Episode 750: The Presidential Debate – Who Won?

Published Sep 13, 2024, 5:13 AM

Newt analyzes the presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris. Newt observes that Harris focused on style over substance, while Trump emphasized key issues like the economy and immigration. The debate was marked by perceived bias from the ABC News moderators, who appeared to be more supportive of Harris. Despite Harris's polished presentation, Newt argues that Trump effectively addressed the core concerns of voters, particularly on economic issues. Polls taken after the debate suggest that while Harris performed well stylistically, Trump gained ground on substantive issues, reflecting a divide between elite opinions and those of the general public.

On this episode of New World, I want to talk about the presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris Calliss, and I watched it with great interest. As you can imagine, I'd been a lot of debates in twenty twelve when I ran for president, I participated in debates as an observer, going all the way back. I guess my first debate was Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy in nineteen sixty. I was intrigued with what was going to happen. I knew that Vice President Harris had taken basically a week off to hide and to train, and I was curious whether that would help her or heard her, and I have to confess, I think it helped her. She was well prepared within certain boundaries. She was pretty well trained about how to look and how to sound, and it took a while for me to realize what the challenge was. She could do very well in style, but she did very badly on substance, and the question was whether in the long run, style carries you past substance. Trump, on the other hand, came in I think very prepared to make certain key points, and frankly, I think he figured as long as he made those key points, the rest was irrelevant. So his polling and every polling I've seen, the number one issue in the country is the economy. And I must say, in the one brief moment where the ABC moderators were neutral, they actually opened my asking about the economy. I'll come back to that. But Trump figured out if he stayed on the economy and drove it hard enough, if he stayed on immigration and drove it hard enough, that those were the number one and number two issues, and they were the things that would move voters, and in particular that the economy, when tied to fracking and energy policy, would dramatically move Pennsylvania. So you had two remarkably different strategies. I think that Kamala Harris's people knew that she could not win on substance. She couldn't win the performance argument on substance because in the end, every pole indicates people thought they were better off under Trump than they have been under Biden. And she couldn't win the defense of her policies argument because in a number of areas she's far far more radical than the country. So she had to focus on style. And I'm going to play for you in a second her opening answer, because it sort of captured what she was trying to do. But I want you to notice how it's set up the moderate and I have to say that David Muir and Lindsay Davis were the most biased, most destructive moderators I think in the history of presidential presidential debates, and interestingly, to such a degree that I really thought of it as the ABC News Kamala Harris team, that Trump was in fact competing with three people now with one, and that they operated with remarkable mutual support. You may think I'm using strong language in describing an ABC News Kamala Harris team, but I want to explain to you the context that would lead me to believe that that's true. As The New York Post reported, quote ahead of next month's presidential debate and ABC News, a potential conflict of interest is raising eyebrows. Dana Waldon, a senior Disney executive whose portfolio includes ABC News, is one of Vice President Kamala Harris's extraordinary friends. According to report The New York Times, Walden and Harris have known each other since nineteen ninety four, while their husbands Matt Walden and Doug Imhoff have known each other since the nineteen eighties. Dana Walden has donated to dozens of Democrats and contributed to Harris's political campaigns since at least two thousand and three, when she ran for district attorney in San Francisco. At the very beginning, to his credit, David Muir ask about a very specific thing and says to Vice President Harris, first of all, thought it was a good question about the number one issue for the American people. But in addition, it put her on the spot because it basically said yes or no, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago? Now we're down to substance, not style, And I want you to listen to her answer. It's a little bit long, but it gives you a flavor of how she's trying to dance around.

Begin tonight with the issue that voters repeatedly say is their number one issue, and that is the economy and the cost of living in this country. Vice President Harris, you and President Trump were elected four years ago, and your opponent on the stage here tonight often asks his supporters, are you better off than you were four years ago? When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off that they were four years ago.

So I was raised as a middle class kid, and I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America. I believe in the ambition, the aspirations, the dreams of the American people, and that is why I imagine and have actually a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy. Because here's the thing. We know that we have a shortage of homes and housing, and the cost of housing is too expensive far too many people. We know that young families need support to raise their children, and I intend on extending a tax cut for those families of six thousand dollars, which is the largest child tax credit that we have given in a long time, so that those young families can afford to buy a crib, buy a car seat, buy clothes for their children. My passion, one of them is small businesses. I was actually my mother raised my sister and me, but there was a woman who helped raise us. We call her our second mother. She was a small business owner. I love our small businesses. My plan is to give a fifty thousand dollars tax deduction to start up small businesses, knowing they are part of the backbone of America's economy. My opponent, on the other hand, his plan is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in five trillion dollars to America's deficit. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump's sales Tax, which would be a twenty percent tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result for middle class families in about four thousand dollars more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.

