If you told your teacher you had “concepts of a plan” for your essay, they would say that’s not good enough. So why does a presidential candidate have no plan for America?
In a debate that was supposed to be between two presidential candidates rationally presenting their policy goals for the future of America, former President Donald Trump came to the debate against Vice President Kamala Harris with neither rationality nor policies.
Trump responded to a question about whether he had a plan to fix healthcare by saying, “I have concepts of a plan.”
When Harris noted that 16 Nobel laureates said his poor economic plans would increase inflation and cause a recession, he tried to attack Harris as the one without any economic strategy.
“She doesn’t have a plan,” he said. “She copied Biden’s plan … She doesn’t have a plan. Take a look at her plan. She doesn’t have a plan.”
Minutes earlier, Harris had explained her economic strategy to raise up the American economy with a $50,000 tax deduction for small businesses and a $6,000 tax credit for new families to help support their children.
Her economic strategy stands in stark contrast to Trump’s lack of understanding of basic economic concepts. He said he would raise tariffs on China to 20% to force China to pay more money.
However, most economists say that the bulk of the costs are passed onto the consumers making everyday goods more expensive, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Tariffs are not the only thing Trump doesn’t understand, as he appeared unable to distinguish between political asylum and mental asylum by saying that immigrants were “pouring into our country … from mental institutions and insane asylums.”
After a somewhat rocky start to the debate, Harris began to get under his skin.
She mocked the fact that people leave his rallies early. Trump responded by saying he has “the most incredible rallies in the history of politics” and people “don’t go to [Kamala’s] rallies. There’s no reason to go.”
He only unraveled from there, attempting to explain to moderator David Muir that “In Springfield [Ohio], they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
In response, Muir had to tell a potential future president of the United States that there were, in fact, “no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”
This racist, made-up story was just one of the many examples of fear-mongering that Trump used throughout the debate rather than address any real issues.
Trump responded to a question about abortion by saying that in some states it’s legal to “execute” babies in the ninth month of pregnancy or after they’re born.
Moderator Lindsey Davis had to tell Trump there are no states where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born. Additionally, the CDC estimates that the percent of abortions during the ninth month of pregnancy is so small it rounds to 0%. Even in the few cases of abortions in the ninth month, it is almost always to protect the mother’s life.
At one point, he couldn’t even separate his attempts to rile up his base into different statements, culminating in the wildest sentence of the debate: “She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”
By this point, Trump seemed to have hit rock bottom. He had completely lost the calm demeanor that Chris Christie, a former governor of New Jersey who helped prepare Trump for the 2016 debates, said would be key to his winning. Trump grabbed a shovel and started digging.
He backtracked on his earlier admittance that he knew he lost the 2020 election by saying he was being sarcastic, and he still believed he won the election.
Later, Harris baited him by saying that world leaders laughed at him and that she believed he didn’t have “the temperament or the ability to not be confused about fact.”
He took the bait hard, launching into a rant about how world leaders don’t laugh at him because Viktor Orban, the autocratic prime minister of Hungary, loves him.
“Look, Viktor Orban said it. He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump,” Trump said.
When it comes to cozying up to dictators, Trump won in a landslide. He refused to express support for Ukraine to win its war against Russia, instead saying it would be better if Vladimir Putin were “sitting in Moscow much happier than he is right now.”
By the end of the debate, Trump appeared to have even forgotten who he was debating against when he tried to answer a question about Ukraine by saying, “We have a president who doesn’t know he’s alive.”
This prompted Harris to inform him, “You’re not running against Joe Biden. You’re running against me.”
The clearest difference between Harris and Trump was their visions for the country in their closing statements. While Harris said she intended to “build back up our country,” Trump called America “a failing nation … that’s in serious decline.”
Two candidates came to the stage Tuesday: one with a clear vision for the future of this country, and one bringing nothing but fear. With a shocking-even-for-him debate performance, it’s clear that right now, it’s Trump who’s in a serious decline.