Ahead of Tuesday night's presidential debate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave Vice President Kamala Harris advice on how to "rattle" former President Donald Trump—and her words paid off given how much Harris succeeded.
On Saturday, three days before the highly anticipated event, Clinton said in a New York Times interview that Trump would employ "a scorched-earth approach and will just try to tear her [Harris] down, which is his usual go-to strategy.”
Then she pointed out exactly what Harris should do to throw Trump off his game:
“She just should not be baited. She should bait him. He can be rattled. He doesn’t know how to respond to substantive, direct attacks.”
Clinton is well aware of this, given Trump’s tendency to interrupt his political opponents during debates. When she ran against him in 2016, the election cycle was partly defined by the moderators' struggles to manage Trump's confrontational style.
In a September 2016 debate against Clinton, Vox found that Trump interrupted her 51 times, including 25 interruptions in the first 26 minutes. Clinton interrupted Trump 17 times during the same debate.
And four years later, according to The Washington Post’s The FixThe Fix, Trump was responsible for over three-fourths of the interruptions during a 2020 debate, while Biden accounted for the remaining interruptions.
Clinton even pointed out in a 2016 tweet in which she quoted herself how easy it is to "bait" Trump.
To illustrate her point, Clinton referenced an October 2016 debate moment when she labeled Trump a “puppet” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, using it as an example of how to highlight Trump’s vulnerabilities:
“I mean, when I said he was a Russian puppet and he just sputtered onstage. I think that’s an example of how you get out a fact about him that really unnerves him.”
Harris clearly took Clinton's advice.
Early on, Trump did indeed "sputter" after Harris suggested his rallies are so boring that his own supporters are leaving them, which of course miffed a man with a historic obsession with crowd sizes who as recently as last week said it's "virtually impossible" to speak at rallies so long without anyone leaving.
Rather than talk about policy—which his GOP allies have begged him to do for weeks—Trump spent minutes of valuable airtime defending the entertainment value of his rallies.
And things only unraveled further from there as Trump jumped from one angry, outlandish claim to the next.
At one point, Trump even claimed that Harris believes in abortion "after the ninth month," repeating the outrageous claims that blue states allow an abortion to be performed after the baby is born—which would be murder. There is no state, nor has there ever been, anywhere in this country that allows babies to be killed after they're born.
And perhaps most egregiously, Trump promoted the unfounded allegation that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were consuming dogs and other household pets in response to a question about immigration:
"They're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame."
All of these statements—and more—served as crystal clear examples of Trump's willingness to traffic in misinformation, especially as it pertains to a nation he once infamously described as a "s**thole country."
So it paid off—and many were willing to give Clinton credit where credit is due.
According to a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS, registered voters broadly agree that Harris outperformed Trump. The poll also indicated that she exceeded both debate watchers’ expectations for her performance and those for Biden’s earlier debate against Trump.
Debate watchers favored Harris over Trump by a margin of 63% to 37% in terms of performance during the debate. Before the debate, voters were evenly split, with 50% predicting Harris would perform better and 50% predicting Trump would.
After the debate, 96% of Harris supporters felt their candidate performed better, while 69% of Trump’s supporters believed he had a stronger performance.
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