Well, as you can see from that answer, she immediately drops into identity. She drops into the only person on stage whose middle class. She drops into her mother's role, a woman who helped raise she and her sister and so forth. But in fact, she never answers the question does she think people are better off than they were? And she can't answer the question because she knows seventy percent believe they're worse off today than they were under Donald Trump. And that's why the substance issue is what Trump is trying to get to. There's also fascinating sort of parallel she's dancing around. So, for example, she says.

Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.

Well, that's true. We had been through a worldwide pandemic and the economy virtually collapsed for about three months, and the Trump administration adopted a program of enormous incentives to get the economy growing again. And as they left office, the economy was taking off. But it was a little clever to blame him for unemployment caused by the COVID epidemic. And you see these kind of things going on all evening. Now. In the end, Trump comes back again and again, sometimes a reach, talking about illegal immigration, talking about the economy, and interestingly making probably the funniest, strangest come of the evening, where he talks about cats. Listen to Trump for just a second, talking about the threat from illegal immigrants to cats is Springfield.

They're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating they're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country.

And it's a shame.

Now that went viral for some reason, people who weren't sure about all the details and complexities, they could get the cat issue. And there are very funny memes about Trump and cats all over the place. But on the other hand, it also means a lot more people are going to learn about Springfield, Ohio, and they're going to learn about Aurora, Colorado. And if you ask people, do you believe that the crime levels up, and do you believe that millions and millions of illegal immigrants is a problem. Trump is in fact right where they are. And I'll come back because it's one of the things that the elites least understand about the Trump pattern, that Trump is willing to be wrong on small things if he gets your attention to big things. And it's the big things that have made him so formidable campaigner and so formidable a political leader. So part of what I think made the debate really hard was the degree to which the ABC newspeople were totally biased. So listen for a second to Donald Trump talking about abortion and the Democrats being radicals on abortion and he initially refers to the governor of West Virginia. He says later he meant the governor of Virginia. But listen to this answer by him.

The reason I'm doing that vote is because the plan is, as you know, the vote is.

They have abortion in the ninth month.

They even have and you can look at the governor of West Virginia, the previous governor of West Virginia, not the current governor is doing an excellent job, but the governor before he said, the baby will be born, and we will decide what to do with the baby. In other words, we'll execute the baby. And that's why I did that, because that predominates because they're radical. The Democrats are radical in that. And her vice presidential pick, which I think is a horrible pick, by the way, for our country because he is really out of it. But her vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it's an execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born, is okay.

And that's not okay with me. Hence the vote. But what I did is.

Something for fifty two years they've been trying to get Roe v wade into the states, and through the genius and heart and strength of six Supreme Court justices were able to do that. Now I believe in the exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother. I believe strongly, and it Ronald Reagan did also. Eighty five percent of Republicans do exceptions very important. But we were able to get it, and now states are voting on it, and for the first time, you're going to see, Look, this is an issue that's torn our country apart for fifty two years. Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote.

And that's what happened. Happened.

Now, Ohio the vote with somewhat liberal, Kansas the vote with somewhat liberal, much more liberal than people would have thought. But each individual state is voting. It's the vote of the people now, it's not tied up in the federal government. I did a great service in doing it. It took courage to do it, and the Supreme Court had great courage in doing it, and I give tremendous credit to those six justices.

Now then gets an immediate intervention from ABC News, and Davis says.

There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born.

Now, I just want to stop right here and point out to you what she just said is explicitly false. There are, in fact, states where there are babies who die after they're born. And the former governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, did in fact say, quote third crimester abortions are done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that's non viable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what happened. Northam, a pediatric neurosurgeon, told Washington Radiosation w TOP the infant would be delivered, the infant would be kept comfortable, the infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desire, and a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother. So here you have ABC intervening specifically about something where they are factually false. But it gets worse. Trump talks about rising crime and the way the whole thing is set up. You have David Muir correcting Trump by saying.

That in Trump. As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is actually coming down to this country.

Now, the fact is the FBI crime statistics are wrong. People know they're wrong because the biggest cities no longer report crime. So it looks great because you don't have New York, you don't have San Francisco, you don't have Chicago. But at a common everyday level, virtually nobody in America believes that the country's safer, and in fact, almost everywhere they believe that there are a greater So even worse than Candy Crowley intervening when she was the debate moderator and getting Mitt Romney off balance, you now have a direct argument in which Mure has replaced Harris as the opponent. So you then go stage further. You have the funniest part of the evening, I think, which is Trump asserting that illegal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio or eating dogs and cats, Mure coming back and saying, oh, that's not true. Listen to this exchange. Remember again, this is not Kamala Harris debating Trump. This is Mure debating Trump in Springfield. They're eating the dogs, the people that came in.

They're eating the cats they're eating, they're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame as far as the.

Rallies are concerned.

As far as the reason they go is, they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great against very simple phrase, make America great again. She's destroying this country and if she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success will end up being Venezuela on steroids.

