It’s always frustrating watching Donald Trump debate, because you never know where he’s going to go with an answer. Sometimes he does just fine, other times he takes the bait and missed opportunities to really damage his opponent. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, brought nothing to the table. She could have, with just a few answers, addressed what people actually care about this election cycle in a way that would have helped her immeasurably. She did not, and in many ways she could not. Because of that, she lost, which means – at least by default – Donald Trump won.
Let me say from the start, I thought Trump won from the beginning, and wrote it at the time. That being said, he could have really knocked her out and ended the race with a better performance. Hear me out.
Harris had no answers, only platitudes. Right off the bat, Kamala lost by refusing to acknowledge the fact that people are not better off than they were four years ago. That she was so unprepared for such an obvious question is a testament to just how bad her handlers are.
Rather than admitting reality and offering up some BS line about how things have gotten better than they were at their worst, and how she’s got a plan to finish that job, she slipped into biography. Who cares if she “grew up middle class”? Can people feed her biography to their kids?
Yet, that’s all she offered – an attempt to identify with middle class voters by pretending to have been middle class.
In reality, she’s the privileged child of two Ph.D. students who became college professors after moving to the United States to get those degrees. Poor kids from the third world don’t have the money to move around the globe to get advanced degrees that lead to tenured positions. In other words, Kamala Harris was about as “middle class” as her husband was faithful to his first wife.
People smell the BS, and they noticed non-answers. What makes Trump so effective of a communicator is not that people think he can relate to them – he can’t, he’s always been rich – it’s that he isn’t BSing them. Yes, he exaggerates and tells “fish stories” about certain issues, but they’re always exaggerations, not lies. His economy was great, especially compared to the Biden/Harris economy, but it wasn’t the greatest economy ever. So what? People forgive exaggeration, they’re less forgiving of lies.
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Kamala Harris lied, a lot.
There's only two moments that mattered in that debate. The first question to Harris about being better off was answered with the following, “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 for 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 $6,000, 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 $50,000 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 $5 trillion to America's deficit. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that Trump's sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 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.”
There was nothing in there remotely related to the question, and people noticed. People tuned in because of this. After two months of ducking the question and a week from prep, she had nothing. Having a nanny or someone else help raise you while your mom worked is not endearing and won’t fill up anyone’s gas tank. Short-term tax credits for certain behaviors are not tax cuts. It couldn’t have been a worse answer if I’d deliberately set out to draft one for her – THE issue people care about most, the one that moves their votes, and she whiffed like a drunk at the driving range.
The other moment, the one a good answer as the start could have helped defuse a little, was Donald Trump’s closing statement. It was simple, yet to the point and really the point of the whole campaign. Trump said, “So, she just started by saying she's going to do this, she's going to do that, she's going to do all these wonderful things. Why hasn't she done it? She's been there for three and a half years. They've had three and a half years to fix the border. They've had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn't she done it?”
Why hasn’t she done it? Or at least pushed for it? It’s a valid question, and an easy one to answer: she doesn’t care. She’s not going to push for something she doesn’t support or believe in, she’s just hoping enough people buy it to shift the election.
But people who don’t have the cynical understanding of how Democrats work can still see through the fog and wonder this very same thing. If Kamala Harris has the cure for what ails us, why is she keeping the details of it secret? Why is us getting the details of how to spare people from economic suffering contingent upon her obtaining power? Will she take these secrets to her grave if we don’t elect her?
The truth is she has no answers, there is no secret. All she has is spin and lies. While that might play with ardent pro-abortion voters on that issue, everyone who has that as their top issue has already made up their mind to vote for Democrats. But people who want to remain in their houses or keep feeding their families…they didn’t hear anything other than “You don’t know how good you’ve got it” from the Vice President.
That attitude and her answer on the economy are what will be remembered in a week, if not sooner. That is why Kamala Harris lost. And Kamala Harris losing is why Donald Trump won. It makes sense, if you think about it for a second.
Derek Hunter is the host of a free daily podcast (subscribe!) and author of the book, Outrage, INC., which exposes how liberals use fear and hatred to manipulate the masses, and host of the weekly “Week in F*cking Review” podcast where the news is spoken about the way it deserves to be. Follow him on Twitter at @DerekAHunter.
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