Trump could have been sharper, but if Harris ‘won,’ it’s because bar for her is low | Opinion

Any analysis of Tuesday night’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be seen through our individual political lenses. It is a given that Trump voters will smile on his performance while Harris supporters will think well of what she brought to the stage.

But are there observations that are objectively true? I’ve searched for some, from my own reactions and those of others, across party lines. You could say the findings are mixed.

The first thing I should probably do is give credit to the candidate I oppose. The vice president, prone to unfathomable meanderings when sharing thoughts on the fly, brought a focus that served her well. I disagreed with virtually everything she said, of course, but there were no meme-worthy word salads ripe for instant mockery, so that’s progress.

If linguistic discipline was the order of the day for Harris, Trump supporters sought attitudinal discipline at the prospect of a prime-time beatdown of a woman if he got too aggressive. But as he did against Joe Biden on CNN in June, as the president blinked in and out of coherence, Trump managed to keep the sharp elbows largely restrained, at least in terms of personal attacks.

If anything, even though Trump spared no sharpness in his observations on the Biden/Harris track record, some supporters think he left some ammo in the chamber. My main wish list item was a focused description of why the immigration bill he opposed was so unacceptable. It would not have been hard to say: “The bill allows far too many asylum applicants before border closure kicks in” or “The addition of more border agents is meaningless if all they do is rubber-stamp arrivals and send them on their merry way with a court date years down the road.”

It would have been additionally useful to clap back against Harris’ redeployment of the worst smear in presidential debate history, the Charlottesville “both sides” hoax that even liberal fact-checkers have dismantled. As Biden did in June, she falsely asserted that Trump extended moral approval to supremacists and neo-Nazis in attendance, rather than to the opposing sides of the confederate statues debate which was the obvious source of his quote.

Other falsehoods filled the air, from the fake linkage of Trump to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and misapplication of his “bloodbath” quote, to the assertion that he incited the Jan. 6 mob even though he called on protesters to march “peacefully.” And with such loaded suppositions coming from both Harris and the ABC moderators, one might observe that there was only so much time on the clock for Trump to repel all of them.

I rarely assert that a debate has been won or lost, a usage best reserved for sports contests where victory and defeat occur without nuance. In debates, one candidate might do better than the other. In this case, an assessment of Tuesday night runs into the buzzsaw of the expectations game.

If Trump was not hitting on every cylinder, that is lower than the expectations some might have had in view of his practiced aggressiveness and her broad avoidance of normal campaign-trail questioning.

If Harris’ night was free of any mangled syntax, that is an achievement well above expectations found even in her own party.

So, does that mean she had the better night? Only if we hand out trophies for performances that manage to avoid disaster. Is that where the bar is set?

The first question asked her if Americans were better off after her term with Biden. Her non-answer filled the entire time allotment. At no point did she make an argument that explained her various convenient issue pivots or justified the value of the leftist views she has chosen to keep.

Trump, meanwhile, made frequent references to our open border, our wrecked economy and the dangerous world he feels would overwhelm her. If those solid observations were clouded by collective amazement at the vice president’s momentary communicative adequacy, I guess that’s the way the debate analysis business goes these days.

Attention now turns to a second debate. The notion that Harris wants a chance for redemption after a bad night is understandable Trump-camp bluster. The reality is that a fawning media chorus now sings of her rhetorical mastery, and if her own appreciable ego is lapping it up, she might be thinking another beneficial night awaits.

And it may. Debates are always unpredictable, so we’ll see if Trump is up for a rematch. I would hope so, and after two appearances on networks that hate him, I would hope the next one would be on Fox News. At least there he would face only one opponent.

Mark Davis hosts a morning radio show in Dallas-Fort Worth on 660-AM and at 660amtheanswer.com. Follow him on X: @markdavis .

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