All that the thing on ABC tonight will have in common with a debate is two lecterns and two people…er, ah…one person and a mental health crisis in a jacket that doesn’t have the sleeves tied behind it. Other than that, to call these quadrennial Q&A sessions debates debases the moral and mental acuity of the viewing audience and the English language itself.
I have for years puzzled over the idea that a “debate prep” is necessary for any Democrat facing Donald Trump before a live television audience. There is only one preparation necessary for a “debate” with Donald Trump: provision of the vocal cords with enough throat spray to prevent going hoarse as you utter the phrase “that’s a lie” for the seventy-seventh time.
Every time the Republican candidate opens his mouth, a falsehood will fly forth. Kamala Harris can expect a flood of what we in les temps ancien used to call doozies from her opponent. He’s going to “round up and deport” 10 million or 15 million or 20 million – whatever number jumps into his head — “illegal” immigrants. That’s a lie. His own staff, augmented by Secret Service and local and state law enforcement, can’t handle vetting the several thousand people who show up for his outdoor rallies, and they show up voluntarily and equipped with whatever form of identification that is required. He said on his social platform that he is going to put “Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials” in jail for “long term sentences” when he wins. That’s a lie. It’s not a crime to be a lawyer or a political operative or a campaign donor, and illegal voters and corrupt officials already face charges if there truly are any such creatures, which in past elections, there have not been, not at least in numbers sufficient to worry about. Trump is claiming at rallies that schools are plucking children out of class and taking them down the hallway to a secret sex-reassignment room and operating on them and sending them home with a gender different from the one they showed up at school with that morning. That’s a lie, and Kamala Harris shouldn’t have much trouble pointing at Trump and laughing her head off as if he’s a clown who just wandered in from a circus somewhere on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
Donald Trump is treated every single day by the various media that cover the presidential campaign as if he is a serious man. This is a grievous error, and Vice President Harris should not repeat it during the so-called debate. She does not have to fact-check Trump in real time. Every time he opens his mouth and another lie spills forth, all she has to do is look into the eye of the camera and utter those famous words of Ronald Reagan, “There he goes again,” followed by a reference to how dangerous it would be to have a man who spreads such lies as President of the United States.
Kamala Harris should take at least one of Trump’s lies as an opportunity to describe to viewers what it is like in the White House where the most powerful person in the world is confronted almost daily with decisions that can end in the deaths of people or saving of their lives. She could describe the price in lives that Ukraine is paying because of Trump’s friend Vladimir Putin and his insane Hitlerian ambitions of conquest and domination. She could use an example of a woman who has nearly died in an emergency room because Donald Trump thinks it is a good idea for the Supreme Court to allow severe abortion restrictions to the extent that emergency rooms are reluctant to perform them even to save a woman in extremis from a tubal pregnancy or other pregnancy-related life-threatening conditions before birth.
If Vice President Harris is going to practice anything in her preparations for tomorrow night, she should practice saying the word “abortion” and expel “women’s health” from her vocabulary. Everyone in this country knows that Donald Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court resulted in the end of a national right to an abortion. Women are especially aware of this. Trump’s court didn’t return “women’s health” to the states. His court ended the right to abortion and enabled nearly half the states to either ban abortion outright or impose so many restrictions that abortions are not available to more than a third of the women in this country.
Harris should make the point that what Trump did to abortion rights, he will do to other rights – voting, housing, the right of children to have a meal at school, gay rights – and she should use the word “gay” rather than LGBTQ, which the right has dirtied as they have DEI. Forget the acronyms and dodges like “reproductive health” and say what you mean. Trump is against women and gays and Blacks and anyone who doesn’t bear a close resemblance to the people he plays golf with.
This brings up a good question she could ask: “Mr. Trump, you spent 307 days playing golf while you were president the last time. That’s almost a year. How many days would you devote to golf this time if you are elected?”
Getting under Trump’s skin is the name of the game tonight, and even before the first question is asked, Kamala Harris is ahead because she’s a woman. Donald Trump hates women. He resents the fact that he is running against a woman whose skin is not white.
Harris must use who she is. She should call him a liar so many times that he’ll be forced to defend himself. And if he says anything to belittle her as a woman or as a person of Black and Indian descent, she can give the camera one of her patented grins, and tell the audience, “If that’s all he’s got, he’s a loser.”
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