Let’s face it: Donald Trump had a bad night.

The problem was he sounded too much like… Donald Trump. He missed major opportunities to set the record straight. He truncated his sentences so they became almost meaningless unless you knew what he was (or should have been) trying to say. He can get away with that at rallies, though the teleprompters help keep him on track, but not in a live debate.

Question one was about the economy—that was predictable because the number one issue is the economy—and it went first to Harris. The last sentence of the question was: “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” Shades of Ronald Reagan.

Harris produced a long, rambling answer that had nothing to do with the Biden-Harris economy (“I was raised as a middle-class kid . . .”) but was entirely focused on what she (said she) intended to do.

That was a softball question Trump should have knocked out of the park. Instead, Trump spent half his time talking about illegal immigrants. Harris had said Trump planned a sales tax, and Trump took the bait: “First of all, I have no sales tax. That’s an incorrect statement. She knows that. We’re doing tariffs on other countries.” (What does “We’re doing tariffs . . .” mean?)

Then he spent the whole second half of his answer talking about the “millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions, and insane asylums.” Well, maybe, but that wasn’t the question. The question—really a softball question—was about the economy, and he could have buried her. He didn’t.

David Muir, one of the questioners, picked up part of an answer from Trump on tariffs and asked Harris why the Biden administration had kept a number of Trump’s tariffs in place. She didn’t answer the question, and when Trump responded, he never mentioned that she hadn’t answered the question but called her (and her father) a Marxist and then pivoted to the illegal immigrants again—“criminals” pouring into the country. Another missed opportunity.

Abortion was next. Trump said, inter alia, that the governor of West Virginia (he meant Virginia, not West Virginia) was in favor of allowing the execution of babies after they were born. Following his answer, the other questioner, Lindsay Davis, said, seemingly to correct Trump, that there is no state in the country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born. Trump hadn’t said there was; her comment was a gratuitous criticism meant to embarrass Trump.

The next question was about the border: “Why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?” Harris pivoted to the bill that Congress didn’t pass and, in 390 words, blamed Trump for the bill’s fate.

Muir then tried to get Trump to say why he had tried to kill the bill—but the original question was why the Biden-Harris administration waited until six months before the election to act on the border, and Harris hadn’t gotten close to addressing that. Why didn’t Muir ask Harris again? You know the answer.

How did Trump answer Muir’s question? He went off on a tangent about his rallies because Harris had said something critical about them. “People don’t go to her rallies.” Trump just couldn’t stay focused. Then he returned to immigration and said some of the illegals were eating cats and dogs in Springfield—which prompted Muir to say that ABC had been told by the city manager of Springfield, Ohio, that there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community—a completely gratuitous fact-check on Trump.

Trump simply spouted his typical talking points—and the focus on why Biden-Harris has done nothing about immigration (another of the major issues of the campaign) was completely lost.

In a question to Harris about fracking, Harris slipped in that Trump had been handed $400 million on a silver platter and then filed for bankruptcy six times. Trump took the bait and said he was given only a fraction of that amount and built it into “many, many billions of dollars.” A fraction of $400 million is still . . . a lot. Trump might have said his good fortune allowed him to employ thousands of workers.

In answering a question about January 6, Harris said, “Let’s remember Charlottesville, where there was a mob of people carrying tiki torches, spewing antisemitic hate, and what did the president then at the time say? ‘There were fine people on each side.’”

By now Trump should have perfected a response to that attack—which would keep people from making it. Something along the lines of: “The people in Charlottesville were protesting the removal of a historic statue. There were some nasty people in that crowd. But there were also some people who saw value in preserving historic monuments, even of people who were far from perfect. Is Vice President Harris prepared to say, standing here tonight, that there were not even two decent people in that whole crowd? How does she know that? She doesn’t—and she doesn’t even care. She’s just in it for the cheap shot.”

But Trump didn’t have that in him—he doesn’t have it in him. He looked old. And tried. And grumpy.

It was not a good night for Trump. Or for America.

***

Daniel Oliver is Chairman of the Board of the Education and Research Institute and a Director of the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy in San Francisco. In addition to serving as Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission under President Reagan, he was Executive Editor and subsequently Chairman of the Board of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review.

Email Daniel Oliver at Daniel.Oliver@TheCandidAmerican.com.