The Debate: A real Person Vs. a Cardboard Cutout.
Who won the debate between President Trump and Kamala Harris? If the debate had been held as part of a college debating contest, the answer would have been Harris. But that is not the situation here. To evaluate this debate correctly, we need to put it in the right context. That context was an opportunity for tens of millions of Americans to get their first look at Kamala Harris.
What did they see? The same sort of smarty-pants girl everyone hated in fifth grade. Yes, she could answer the teachers questions, but her smug, smirking body language, her contempt for President Trump and his supporters and her Stepford Wife mechanical perfection were huge turn offs. People complain that Mr. Trump does not act Presidential, but compared to Harris’s endless mugging for the camera he was a reincarnation of George Washington. The debate left most viewers with a new understanding of how she became the Democratic Party’s candidate: she is and always has been a DEI hire.
As for President Trump’s performance, he was what he always is, namely someone who says whatever comes into his head at the moment. Fortunately, his instinct-driven words are usually right. Especially important here were his warnings about our policy of escalation in Ukraine, where we appear likely to take another step up the ladder by allowing strikes with U.S. and NATO-provided missiles into Russia itself. As Mr, Trump said, we are moving toward a nuclear World War III.
As other commentators have noted, Mr. Trump failed to take the offensive when he should have, reminding the audience over and over that a vote for Harris is a vote for four more years of the Biden Administration, but with cultural Marxism on steroids. He could have pounded her on issues such as forcing all Americans to buy electric cars, saying American troops are not fighting anywhere in the world (Syria, Iraq, and off the coast of Yemen are apparently on another planet – and where was the moderators’ fact checking on that one?, as well as her plans to condition children in cultural Marxism in all schools, as her running mate, Governor Waltz, just did in Minnesota.
But these criticisms are all overwhelmed by the most powerful impression viewers took away from the debate. That impression is that President Trump is a real person while Kamala Harris is a cardboard cut-out.
Tens of millions of Americans like President Trump because he is real. The fact that he says whatever comes into his head makes him real. That is more important than what he says.
In contrast, Harris was a cardboard cutout of a past peron, a cutout created, shaped, instructed, and propped up by an army of highly paid consultants, image polishers, and programmers. Everyone saw that she was as programmed as Chatty Kathy, the doll with a ring in its back that, if you pull it, makes the doll talk. She had been drilled endlessly in the likely questions and had memorized all the answers. The viewers who wanted to see this new person came away empty. As with Oakland, California, there is no there there.
An old political rule is, you can’t beat something with nothing. President Trump is real, Kamala Harris is not. So who won the debate? President Trump, in a landslide.