(Un)Truth or Consequences

Dems reaping rewards of Trump’s performance

Credit: Getty Images

Add another check to the things-I’ve-never-seen-in-a-presidential-election column. Normally, presidential debates are no more than live, relatively uninteresting interviews with the candidates. But this cycle, the first debate caused a sitting president to withdraw from the race, and the second reminded 67 million viewers that a certain Republican is simply not fit to hold the office.

Will Trump’s (under) performance be enough to send his poll numbers sliding and eventually lead to his defeat at the polls? We have to fall back on the old “too soon to tell” adage, but consequences abound from this debate.  

FUNDRAISING
It is not unusual for a campaign to push for donations after a good debate performance. What is unusual is the amount the Harris/Walz campaign has raised. In the first 24 hours, it took in $47 million from 600,000 people. Both numbers are extraordinary. This haul will only widen the fundraising gap with the Trump/Vance campaign. Coming into September, Harris had $404 million cash on hand, while Trump had $295 million. Every penny counts in what will be a $2+ billion election, the most expensive ever.

VIRALITY 
For most of my long career covering presidential politics, once a debate was over, that pretty much was it. You could read about it or maybe see a few clips on television a day or two after. But little of anything beyond that.

Now, the debates — and just about everything else — live in perpetuity on social media. Memes, TikTok videos, and bits by late-night hosts are being viewed and shared by millions of people. Trump’s most cringeworthy moments will never die. These viral videos are quick and engaging by design, with no context — not that you can put “pet eating” into context. Trump’s rambling incoherence is tailor-made for such things. 

NO MORE DEBATES
After the debate, Harris said that she and Trump owe it to the electorate to debate again. No surprise, he disagreed. Trump has unequivocally stated, in all caps, on social media, “There will be no third debate.” The word unequivocally and Trump do not usually go hand in hand, so he might mean it, or it could be the opening salvo in a negotiation for another debate. 

Trump has never met a camera he didn’t want to get in front of, so his refusal to debate again is telling. Harris would likely benefit from another debate since she is still working to tell her story and crystalize her policies. 

TAYLOR SWIFT
Normally when a politician receives an endorsement from a celebrity, it’s a nice gesture, but that and $5 will get you a coffee at Starbucks. As we have said, this election is the opposite of normal.

The endorsement from pop superstar Taylor Swift was more than a gesture. Her backing of the Harris/Walz ticket came with a request from Swift to her 283 million Instagram followers to be sure and register to vote, with a link to the government website vote.gov. Twenty-four hours after the endorsement, more than 405,000 people had visited the site. It usually gets about 30,000 hits a day. In a race this close, that many potential new voters, in the right places, could nudge the needle.

At the MTV Video Music Awards the night after the debate, Swift again made a voter registration pitch, this one live during an acceptance speech, to a demographic Harris badly needs: young people. 

FOCUSING ON THE WRONG THING
A seemingly desperate Donald Trump announced yesterday the launch of “World Liberty Financial,” a crypto-currency platform. He said he will give a “state of crypto” address on X. 

Really? Now? Seems like he has more important tacos to make. Perhaps that’s the point. He can’t focus on things that actually matter to the voting public, so he is trying to distract them with things that make no difference to most Americans, but make him seem to be a big-shot businessman. This comes on the heels of his media company losing billions in value when the stock tanked after the debate.

LIES CAN BE HARMFUL
Certainly an unintended consequence of the debate is what has happened in Springfield, Ohio, a city made infamous by Trump’s dangerous lies about Haitian immigrants eating residents’ pets. In the debate’s wake, a bomb threat caused the evacuation of two elementary schools and the closure of a middle school. 

The mayor of Springfield believes the threat was a direct result of the baseless claims made first by vice presidential candidate JD Vance and repeated on the debate stage by Trump. 

In a shockingly candid op-ed in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove, the Republican campaign strategist, had nothing good to say about Trump’s performance. “But there’s no putting lipstick on this pig,” he wrote. “Mr. Trump was crushed by a woman he previously dismissed as ‘dumb as a rock.’ Which raises the question: What does that make him?”

It makes him vulnerable. Another unintended consequence. And it becomes even harder to predict where this race is headed.

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Dan