The perils of a kitchen-sink debate strategy

Trump is getting better polls, but hasn't fixed any of the problems with his message

Last night, we got to hear from Donald Trump on:

• Crime rates in Central American countries

• What Victor Orban thinks

• How, if he got a certain raw vote total last time, he couldn’t lose (not how this works)

• Migrants eating cats (!)

• Crowd size (of course, after taking Kamala Harris’ bait)

We did also hear Trump’s core campaign message on the border, global chaos under Biden-Harris, and why Harris didn’t do anything about the problems she talks about for the last three and a half years. It would have been helpful for Trump if that was all we heard from him—but it wasn’t.

We’re told Trump is a “counterpuncher.” He responds to absolutely everything. He throws the rhetorical kitchen sink at his opponents in these affairs.

That’s not how you methodically dismantle an opponent. And the stakes are higher for him than in most of his previous debates, because he’s going up against an opponent who hadn’t been in the limelight for decades. He needs to be the one to fill in the blanks with a few focused messages that will stick and are memorable, without a bunch of random asides thrown in.

In 2016, Trump had the wind at his back thanks to the baked-in negative perceptions of Hillary Clinton. What he mostly had to do was attach a nickname to these perceptions — Crooked! — and he was off to the races.

Without pre-existing negatives to latch on to, Trump struggled against the soft positive perceptions of Joe Biden in 2020. The first impeachment was all about a ham-handed attempt to latch onto something—anything—that might disqualify Biden.

Trump then appears to do better in the second race against Joe Biden, when huge, pre-existing negatives—age, inflation, the border—had attached themselves to his opponent.

His messaging “genius” is all about branding and marketing existing negative perceptions of his rivals with clever nicknames and edgy rhetoric.

This is not that the race he can run today. The negative case against Kamala Harris is there, but has yet to firmly implant itself in the public mind because she hasn’t had to endure a single withering negative news cycle since getting in the race.

Absent the media doing it, Trump has to do it, but repetition and focus on a few key points are the key.

There’s still time, but the debate stalls any skepticism that was taking root around Kamala’s honeymoon after the New York Times and other polls showed the race nationally back to a dead heat.

In fact, the debate highlights the risk for Trump. The polls got better for him—but without him fixing any of the problems he had in August, when the message against Harris was too unfocused and scattershot.

As in the first debate, Trump was best in the first 15 minutes but then the temptation to go off on side quests kicks in.

When you feel like you have to mention absolutely everything, there’s no time to bear in on what really matters in a sustained manner. How many times did we hear about the knock-on effects of migration on Central American crime rates before we heard the words “border czar?”

By the time Harris’ 2019 answers to the ACLU questionnaire were raised, Trump’s recitation of them seemed of a piece with his other rants, diluting their impact.

So Harris’ true vulnerabilities largely went unexploited. If she’s not Joe Biden, can she tell us about a single disagreement she had with him in the last three and a half years? How exactly has her political philosophy changed since the 2019 campaign? These sorts of questions get fleshed out by sustained questioning by the media, but usually as follow-ups to things a rival campaign have made salient. For Trump, the debate was a missed opportunity to plant the first seeds of skepticism about Harris’ political reinvention.