While everyone is understandably focused on Democrat President Joe Biden’s complete disaster of a performance in Thursday evening’s debate, gone missing in the post-debate analysis is just how effective his Republican opponent former President Donald Trump was in his own showing.
Trump, from the get-go, had a clear message he hammered Biden with all night: That Biden “has done a poor job” as President and life was better for Americans during Trump’s administration. And from the first few minutes of it, Trump had effectively framed the conversation on terms that were his: the discussion was about the economy, and Trump inserted into that talk of Biden’s failed withdrawal from Afghanistan and Biden’s open borders immigration policies. But even when the debate and conversation moved into areas that are typically Democrat strengths and GOP weaknesses, Trump swatted away concerns and moved deftly through a coherent policy vision while Biden struggled to score points on things like abortion and January 6 and the various hoaxes against Trump over the years.
The debate opened on the biggest issue facing the country—the economy—and Biden struggled from the get-go with the first question, offering a frail defense of how bad things are now by blaming Trump, but Trump in his first answer deftly laid out how the economy was very strong until COVID came in and then when he left office he gave Biden a mostly-recovered economy.
“We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We have never done so well. Every – everybody was amazed by it. Other countries were copying us,” Trump said, per CNN’s rush transcript of the debate.
He continued:
We got hit with COVID. And when we did, we spent the money necessary so we wouldn’t end up in a Great Depression, the likes of which we had in 1929. By the time we finished—so we did a great job. We got a lot of credit for the economy, a lot of credit for the military, and no wars and so many other things. Everything was rocking good. But the thing we never got the credit for, and we should have, is getting us out of that COVID mess. He created mandates – that was a disaster for our country. But other than that, we had – we had given them back a – a country where the stock market actually was higher than pre-COVID. And nobody thought that was even possible. The only jobs he created are for illegal immigrants and bounce-back jobs, they’re bounced back from the COVID.
In Biden’s next answer, the current president noted the former president gave Americans the largest tax cut in history while also trying to claim Trump did not actually have the greatest economy in history.
Trump took what Biden said in his response and then used it against him, a tactic he would employ all evening. “The only thing he was right about is I gave you the largest tax cut in history,” Trump said. “I also gave you the largest regulation cut in history. And that’s why we had all the jobs.”
Trump also in those opening moments was able to immediately insert the worst moments of Biden’s presidency, the deadly withdrawal from Afghanistan, getting it right out there front and center in people’s minds. “As far as Afghanistan is concerned, I was getting out of Afghanistan, but we were getting out with dignity, with strength, with power,” Trump said. “He got out, it was the most embarrassing day in the history of our country’s life.”
Seconds later, when Tapper was pressing Trump on spending during his administration, Trump effectively blamed COVID for it—and then shifted the conversation to Biden’s open border policies. Speaking of the “damage” Biden has “done to our country,” Trump told the moderators: “I’d love to ask him… why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails, and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country.”
It was downhill for Biden—and uphill for Trump—from there. When the moderators next pressed Biden on the national debt, his nonsensical answer ended with a flub that may seriously haunt him with seniors throughout the year when Biden said, “We finally beat Medicare.”
In response, Trump seized on Biden’s mistake saying Biden is “right” and flipped the Democrats’ attacks on Republicans over Social Security and Medicare right back in Biden’s face again using immigration as a wedge to do it.
“He did beat Medicare. He beat it to death. And he’s destroying Medicare because all of these people are coming in, they’re putting them on Medicare. They’re putting them on Social Security. They’re going to destroy Social Security,” Trump said. “This man is going to single-handedly destroy Social Security. These millions and millions of people coming in, they’re trying to put them on Social Security. He will wipe out Social Security. He will wipe out Medicare. So he was right in the way he finished that sentence. And it’s a shame.”
At the end of that answer, Trump then slipped in a brutal attack on Biden saying that he gives other countries everything they want and that nobody respects America anymore, and wrapped it with this zinger: “What this man has done is absolutely criminal.”
