home Goldman’s role in the foreclosure crisis that destroyed the lives of millions of hard working Americans. Instead, he grumbled that he graduated from Wharton, before veering off track again. When Kamala predictably raised Trump’s call for executing the Central Park 5, he could have reminded voters of how she boasted of jailing massive numbers of Black youth for truancy and marijuana possession. On foreign policy, Trump should have homed in on Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala for a redux of his demolition of Jeb Bush in the 2016 primary debates. He had two hours to put forward a critique of a candidate who was not well known to most swing voters, to paint her as a media created phony and reckless warmonger afraid of her own record, and he failed.

Trump supporters are correct that the moderators, David Muir and Kristen Welker, orchestrated the debate in Kamala’s favor, never fact checking her and feeding her one alley-oop after another, while relentlessly cornering Trump. Muir and Welker clearly saw the Beltway press corps’ disappointment with Dana Bash and Jake Tapper for failing to ruthlessly fact check Trump in the first debate, and seized the chance to burnish their status. In the past, Trump would have recognized the moderators as a second opponent, and blasted the fake news media for its shameless bias. But the Trump of 2016, whose campaign was propelled by a popular sense of anti-establishment betrayal after the Iraq war and financial crash, is a ghost. If he somehow makes it into the Oval Office after this performance, he will be focused on personal survival, with his agenda hijacked and subverted by the forces he once thundered against.

Source: https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1833909786024521831