Donald Trump emerged Wednesday from a rocky debate against Kamala Harris looking to regain his footing with 54 days until Election Day, the first ballots already going out in Alabama and other states on the cusp of early voting.
Not even three months ago, Trump stepped off the debate stage in Atlanta having watched President Joe Biden deliver a disjointed, whispery performance that eventually led the 81-year-old Democrat to end his reelection bid and endorse Harris, his vice president. By the end of Tuesday night, it was the 78-year-old Trump on the defensive after the 59-year-old Harris controlled much of the debate, repeatedly baiting the Republican former president into agitated answers replete with exaggerations and mistruths.
One elected official who perhaps saw this coming before others did, or at least were willing to say it out loud, is Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips (DFL), who called out President Biden in 2022 on WCCO Radio and said it was time for a "new generation". And he backed up those words by challenging the sitting president in the primary before dropping out after Super Tuesday. But it was the start of the end for Biden and set the stage for Kamala Harris to enter the race.
"I can't imagine being an independent voter last night and watching that debate and somehow feeling that Donald Trump would be a more competent, steady and effective leader for the United States of America," Phillips said Wednesday with Chad Hartman on WCCO. "Conversely, I think Kamala Harris surprised a lot of people, myself included."
Phillips has not been shy to say that while he respected Biden, he was clearly past the time where he should run for another term as president. He says now it's clear there is the same issue with Donald Trump.
"You know, now there is one old incompetent man, in the case, and his name is Donald Trump," Phillips says. "And I think that showed quite vividly last night on national television, in a way that none of us could have anticipated."
While clearly supporting Harris' bid, Phillips also points out she still hasn't shown Americans enough about what her presidency would be about, and didn't do enough to answer questions Tuesday. It was obvious her strategy was to get Trump off-topic and upset, but Phillips says she missed opportunities to say more about her plans.
"That my great source of frustration in Washington, is the unwillingness and perhaps inability of people in elected office to just answer a question," says Phillips who is not running for re-election in Minnesota's third district. "And, you know, political pragmatism and self-preservation always take precedence. I would have liked to see her acknowledge that while our macro-economy as is extraordinarily strong, that 60% of Americans are still living paycheck to paycheck and don't feel economically secure, acknowledge that and then present your proposition on how to fix it."
But for Phillips, the performance by Trump was more than enough to prove he's not fit to serve in office anymore.
"You know, anybody who may have criticized President Biden for his physical decline or challenging his competencies or his mental state, and I think it was fair. He is old, he is in decline, but now he's not in the race," Phillips says. "And now one man who's clearly in decline is in the race. I don't know how an American could objectively watch that last night, listen to those words about people eating, I don't know, cats and dogs. It's so bizarre and all I can say is this is a man who's wants to be the president, who will have his hand on the nuclear button, who has to make life and death decisions every single day. And we would expect to be a critical thinker."
Former Minnesota Republican Congressman Vin Weber told a similar story to WCCO's Chad Hartman Wednesday, but adds that Harris did the bare minimum.
"Kamala Harris did the minimum that she had to do and Trump did not," Weber says. "So, I give her a little but I don't think it's a home run. I don't think it's a decisive thing. I don't think the election's over. But I do think that she enhanced her position and Trump did not."
Weber said Harris didn't do nearly enough to re-introduce herself to the American public or clarify the "flip-flopping" she's done on a number of issues.
TRUMP FACES DEBATE FALLOUT
Phillips is far from the only person in Congress, including Republicans, who were less than impressed with Trump's performance.
“We’ll see what the polls say going forward, but I don’t know how anybody can spin this other than a pretty decisive defeat for Trump,” former Rep. Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican who has long been critical of Trump, said Wednesday on CNN.
Harris’ campaign immediately pitched the idea of a second debate. Fox News has proposed an October matchup but with moderators that Trump has indicated he does not prefer. And he said via his Truth Social account Wednesday that there is no need for a second round,
“In the World of Boxing or UFC, when a Fighter gets beaten or knocked out, they get up and scream, “I DEMAND A REMATCH, I DEMAND A REMATCH!” Well, it’s no different with a Debate,” Trump wrote, as he claimed victory. “She was beaten badly last night ... so why would I do a Rematch?”