Sensing how terribly it was going for Biden, the CNN moderators then tried to throw the Democrat a lifeline by shifting the conversation abruptly to abortion—but Trump was ready for that, too. Asking Trump if he takes credit for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and then pressuring Trump on if he would ban the abortion pill, Trump flipped the whole into an argument on Democrats’ extremism on abortion and—with Biden’s help—migrant crimes against women.
After explaining how he would not block the abortion pill, and laying out the problems with Roe v. Wade and where he stands on exceptions to abortion bans and how he believes states will make their own rules, Trump then ripped Biden with former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s Democrat plan for infanticide.
“The problem they have is they’re radical, because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth – after birth,” Trump said, continuing:
If you look at the former governor of Virginia, he was willing to do this. He said, we’ll put the baby aside and we’ll determine what we do with the baby. Meaning, we’ll kill the baby. What happened is we brought it back to the states and the country is now coming together on this issue. It’s been a great thing.
Biden, in response, stepped into a major trap that Trump exploited immediately. “Look, there’s so many young women who have been – including a young woman who just was murdered and he – he went to the funeral,” Biden said.
Biden continued:
The idea that she was murdered by a – by –by an immigrant coming in, and they talk about that. But here’s the deal, there’s a lot of young women who are being raped by their – by their in-laws, by their – by their spouses, brothers and sisters, by – just – it’s just – it’s just ridiculous. And they can do nothing about it.
Trump seized on the opportunity Biden gave him, shifting the conversation to migrant crimes. “There have been many young women murdered by the same people he allows to come across our border,” Trump said before emphasizing again his view that the states are deciding abortion policy. “We have a border that’s the most dangerous place anywhere in the world – considered the most dangerous place anywhere in the world. And he opened it up, and these killers are coming into our country. And they are raping and killing women, and it’s a terrible thing.”
Over the next couple questions, Biden would not delineate any restrictions on abortion he would accept—and Trump zoned in on this and hammered him for extremism. “So that means he can take the life of the baby in the ninth month and even after birth, because some states – Democrat-run – take it after birth.,” Trump said over protests from Biden that fell on deaf ears. “Again, the governor – former governor of Virginia: put the baby down, then we decide what to do with it. So he’s in – he’s willing to, as we say, rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby. Nobody wants that to happen.”
After Biden lost on abortion in the debate, the moderators then moved on to immigration where Biden gave an answer to the question of why voters should trust him to solve it that was so incoherent that Trump took his first major stab at Biden’s well-being on stage in response. “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence,” Trump said. “I don’t think he knows what he said either.”
Trump in his answers here was extremely well-prepared, as one could expect, since immigration policy is his wheelhouse.
“Look, we had the safest border in the history of our country,” Trump said in part. “The border – all he had to do was leave it. All he had to do was leave it. He decided to open up our border, open up our country to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, insane asylum, terrorists.”
Trump also correctly noted that the National Border Patrol Council union of Border Patrol officials endorsed him, not Biden as Biden falsely claimed moments earlier, but the line about terrorists getting in under Biden stuck with the current president, who tried to argue with Trump on this in his reply. But Trump during rebuttal broadened his criticism of Biden to argue the current president is causing large-scale death.
“He’s the one that killed people with the bad water, including hundreds of thousands of people dying and also killing our citizens when they come in,” Trump said of Biden.
He added:
We – we are living right now in a rat’s nest. They’re killing our people in New York, in California, in every state in the union because we don’t have borders anymore. Every state is now a border. And because of his ridiculous, insane and very stupid policies, people are coming in and they’re killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen. We call it migrant crime. I call it Biden migrant crime. They’re killing our citizens at a level that we’ve never seen before. And you’re reading it, like these three incredible young girls over the last few days.
By this point, Biden himself probably even knew how badly it was going, so he tried to next trot out the “sucker and losers” hoax against Trump, which Trump deflected with ease by pointing to other debunked hoaxes like the 51 ex-intelligence community people who claimed Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.
When the conversation shifted to foreign policy, and specifically the Russian war in Ukraine, Trump was again ready with a blistering critique of Biden—catching the president flat-footed and laying out how it is only happening because Biden is incompetent.
