President Trump delivered a vintage debate performance last night, taking on not only Kamala Harris, but ABC’s two debate monitors, David Muir and Linsey Davis, whose hostile questions and fact-checking primarily, if not exclusively, were directed at the 45th President. The 45th President displayed a masterclass in polemics to over 50 million viewers – with fair-minded commentators ranking it among one of the President’s best.
He repeatedly drilled down on the issues that matter to voters this election season – above all, Kamala’s catastrophic border crisis, which has unleashed tens of millions of criminal invaders into the country with impunity, bringing lethal drugs like fentanyl as well as unprecedented barbarity, including drug cartels and human trafficking, which have no analogue in American history.
The tenor of the President’s remarks and style were apropos of the gravity and extraordinarily high stakes of this election cycle: fierce yet reserved, intense yet thoughtful, serious and sober. In sharp contrast, Kamala Harris reeked of juvenility and weakness throughout, nervously trying to cackle herself out of uncomfortable situations addressing problems for which she is chiefly responsible. This includes the outbreak of the Ukraine War that observed Vladimir Putin send troops into Eastern Europe just three days after she was tasked by Joe Biden to broker peace in the region.
This was in response to Putin sensing her weakness, a point that President Trump stressed, as well as observing just months prior to Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. The catastrophic pullout directly caused the deaths of 13 American troops and left millions of dollars of equipment behind for dangerous terrorists to swoop up – this country’s greatest foreign policy blunder in living memory.
Moreover, the President dealt another haymaker when he excoriated Kamala’s mismanagement of the border when she was designated as the Biden administration’s “border czar.” The President pulled no punches when he declared, “[The migrants are] eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” referring to an influx of recent Haitian arrivals in Springfield, Ohio, who have been reported – and corroborated by a police report, despite the gaslighting of ABC’s erroneous “fact-checkers” – to be eating American pets, bringing the barbaric and uncivilized practices of the Third World to these shores.
Speaking of third-world barbarity, the President delivered another blow to Biden and Harris when he attacked their record on the economy, which has resulted in inflation at record-setting levels, sabotaging the jobs market and resulting in the slowest growth in both the stock market and growth domestic product since the Great Recession. The damning jobs report, recently put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed that last quarter the Biden-Harris regime created some 1.2 million jobs, but those jobs were incredulously, exclusively for foreign laborers – many of whom are illegally domiciled here. Meanwhile, native-born American citizens have lost 1.3 million jobs – an unmitigated disaster.
On these statistics, the President held Kamala’s feet to the fire. “Kamalanomics is killing the American Economy!”, the President declared. “When I left office, I handed Kamala a surging economy. Mortgage rates were around 2%. Gasoline was $1.87/gallon. Incomes surged. Kamala blew it all up.” All true.
President Trump then succinctly captured just how disastrous the policies of the Biden-Harris administration have been for the economy: “If she becomes president, this country doesn’t have a chance of success. Not only success, we’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.”
In addition, President Trump did a stellar job articulating the fact that Kamala Harris’s policies are dangerously liberal: she is a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist. He adeptly dispelled any doubt as to her radical beliefs by delineating the origins of her extremist philosophy: “She’s a Marxist, everyone knows that, her father is a Marxist professor in economics, he taught her well.” In this line, he made reference to Kamala’s father, Donald Harris, who was a professor of economics at Stanford for many years, a specialist in Marxist economic theory – that, through her daughter, have demonstrated the disastrous practical implications of such theories through the policies Kamala and Biden have enacted over the past three and a half years.
These policies include price controls, higher taxes, and handouts for illegal aliens. Furthermore, they include her radical plans to socialize medicine and eradicate private insurance; introduce central bank digital currencies, replicating the CCP’s system of assigning social credit scores; and phasing out fracking, oil, and gas, in pursuit of crippling electric vehicle mandates, putting the United States on the road to serfdom.
The President’s closing statement was maybe his knockout punch. He asked a very simple question: why hasn’t Kamala Harris, who has been serving as Biden’s vice president for the last three and a half years, been unable to deliver on any of the promises she proposed on the debate stage?
“They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border,” President Trump said, “three and a half years to create jobs – and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t she done it?”
It was that final line that will remain in the minds of the 50 million viewers watching last evening. And this was observed in post-debate polling: when asked who won the night, Newsmax found that 93% of its audience believed President Trump won, compared with just 6% for Harris. Even C SPAN, a neutral network, found that 83% of its audience believed the 45th President had won the evening’s debate, compared to just 17% for the Vice President.
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Among CNN’s audience, when asked who would better handle the economy, President Trump’s numbers improved after the debate. Entering the night, 53% of CNN’s left-leaning audience thought President Trump would do a better job handling the economy compared with 37% for Harris. After the debate, President Trump’s numbers increased to 55%, and Harris correspondingly dropped to 33%.
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American voters are intelligent enough to cut through the nonsense. It is for this reason that Harris immediately begged President Trump, as he was wrapping up post-debate interviews, for a second opportunity to debate him. Among Pennsylvania voters, President Trump’s remarks performed especially well. His points about saving fracking and mass deportations resonate with this mostly blue-collar audience, who – like large swathes of the Rustbelt region – have been especially devastated by globalist policies that have outsourced their manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico, and India and eroded their culture with mass immigration at home.
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As a globalist herself, Kamala Harris is the mouthpiece for Washington’s failed ruling class – the likes of which also include Dick Cheney, the chief architect of the disastrous Iraq War, whose endorsement she bizarrely welcomed on stage. In this she revealed herself to be the establishment candidate, embodying the same ruling class that has brought endless wars and untold economic ruin upon this nation over decades.
The fact that President Trump made a concerted effort to appeal to the constituency most harmed by destructive neoliberal and globalist policies last night, in particular, was a brilliant move – for it will be states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin that ultimately decide this election, much as they did for him in 2016. These voters are naturally drawn to the President’s plans to close the border and prioritize America’s interests, as well as his rabble-rousing, no-holds-barred rhetoric that has endeared him to hundreds of millions of Americans, who to this day turn out by the tens of thousands to his rallies wherever he goes.
On that appeal, the President was a smashing success, looking every bit the part of vintage 2016 Donald Trump, who famously pierced the blue wall and shocked the political world by defeating Hillary Clinton, the face of the Washington Swamp, on a very simple yet powerful message: to Make America Great Again.
After last night, he looks poised to do it again.
Paul Ingrassia is an Attorney; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.