Marble Falls Former President Trump may act the fool, but he knows when he’s beat, and it’s time for a quick retreat. He may summon up a straight face to pretend that he “won” the debate with Vice-President Harris, but he’s just playing to the cheap seats. The rest of us can hear the “cluck-cluck” from here. It’s the cry of a chicken. Trump is clear he doesn’t want to get in the ring with Harris again for debate. He’s found, to his peril, that it’s a loser for him, so why take the chance.
There’s a lesson here that he actually probably suspected, but couldn’t avoid and didn’t have the discipline to parry and meet. He’s been in enough courtrooms over the last couple of years and throughout his career to know, you don’t try to take on the prosecutor. Let your lawyers do that. It’s a different skill set. Harris, as a former district attorney in San Francisco and Attorney General in California, knew instinctively from her career experience how to meet Trump and take the fight to him. And, she did. She pulverized, confused, and wrong-footed him at every turn.
The two-handed pundits have a post-debate problem. They’re clear Harris won the debate, but they want to still harp on the issue of getting more details on her program and her candidacy. How ridiculous! When you are in the lion’s den and have seen what happened to Clinton and, more recently, to Biden, you don’t want to be meat and caught up there describing yourself, you want to attack and slap the lion back. A debate is not a panel discussion on policy, for goodness sakes. The Republicans concede that Harris won as well, but they try to hang their hats on this policy hook, which allows the columnists and influencers to parrot their whining, as if it has merit. They do so, even as Trump himself indirectly acknowledges the fact that policy was not on the agenda when he said at one point that he “had the concept” of a policy on health care.
For the new merchants and the undecided voters, there are a host of ways over the next eight weeks to get to know more than they might want to about Kamala Harris. A debate is not the place. Harris and Trump knew that intimately. A debate is about scoring points, winning and losing, holding your own, and more. When Trump knew Biden had embarrassed himself in their debate, he had enough discipline for a change that he kept his piehole shut and let Biden wallow in the aftermath. Harris is doing the same thing to Trump now. He’s on the run, and he knows it, just like he’s smart enough to know that he needs to keep out of the ring with prosecutor Harris from now until November 5th, if he even hopes to have a chance of winning, because she makes him look like a Debbie-downer loser when they are face to face.