As my colleague David Corn put it, Donald Trump lost the first presidential debate against Kamala Harris by simply being himself: He spent the night ranting, raving, and peddling his favorite conspiracy theories and untruths.
It was a performance so on-brand for the former president that you could be forgiven for wondering if Trump had relied on an AI-generated script. Meanwhile, Harris successfully baited her opponent into garbled tangents about the size of his rallies.
Harris’ victory on Tuesday was so clear that even Fox News had to accept reality.
“Make no mistake about it: Trump had a bad night,” Brit Hume, Fox News chief political analyst, said shortly after the event. “He lost the debate repeatedly when she baited him, something I’m sure his advisors had begged him not to do. And we heard so many of the old grievances that we’ve long thought that Trump had learned were not winners politically.”
Hume wasn’t alone. As my colleague Noah Lanard reported, several right-wing bloggers and online personalities admitted that Trump had bombed, even after their man pushed some of their worst pieces of misinformation at the debate stage. Lanard writes:
Rod Dreher, a right-wing blogger who moved from the United States to Hungary largely due to his affinity for Orban and the direction he is taking the country, accepted that Trump had lost.
As Trump flailed during his Orban tangent, Harris looked on with a mix of amusement and seemingly genuine confusion. Across the stage was an angry and unhinged old man walking into every trap she laid for him when he was not stepping into ones of his own making.
Denying this was pointless for his fans. So, they turned to a tactic that losers have likely embraced for as long as debating has existed: From Catturd on down they blamed the moderators.
In the aftermath of his disappointing performance, Trump has blamed ABC’s moderators for their “rigged” job, while simultaneously, insisting that it was his “best debate ever.”
“It was three to one. It was a rigged deal, as I assumed it would be,” Trump said, according to the Hill. He added that he’s “not inclined” to participate in another debate before Election Day.
