‘The End of Our Country’: Trump Paints Dark Picture at Debate
Former President Donald J. Trump offered a dire portrait of America, often relying on false and debunked claims as he described “a failing nation.”
For most of the 90-minute debate between former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the former president bellowed into the microphone, practically spitting at moments as he took the bait time and again and got knocked off his goals.
Instead of repeatedly tying Ms. Harris to President Biden and forcing her to own their record, Mr. Trump came off as angry and scattered as he painted a dark portrait of an America ravaged by crime, overrun by dangerous undocumented immigrants who eat pets and at risk of falling into the hands of an opponent he falsely called a Marxist.
“Our country is being lost,” Mr. Trump said, timing its latest decline to the moment he left the White House. “We’re a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War III.”
He brought up Springfield, Ohio, and reiterated a debunked claim that his campaign has been pushing that Haitian immigrants there have been eating pets. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “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 during a discussion of abortion, Mr. Trump claimed, falsely, that some states with Democratic governors favor being able to “execute” babies after they are born. “In other words, we’ll execute the baby,” he said. No state allows infanticide.
Fear-mongering, and demagoguing on the issue of immigrants, has been Mr. Trump’s preferred speed since he announced his first candidacy for the presidency in June 2015, and he has often found a receptive audience for it. He won his first election in 2016, and lost his second, without dramatically changing his approach; both races were decided in three battleground states by fewer than 100,000 votes. At his inauguration in 2017, he spoke of “American carnage.”
But since he left office, after lies of widespread election fraud costing him the 2020 race and a mob of his supporters attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump’s public comments about the state of the country have grown only darker.
Many of the lines he delivered at the debate were straight from his rally speeches, but they landed somewhat differently on the debate stage — with no live audience at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia — and with millions of people who do not routinely follow his campaign appearances tuning in. And they mostly lacked the accompanying beats Mr. Trump tries to deliver at rallies — the moments when he mentions his own tenure or pivots to a promise to bring prosperity to voters.
Mr. Trump needed to paint Ms. Harris as responsible for the pain that voters have described feeling. Instead, he described a bleak America and talked about himself.
Mr. Trump did occasionally sprinkle in references to his time in office, and he tried to bring the conversation around to the economy and immigration, two issues where his advisers believe, and polls show, that he has an advantage. After struggling at first when pressed about his position on abortion and his role appointing justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, he pushed back in a way his advisers liked by questioning how late into a pregnancy Ms. Harris thought abortions should be allowed (she did not answer). And he pressed hard on the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which precipitated Mr. Biden’s drop in support.
He mocked her for flip-flopping on positions, saying: “Everything that she believed three years ago and four years ago is out the window. She’s going to my philosophy now. In fact, I was going to send her a MAGA hat. She’s gone to my philosophy. But if she ever got elected, she’d change it. And it will be the end of our country.” And then he blew past the stop sign: “She’s a Marxist. Everybody knows she’s a Marxist. Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics. And he taught her well.”
One of his best lines came only when the debate was nearly over, in his closing statement, when he asked why Ms. Harris had not accomplished all of her goals during the three and a half years she has been in office.
That argument had been what Mr. Trump’s advisers had coached him to say in a handful of debate preparation sessions that they had studiously avoided calling debate preparation sessions, preferring to describe them as “policy time.” They had hoped he would look directly at the camera and ask voters if they were better off now than they were four years ago.
Instead, for the most part, Mr. Trump was rattled by Ms. Harris as she took digs at people leaving his rallies early, his inherited wealth and his criminal indictments and legal troubles to describe him as interested only in himself.
He grew visibly angry and, to his advisers’ dismay, shambolic, as he tried to rebut her attacks instead of answering the moderators’ questions or pressing the points he had set out to make. When he did respond to questions posed to him, it also did not go especially well. He again litigated his false claims of widespread election fraud, defended his widely criticized performance during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, refused to rule out signing a national abortion ban and repeated his questioning of Ms. Harris’s racial identity (she is Black).
Ms. Harris, who has been trying to project an optimistic message based on freedom — including reproductive freedom and economic freedom — did not join Mr. Trump in his description of what the country needs.
“The people of our country actually need a leader who engages in solutions, who actually addresses the problems at hand,” Ms. Harris said as she criticized Mr. Trump for his role in killing a bipartisan bill that she said would have addressed border crossings. “But what we have in the former president is someone who would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
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