ABC Presidential Debate: Part I

Trump said almost nothing about what he plans to do. Harris was no better.

Post-debate analysis is a blooming, buzzing confusion of twittering heads. Whose body language projected more confidence? How many times did each candidate attempt an interruption? How unfair were the moderators? Did Trump exaggerate? Did Kamala lie?

It’s not that I think this noise is useless—not exactly. But not all of us have time to parse every one of Trump’s chin-thrusts or Kamala’s eye-rolls. It is much more important to look at what each candidate promised the nation. What would their respective visions mean in practice?

I have decided to split the task in two. Today I’ll go over Trump’s plans; tomorrow, Harris’s.

Yes, Kamala won…

First, I do have to say something about the immediate question on everyone’s lips: Who won? Many newspapers survey undecided voters, mostly with very small sample sizes, such as The Washington Post’s measly 25 participants. Of more value are betting markets. Those showed a post-debate bump for Harris—though the race remains more or less a coin-flip.

If you watched, you saw why betting behavior changed. Harris’s performance was not strong, but Trump’s was worse. In fairness, he had to debate Harris and both moderators at the same time. But he also fell into several Loony-Toons traps. During a discussion of issues on which Harris was notably weak (fracking and gun-rights) she began by asserting that Trump’s rally-goers were leaving early, bored, and confused. Trump became visibly angry. His blustering response allowed Harris to squirm out of answering the question. This pattern repeated itself throughout the night.

Trump has a checkered debate history. In the 2016 CNN snap poll, Hilary beat him 62 to 27. In 2020 it was the same, with Biden beating Trump 60 to 28. This year Trump did slightly better (63 to 37), but broadly in the same range. Of these polls, the only debate he ever won was against a barely-cognizant Biden.

…But Who Cares?

Remember though, that Americans know Trump by now. They don’t really know Harris, who avoids interviews and didn’t even have to run for her nomination. Possibly, her reasonable performance will help her. Harris’s strategy up until now is what I call the “empty pantsuit” con. She knows she’s a DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) hire without any real ability, and her past positions were well outside the American mainstream. There are also her recent position changes, such as on fracking, which Trump could have made much more of if he were a competent debater. But she calculates that if enough people dislike Trump, all she has to do is smile, wave, and wait until election day. It’s not the worst strategy, although antithetical to healthy democratic functioning.

The debate tested this: She actually had to appear on stage, for 90 minutes, with someone other than a court sycophant. She wasn’t even allowed to bring Tim Walz with her. She was alone, except, of course, for the moderators. And she passed the test.

The CNN audience above emerged with slightly higher opinions of her than before. The Trafalgar poll of swing-state voters showed that they agreed with the CNN audience: Harris won the debate.

And yet the Trafalgar poll also showed only a miniscule change with respect to voting intentions. Before the debate, Trump was up by 0.6%; post-debate, he was up by 0.3%.

It's true that Trafalgar is a Republican-leaning pollster, and it’s also true that minute improvements can make a major difference in close elections. But a difference that small can probably be ignored as noise.

Republican Takeaways

I make no secret of the fact that I hope Trump wins. Since he doesn’t seem hellbent on destroying Western Civilization, he comfortably clears the subterranean bar set by the Democrats. As such, on Tuesday night, I was hoping to hear some policy proposals. After all, this might be his last chance to tell the whole nation what he is planning.

I was disappointed. Trump said almost nothing about what he plans to do. Harris was no better.

The Economy

Trump started reasonably well. He argued for new tariffs on foreign goods. It is time, he said, for the world to pay America back. Recent statements suggest Trump would impose a 10% tariff across the board, while tariffs on Chinese products would be much, much higher (perhaps 60%). Harris called these a “sales tax on the middle class”. There is some truth in what she says. Producers in China and elsewhere won’t pay those large sums; importers will pass them onto the consumer. Tariffs raise prices for the public. It is bad economics to claim, as Trump does, that foreigners pay them.

However, Trump’s tariffs do three important things. First, raising the price to American consumers of Chinese products isn’t going to be good for the Chinese economy, and the Chinese economy needs to do well for its people to continue putting up with the scourge of its communist party. Second, these taxes, like most taxes, raise large sums of money. In this case, perhaps a trillion dollars over four years. A trillion here, a trillion there—we’re talking about real money. Finally, these tariffs may help to revive American manufacturing.

