On Sept. 10, 2024, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump met for the first time on the debate stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Penn. Republicans were hoping beyond hope for another Biden-Trump fiasco, and Democrats were praying for Harris to come out of the debate unscathed. The Democrats and the mainstream media couldn’t be happier with the outcome.
The debate lacked substance and was heavy on rhetoric. Harris, acting as a matador, was more than able to wave a red cape and enrage Trump to talk about everything from crowd size to the Central Park Five (a story so old it seems to counter Harris’ claim to want to “turn the page”). There was talk in Republican circles about the need for Trump to be energetic during the debate, but he showed up with too much. It was obvious that Harris left the debate in much higher standing than Trump. And the mainstream media isn’t likely to keep that news quiet.
The main takeaway from this debate is a return to normalcy. Trump is back to being a self-destructive leader of a populist movement with no real positions except winning. Kamala Harris is replacing the supposedly moderate Biden as a supposedly moderate replacement. The media is back to being a mouthpiece for the Democratic Party.
If you want an analysis of Trump’s performance, look at all of the major news media and the multitude of biased and often false fact-checkers. If you want analysis of Harris’ performance, look at Fox News and the alt-media sphere like the Daily Wire (when they aren’t complaining about the moderators and Trump’s performance themselves).
Don’t bother looking for a fact check of any of Harris’ claims from the mainstream media. Like Biden, Harris was not only able to get away with, but the moderators even agreed with, the debunked Charlottesville narrative. You have the lies about Trump’s position and connection with Project 2025 and lies about what is inside that document. You have Harris and the moderators lying about his stance on abortion, even if he refuses to help himself in the moment to clarify. Harris egregiously claimed that “There is not one member of the United States military who is in an active-duty combat zone around the world.” A fact the personnel aboard the USS Carney in the fight against the Houthi rebels in the Red Sea or the several dozen soldiers on bases in Iraq that were drone-struck would disagree with.
But this is the status quo. It was only because of the insane disaster of Biden exposing the state of his age that forced the mainstream media to critique and challenge the Biden administration. They are not watchdogs; they are lapdogs. They are the gaslighters of the Union. Why is the rhetoric and temperature in the country so high and volatile? Because the mainstream media has been leaking noxious, flammable gas into the American public through their lies.
It is only because of Republicans’ inability to return to their own pre-2015 normalcy that characters like Biden, Harris, or Hillary Clinton were and are even viable candidates. The only man Biden could beat was Trump. The only person Harris may be able to beat is Trump (remember she received zero votes in the 2020 Democratic primary), and the only person who Trump is proven to be able to beat is Clinton.
Trump needed to put the focus on Harris and make her answer for her current tenure in the Biden-Harris administration. He was incapable of doing so. He said after the debate that he saved what was his best argument for his closing statement, asking Harris, “Why haven’t you done it in three years?” His closing statement was his strongest two minutes.
Instead of talking about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pets and Ralph Northam’s afterbirth abortion comments (which are true, but so old and memory-holed that no one knows what Trump’s talking about), Trump could have pivoted questions about the border, foreign policy, and the economy on the current administration. Instead, Trump was trumped by Harris’ highly effective but not very difficult task of getting Trump to talk about himself and his variety of grievances.