Trump and Harris were together briefly Wednesday in New York, where they joined President Biden and other dignitaries to mark the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. They shook hands for the second time in 12 hours, with the first coming when Harris approached Trump on the debate stage to introduce herself in the first sign of the aggressive approach she would take during the event.
The former president, who flouted convention with a surprise appearance late Tuesday in the post-debate spin room, continued to insist he had won the night, though he also blasted ABC moderators as unfair. It was a tacit acknowledgement that he did not accomplish what he wanted against Harris.
Trump and some of his allies in online posts speculated about punishing ABC by taking away its broadcast license — the network doesn’t need a license to operate but individual stations do — or denying access to its reporters in the future.
“We had a great night. We won the debate. We had a terrible, a terrible network,” Trump said Wednesday on Fox News. “They should be embarrassed. I mean they kept correcting me and what I said was largely right or I hope it was right.”
Yet his framing of the debate results does not square with the broad consensus of political commentators, strategists on both sides of the political aisle and some immediate assessments by voters who watched Tuesday night. But there is also evidence that the debate did not immediately yield broad shifts among people who watched.
About 6 in 10 debate-watchers said that Harris outperformed Trump, while about 4 in 10 said that Trump did a better job, according to a flash poll conducted by CNN. Before the debate, the same voters were evenly split on whether Trump or Harris would win.
The vast majority of debate-watchers — who do not reflect the views of the full voting public — also said that the event wouldn’t affect their votes in the election. Perceptions of the two candidates remain largely unchanged.
Harris was jubilant late Tuesday, telling late-night rallygoers in Philadelphia that it was a “great night,” even as she repeated that she sees Democrats as “underdogs” against Trump. She won the endorsement of music and cultural icon Taylor Swift.
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu of New Hampshire was more charitable to Trump than some, allowing that Harris won by traditional debate standards but fell short in convincing swing voters focused on their economic conditions.
“The majority of those swing voters are still results driven,” Sununu said on CNN, adding that Trump still has opportunities to sway voters on the economy, immigration and, especially, foreign policy.
That view was certainly the Republican messaging on Capitol Hill, where the GOP is trying to maintain its fragile House majority and take advantage of a friendly slate of Senate contests to flip control of that chamber.
“Undecided voters’ biggest concern about Kamala Harris heading into the debate was the fact that they don’t know where she stands on any issues because of her constant flip flops,” said Mike Berg, the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Senate GOP’s campaign arm. “I don’t think she did anything to fix those concerns.”
Jack Pandol, the communications director for the National Republican Congressional Committee handling the House races said, Harris “still refuses to tell voters what she will do as president.”
Yet even on that score, Trump handed Democrats a cudgel with his answers on health. After twice running for president on promises of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, commonly called “Obamacare,” Trump falsely insisted that he saved the 2010 law. At the same time, Trump stood by his long-standing promises to replace the law with something better but when pressed acknowledged that he still had no specific proposal.
“I have concepts of a plan,” Trump said in a remark that become quick fodder for online memes and merchandise.
Dent, the Pennsylvania Republican, said that answer tracked with how Trump approached the issue during his four years as president. “He would only say ‘we’re going to cover everybody, it’s going to cost less, and it’s going to be beautiful,’’ Dent recalled in his CNN appearance. “There was never any policy to back it up. He just didn’t care about its impact on people.”
Sununu, meanwhile, offered perhaps the most revealing assessment of where Trump stands after the debate. It was not what Sununu said about Trump himself, but about another Republican the governor originally supported in the 2024 primaries: former Ambassador Nikki Haley, who was the last GOP candidate standing against Trump and continued garnering support in primaries weeks after she dropped out of the race.
“Imagine what Nikki would have done in that debate,” Sununu said. “It would have been great.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.