No matter else Kamala Harris is doing to prep for her debate with Donald Trump on Tuesday, she’s already proven that she is aware of tips on how to deal with his provocations: Swat them away just like the small, acquainted gnats they largely are.
“Usual, drained playbook. Subsequent query, please,” was all Harris needed to say when CNN’s Dana Bash requested her on Aug. 29 about Trump’s asininity that Harris had chosen to “flip Black,” and it was all his diss deserved. Trump’s entire schtick, together with the race-baiting, has gotten tiresome, even for some voters who twice supported him. And that’s how Harris ought to react: She’s bored with his tripe; aren’t we? All the higher for her, the incumbent vice chairman, to drag off the trick of seeming like a contemporary change agent subsequent to America’s loopy uncle, its barstool bigot.
One factor’s for sure: The tableau of the 2 nominees onstage shall be a far cry from the oldsters face-off between Trump and President Biden in June. Trump was horrible in that encounter however Biden was worse, addled and searching older than his 81 years.
Trump didn’t beat Biden, for all his shameless hawking of remnants of the “knockout go well with” he wore that evening. Biden beat Biden. Now Harris must carry her prosecutorial greatest to Philadelphia, let the few undecided voters get extra aware of her, present some coverage chops and never take his bait. Let Trump beat Trump.
Merely ignoring his performative bullying has limits, nonetheless. Harris, we are able to hope, will rating factors with a well-executed clapback or three, placing Trump on his heels or upsetting him into an unhinged tirade, or each. Among the many nice what-ifs of previous presidential debates was Hillary Clinton’s failure to problem Trump as he stalked her throughout their city hall-style showdown in 2016.
As Clinton later wrote in a memoir, “Irrespective of the place I walked, he adopted me carefully, gazing me, making faces. … My pores and skin crawled. It was a kind of moments the place you would like you possibly can hit pause and ask everybody watching, ‘Nicely, what would you do?’ Do you keep calm, preserve smiling and keep it up as if he weren’t repeatedly invading your house? Or do you flip, look him within the eye and say loudly and clearly, ‘Again up, you creep.’”
I can’t neglect watching that scene, wishing like so many ladies for the latter response — for Clinton to spin on her heels and verbally put the creep in his place.
For the second time in three presidential bids, Trump, the misogynist in chief, confronts a girl as his rival, and now a girl of shade as well. Some other male candidate must take care to not be offensive or patronizing. However not Trump. In-your-face affronts are his M.O., and his voters like it. That and aggrievement. He’s whined for weeks that he’s not dealing with Biden once more, muttering nonsense about how Democrats staged a coup. Now he confronts this sensible, vibrant girl he’s by no means even met. I odor concern.
When Bash expressed shock within the CNN interview that the 2 had by no means met, Harris merely nodded. That was a missed alternative.
Within the debate, she ought to take any such opening — or create one — to level out that she and Trump have by no means crossed paths for good cause: Trump is the primary president because the nineteenth century to skip his successor’s swearing-in. The sore loser took his marbles to Mar-a-Lago quite than witness the Biden-Harris inauguration on the Capitol, two weeks after his supporters’ failed revolt there.
Within the weeks after Biden dropped out of the race, Trump fulminated and threatened to skip debating the president’s alternative. Harris taunted him at her raucous rallies, with that snigger that so will get beneath his skinny pores and skin: “Because the saying goes, in the event you acquired one thing to say, say it to my face.”
A bit taunting is sweet. On Tuesday, she may faculty Trump on tips on how to pronounce her identify. If he trots out his new nickname for her, “Comrade Kamala,” she may come again with a bemused put-down of the dated Chilly Warrior rhetoric, and word the irony of Vladimir Putin’s pal calling her “comrade.”
Trump will certainly repeat his stump-speech assaults on Harris for flip-flopping on long-past liberal positions, comparable to her 2019 opposition to fracking, which is essential in battleground Pennsylvania. After a fast counter — say, about how her present stances characterize applicable compromise now that she’s been within the authorities for practically 4 years — how about slamming Trump for his nonetheless pinballing positions on abortion?
The policy-phobic Trump is bound to serve up unresponsive phrase salads to questions on substantive points, like his two-minute gibberish on the New York Financial Membership Thursday to a question about tips on how to make youngster care inexpensive. It’s price watching the entire thing to see him inanely conflate the nation’s tariff revenues (utilizing false claims) with households’ youngster care prices. (“We’re going to be taking in trillions of {dollars} and as a lot as youngster care is talked about as being costly, it’s comparatively talking not very costly in comparison with the form of numbers we’ll be taking in.”) In brief, he has no clue.
Trump’s falsehoods about his report are so acquainted that Harris must be well-prepared with concise fact-checks , as Biden wasn’t, particularly on points such because the economic system and immigration, the place he has an edge.
Puncture his pompousness. Get out the fly swatter for the gnats. Cue the snigger. However most of all, present the persuadable voters what a severe presidential candidate seems to be and appears like.