“As far as Russia and Ukraine, if we had a real president, a president that knew – that was respected by Putin, he would have never – he would have never invaded Ukraine,” Trump said. “A lot of people are dead right now, much more than people know.”
Later, when Tapper pressed Trump on January 6, Trump was again ready with a zinger that hammered home his intended message.
“Let me tell you about January 6,” Trump said:
On January 6, we had a great border, nobody coming through, very few. On January 6, we were energy independent. On January 6, we had the lowest taxes ever. We had the lowest regulations ever. On January 6th, we were respected all over the world. All over the world, we were respected. And then he comes in and we’re now laughed at. We’re like a bunch of stupid people that – what happened to the United States’s reputation under this man’s leadership is horrible, including weaponization, which I’m sure at some point you’ll be talking about, where he goes after his political opponent because he can’t beat them fair and square.
When Tapper pressed him again, Trump noted that he told people to protest “peacefully and patriotically” then flipped the whole argument on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who turned down Trump’s offer for National Guard troops and admitted in documentary footage recently released that she was responsible for what happened because of that.
“Nancy Pelosi, if you just watched the news from two days ago, on tape to her daughter, who’s a documentary filmmaker, they say, what she’s saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s my responsibility, I was responsible for this,’” Trump said.
He recounted:
Because I offered them 10,000 soldiers or National Guard. And she turned them down. And the mayor of – in writing, by the way, the mayor, in writing turned it down, the mayor of D.C., they turned it down. I offered 10,000 because I could see – I had virtually nothing to do. They asked me to go make a speech. I could see what was happening. Everybody was saying they’re going to be there on January 6th. They’re going to be there. And I said, you know what, that’s a lot of people coming, you could feel it. You could feel it too. And you could feel it. And I said, they ought to have some National Guard or whatever. And I offered it to her. And she now admits that she turned it down. And it was the same day. She was – I don’t know, she can’t be very happy with her daughter because it made her into a liar. She said, “I take full responsibility for January 6th.”
When Biden tried to flip it back at Trump by saying Trump intends to pardon many of the January 6 prisoners, Trump put the heat back on Biden by noting that the January 6 Committee deleted much of its information and that they “should go to jail for that.” That baited Biden into, for the first time, using the attack line that Trump is a “convicted felon” and then when Tapper asked him in response what Trump plans for revenge Trump turned it positive and said, “My retribution is going to be success” for the country.
But then Trump stabbed Biden harder:
But when he talks about a convicted felon, his son is a convicted felon at a very high level. His son is convicted. Going to be convicted probably numerous other times. He should have been convicted before, but his Justice Department let the statute of limitations lapse on the most important things. But he could be a convicted felon as soon as he gets out of office. Joe could be a convicted felon with all of the things that he’s done. He’s done horrible things. All of the death caused at the border, telling the Ukrainian people that, we’re going to want a billion dollars or you change the prosecutor. Otherwise, you’re not getting a billion dollars. If I ever said that, that’s quid pro quo. That – we’re not going to do anything. We’re not going to give you a billion dollars unless you change your prosecutor, having to do with his son. This man is a criminal.
In response, a baffled Biden simply yelled that Trump’s comments were “outrageous” and a “lie” and then tried to trip Trump up by saying he had sex with a porn star, which Trump denied and swatted away. Biden then tried to shift the conversation to Charlottesville. Trump effectively laid out how that one has been debunked too as a recent fact-check from Snopes pointed out.
CNN went to the first commercial break soon after, and then came back with questions about the black community and again Trump nailed it.
“He caused the inflation,” Trump said. “He’s blaming inflation. And he’s right, it’s been very bad. He caused the inflation and it’s killing black families and Hispanic families and just about everybody. It’s killing people. They can’t buy groceries anymore. They can’t.”
This type of back-and-forth—where Trump had in-depth policy-heavy answers that showed compassion for voters while Biden rambled incoherently—continued for the rest of the debate through things like climate policy and the drug epidemic and more. So, while the Democrats feel their way through the very legitimate crisis of confidence they have with their candidate from this point forward, keep in mind that Trump is a uniquely strong candidate for Republicans–and he showed it yet again on Thursday night.