It is no surprise, then, that rust-belt Democrats such as Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey are also in favor of tariffs. And other Democrats, too. As Trump pointed out, the Biden-Harris administration could have canceled the tariffs that he had put in place in his first term—yet, of course, they did not.

The second key plank in Trump’s economic platform is curbing harmful immigration. He sensibly believes in win-win immigration—immigration that benefits both the immigrant and the host nation. But he also knows that opening the U.S. Southern border to vast numbers of immigrants has been both economically and socially deleterious. Republicans instinctively know what Democrats have long since convinced themselves is heresy: when immigration runs out of control, as it has in the past three and half years, social cohesion, trust, and patriotism are replaced by antagonism, suspicion, and ethnonarcissism. And crime, the companion of radical migration policies, isn’t cheap. So here Trump is clearly right.

Trump made other proposals, but they are vague. A look at the GOP platform is not terribly illuminating, though help yourself if you so wish. Nonetheless, Trump’s record of cutting taxes and deregulation speaks for itself.

The Right to Life

After the economy chat, the debate moved onto the second (and last!) area where either candidate got close to laying out specific plans. Trump, the moderators pointed out, once called himself “the most pro-life president”. But what does Trump really think about abortion? It’s hard to say. Even I don’t think that what he says and what he thinks on this issue are very strongly correlated.

Trump is glad that the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade, but he is not going to diverge from opinion polls. He staunchly supports what he calls the “exceptions” to pro-life policies. Unborn babies deserve the protection of the law—unless, for example, their parents are too closely related. In those cases, they have personhood conferred upon them only at birth. The logic is strange, but the position is popular. Trump has even managed to purge the GOP platform of most pro-life language. Only late-term abortions are opposed there now.

The moderators, predictably, pushed him for more specifics on the matter. I discerned three positions. First, he is content for the matter to stay with the states. Second, he is in favor of various exceptions to protections for the unborn. Finally, he seems genuinely uncomfortable with late-term abortions, and recognizes how evil the Democrats have become on the matter. I have written about Tim Walz’s extremism on this issue before. Trump focused instead on Ralph Northam, the former governor of Virginia. If you have an iron stomach, you can read about it, but the short version is that Northam wanted laws allowing doctors (in consultation with mothers) to deal with babies accidentally born alive during abortions as they pleased, as long as the babies were “kept comfortable” during whatever happened.

Trump exaggerated, as he is prone to do. Doctors in places such as Minnesota most likely allow babies born accidentally to die of dehydration or of their wounds. They do not, to my knowledge, slice up the babies once born. So, when Trump spoke of “executions”, Harris’s moderator allies stepped in. Infanticide is illegal, Mr. Trump. Now let’s talk about something else. He should not have let them snare him on a technicality. He ought to have held his ground.

Foreign Policy

A few differences on foreign policy stood out:

1)        Trump believes vastly more government and military employees should be fired when they fail. The Afghan debacle was foremost in his mind. Shockingly, he said, Biden fired no generals over it. Trump would behave differently.

2)        Trump would use the military to defend the border.

3)        He would secure the nation against electoral subversion from abroad.

4)        He would tighten sanctions on Iran.

5)        Trump would end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

The last proposal was jumped on by Harris. Ending wars is great, except if it is done by losing them. Trump, true to form, argued that his presence would be enough to bring these conflicts to a close, perhaps before he even took office. The claim is not as implausible as you might think. Ronald Reagan’s election brought an end to the Iranian hostage crisis—they were released minutes after he was sworn in. Trump is no Reagan, but Biden has been like an older, feebler Jimmy Carter.

As president, Trump got America through four years without getting embroiled in new wars. He deserves great credit for that. Nonetheless, it bears repeating that it is unstatesmanlike for him to insist that voters just need to trust him. Donald Trump does not remember what he never learned: That the president is a servant of the American people, that they are his employer, and that he owes his employer a clear account of what he will do if he is re-hired.

Nevertheless, as I will explain tomorrow, we don’t really have another option.