I just want to clarify here. You bring up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.

All seeing people on Tellivien, let me just say, this is the people on television.

My dog was taken and used for food.

So maybe he said that, and maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager.

I'm not taking this from televison.

People are television to say man dog was eaten by the people that went there.

Again, the Springfield city manager says there's no evidence of that.

What I want to report is we have been looking at Springfield, Ohio, and we've discovered for that, there's no question that variety of animals are being eaten. There's a whole report of immigrants who are eating geese. For example, there's a report from Canton, Ohio, not Springfield, of a woman who was arrested for eating a cat, and that was a story which went viral, and I suspect, giving the way Trump gathers information, that's part of it. And there are television stories about this, so it's almost a setup. Yours says they talked to the city manager, so clearly they wanted to ask him about this to be able to report to him what the city manager said, to which Trump of course blows it off. Now that became probably the most viral single thing tells you a lot about American politics, that it's cats and dogs that actually broke through, not Ukraine, not Gaza, not inflation, but somehow the imagery involving cats and dogs. Then you have again an argument in which Mure and Trump are arguing, and I want you to just listen to it for a second, just to understand that Mure has replaced Harris as the opponent.

Are you now acknowledging that you lost in.

Twenty twenty I acknowledge it at all.

You say that sarcastically. You know that, and we said, oh we lost by a whisker. That was said sarcastically. Look, there's so much proof. All you have to do is look at it. And they should have sent it back to the legislatures for approval. I got almost seventy five million votes, the most votes any sitting president has ever gotten. I was told if I got sixty three, which was what I got in twenty sixteen.

You can't be beaten the election.

People should never be thinking about an election as fraudulent.

We need two things. We need walls we.

Need and we have to have it. We have to have borders, and we have to have good elections. Our elections are bad.

And a lot of.

These illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. They can't even speak English, they don't even know what country they're in practically, and these people are trying to get them to vote, and that's why they're allowing them to come into our country.

I did watch all of these pieces of video. I didn't detect the sarcasm lost by Whisker. We didn't quite make it, and we should just point out here as clarification. And you know this, You and your allies sixty cases in front of many judges.

Many of them judge looked at it, and so they said we didn't have standing. That's the other thing they said, we didn't have standing a technicality. Can you imagine a system where a person in an election doesn't have standing? The President of the United States doesn't have standing. That's how we lost. If you look at the facts, and I'd love to have you do, you'll do a special on it. I'll show you Georgia, and I'll show you Wisconsin, and I'll show you Pennsylvania and I'll show you We have so many facts and statistics. But you know what, that doesn't matter because we have to solve the problem that we.

Have right now. That's all news.

And the problem that we have right now is we have a nation in decline, and they have put it into decline.

We have a nation that is dying, David.

So what do you see again and again is that the ABC moderators in fact become participants. It's like a tag team. And so you have the ABC News Kamala Harris tag team against Trump. Now, Trump's number one assignment was to not blow up in a way that would allow that to be the story, because everybody in the Trump camp knew that what the Harris people wanted desperately was to prove that Trump was unstable, that he would lose his temper, that he would be unfit to be president. And I frankly found it funny watching him all evening because he wouldn't look at her. He looked straight ahead, He didn't want to engage emotionally, and he looked almost like he was posing for that spot on Mount Rushmore. He was very stone faced, tried to stay very sober. The one time she did get to him was suggesting people left his rallies and that for some reason broke through and for a brief moment he was totally off script, but then he got back on script. So while this is all happening, while he's being fact checked, the ABC newsletters never fact check her, and she gets away of saying things that are just explicitly untrue. She uses the Project twenty twenty five that was done by the Heritage Foundation, which Trump has explicitly repudiated and says it's not true, and it's not his and he's not going to do it. She claimed that Putin would be sitting in Kiev with his eyes and the rest of Europe if Trump were president. The fact is, the one American president where Putin has not invaded anybody was Donald Trump. Putin, in fact invaded his neighbors under George Bush, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden, but did not take any steps like that while Trump was president. Again and again, Harris would exaggerate, distort, or just plain lie about Trump's position. She also claimed that there are currently no active duty troops in any combat zone anywhere in the world for the first time in the century, which, of course, if you watch the news, you know that's not true. There are American troops in Iraq, their American troops in Syria, their American troops in Jordan. We've been attacked by the Iranians. There are sailors deployed who are faced both with Huthi Yemen rebels and the Red Sea, and are potentially faced in the Persian Gulf. Earlier this year, three US soldiers were killed on the border of Syria, by Iran backed forces. So what she said is, I don't want to say it's a lie. I just think that she's that misinformed or that uninformed. She went on to say that she wouldn't take away anybody's guns. Now, she has campaigned on banning AR fifteens and other guns of Democrats call assault weapons. She's come out of times for compulsory buybacks. So I think that nobody checked her about any of these things. So what you end up with is Trump is constantly being blocked, not by Harris but by ABC News, and then she is being protected by ABC News, which refuses to check her on anything. Now, what was surprising to me was, I think the best way to think of this is to think of it as almost like a boxing match. She came in, I think did very well in style that she clearly had thought it through. They clearly had done training with video, and she wanted to project a certain look, a certain positiveness, a certain assertiveness, and I think she did much better than most Republicans expected. Problem was they couldn't solve any of her substance problems, any of the things where the issues really matter to people. Trump did the option. Trump came in determined to pound away at her. If you read the transcriptor if you watch the debate, he goes back again and again and again to inflation, to the economy, and to legal immigration, and just keeps going at her on these things over and over, to such a degree that in the CNN poll which set overall she did very well in the debate, she lost and went from thirty five percent thought she could be effective on inflation dropped to thirty three percent. Now, thirty five was already a problem, thirty three is worse. But remember this is the number one issue to the American people. So what's happening is a little bit like a prize fight, where she's a dancing boxer who wants to reach out and fight a long fight where she tries to win by hitting the opponent in the head. Trump is operating like a clinch boxer who wants to get in close and then hammer away at her body so that she gradually weakens. If you watch boxing matches, you'll see that if you get hit over and over and over, gradually even very strong boxers suddenly have a real problem. Well, Trump understood he only had to win on two or three things. He didn't have to win on twenty But if he could win on who's strong enough to keep us safe? If he could win on who will actually control the border and therefore also bring down crime, and if he could win on who has a plan for the economy, then everything else becomes noise because that captures more than enough people to win the presidency. And I would suggest that, in fact, he had done pretty well exactly what they needed to have done. The fact is, first of all, the big loser of the debate was ABC News. It was very telling that Megan Kelly, who herself had been involved in a very tough fight with Trump in twenty fifteen, aggressively when after ABC this is what she said on X I am ashamed of those moderators at ABC News. They did exactly what their bosses wanted them to do. Person runs ABC News is a close personal friend of Kamala Harris, that is responsible for Kamala and her husband meeting. She just continued to talk about that ABC did everything I could to work with Harris and the Saint Trump. No matter what you thought about the debate and about the very subdued and disciplined way Trump went in and the way in which the ABC News Kamala Harris team operated against him. I want to suggest to you that there's a larger world beyond the elites now. I learned this in the very first Trump debate in twenty fifteen, when Calliss and I were sitting watching and Trump got in a very nasty personal fight with Megan Kelly, and at the end of the debate, all of the elites on television the talking heads said Trump had lost. Remember at this point, he's a brand new candidate, he's never run before. But we were going online looking at a variety of the kind of things where people get to list how they feel, and I noticed that in six or seven different poles. These are not scientific polls. These are just people get to express themselves. But with thousands of people voting, that Trump was getting consistently seventy percent of the vote in a field of sixteen, and it suddenly hit me the gap between how the average American was reacting to Trump and how the elites were reacting to Trump. So as you think about this most recent debate, let me just share with you some polling that I picked up overnight. The Trafalgar Insider Advantage pole before the debate, they had the race tied at forty seven. After the debate, they had the race tied at forty eight advantage Sea Span, which is a place I don't think of as the center of MAGA Republicans. C Span had one hundred and thirty five thousand people vote. They picked Trump seventy four point nine to Harris twenty five point one. The Democracy Institute said that forty five percent people they interviewed thought Trump had won and thirty four percent thought Harris had won. Twenty seven percent were more likely to vote for Trump after the debate, twenty four percent more likely to vote for Harris, so he had a net plus of three. A CNN poll was the one which said fifty five percent of voters said Trump would handle the economy better than Harris. Thirty five percent said the reverse. That twenty point margin is wider than prior to the debate. Now twenty point margin on the most important issue of the voter is a huge advantage for Trump. The Washington Poster course did something kind of weird. They asked twenty five specific swing state voters and shock got a shock. For The Washington Post. They favored Vice President Harris twenty three to two. On the other side of the spectrum, the conservative channel Newsmax asked its conservative viewers who won and got ninety three percent Trump to six percent for Harris. Finally, there's a website called Wall Street Silver had thirty five thousand, seven hundred and thirty eight votes, eighty four percent for Trump, sixteen percent for Harris. Now, I just think these are glimmerings. I don't think their final story. But my sense is that on the things that didn't matter, Harris did pretty well. In the ABC News Harris team did pretty well. On the things that mattered to people, she got beaten badly. And I have a hunch that as you watch over the next two weeks, you will see this outcoming. In the next few weeks, I'll report to you as we learn more about what's going on. Newts World is produced by Ginglish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Henley. Special thanks to the team at Gingridge three sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up from my three free weekly columns at gingrichthree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is newts World

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