Will the Second 2024 Debate Fallout Echo the First?

History is not repeating itself but it could be rhyming.

Photo by NIPYATA! on Unsplash

In the wake of Donald Trump’s Very Bad, No Good, Almost an Aaron Sorkin Caricature of a debate performance earlier this week, it is worth remembering exactly why Joe Biden’s Very Bad, No Good, Horrible debate performance caused him to exit the race:

1. There was the debate performance itself, which no amount of spin could explain away. Biden performed very, very poorly;

2. This was followed by Biden’s co-partisans fracturing in their response. Almost all of them acknowledged that Biden had a bad night. After that, some defended Biden to the hilt and said he just had a bad night and would carry on. Others, however, started publicly questioning Biden’s ability to stay in the race;

3. This was followed by disgruntled staffers in the Biden White House and campaign spilling the tea to reporters. Up until that point there had been the occasional mainstream media story about Biden’s frailties, but they had been poorly sourced — almost like the media knew there was a story there but could not get confirmation. After the debate the confirmations started pouring out;

4. As Biden’s co-partisans went public, Biden’s polling went south. Not by a ton in public polls, exactly, but states like New Hampshire and Virginia suddenly seemed in play. There was scuttlebutt that the campaign’s private polling looked worse.

5. Finally, Biden saw the handwriting on the wall and stepped aside.

That five-step process took less than a month to play out.

Let’s return to September. Trump has fulfilled step one — everyone not named “Trump” knows that he screwed the pooch in the debate. The question is whether steps two through four will repeat themselves (step five ain’t happening). How much will recent history rhyme?¹

We are starting to see the beginnings of steps two and three. For example, after Trump ruled out participating in another presidential debate with Harris, stories started coming out suggesting that was not what his GOP supporters wanted. The Hill has two stories out about Senate Republicans urging Trump to debate Harris again. One story had GOP Senators Rick Scott and Thom Tillis supporting another debate; a follow-up report quoted Senate Republican Whip John Thune telling the AP, “I don’t think they got enough into the substance of their differences and I think elections are always about differences.” Other GOP lawmakers expressed “frustration” to the Wall Street Journal about Trump’s first debate performance.

And now both Trump’s staff and supporters are trying to suggest that the fault lies with one of Trump’s informal advisors, the 9/11 conspiracy theorist and super-racist Laura Loomer. Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and David Weigel report:

She was on the plane with him the day of the debate and on the ground with him the morning after. Some Republicans are worried she had something to do with what happened in between.

Laura Loomer, the right-wing agitator known for egging on Donald Trump’s most inflammatory instincts, has been regularly popping up around the former president. After a debate in which Trump shouted about false viral rumors of pet-eating Haitians in an Ohio town, her potential influence is drawing more scrutiny from both parties.

One person close to the Trump campaign said they were “100%” concerned about her exacerbating Trump’s weaknesses.

“Regardless of any guardrails the Trump campaign has put on her, I don’t think it’s working,” the person said….

“Trump lost the debate because of his performance or lack thereof,” Dennis Lennox, a Republican consultant, said. “That’s what happens when you wing it, live in the Fox News—X bubble, and rely upon Matt Gaetz, let alone Laura Loomer.”

Axios’ Sophia Cai and Alex Thompson reported something similar, going on to observe possible trouble in campaign paradise: “recently, Trump has been furious that his successful June debate against President Biden led to Biden being replaced on the Democratic ticket by Harris, who has erased Trump's big lead in the polls. The developments appear to have led Trump to question to his own campaign advisers, and insist on bringing in other voices such as past adviser Corey Lewandowski.”

The reporting on Loomer’s coziness Trump is also… let’s say “suggestive.” As intelligence analyst J.M. Berger noted on BlueSky, “the crop of Loomer stories today read the way reporters write when they definitely know something but are not able to source it yet.” Whether this rumor: a) turns out to be true and; b) gets reported out remains to be seen. But this is the kind of thing that no campaign wants to see in the media less than 60 days from the election.

The next week or so will also reveal whether the debate, and the cracking of Trump’s foundation, shows up in the polling. The very preliminary evidence suggests that Harris is benefiting from her performance. Now it’s a question of seeing whether history will actually start to rhyme. The Harris campaign is not acting like it, which is prudent. The rest of us can wonder.

Developing…

1. It is fair to ask whether it would really be surprising if Trump’s campaign staffers started chatting to the press — wasn’t this the pattern for Trump’s first campaign and first term?! That is certainly true, and as the author of The Toddler in Chief I am very grateful for that. Nonetheless, this iteration of the Trump campaign has been much more professional. That has been reflected in the reduced number of staff leaks to reporters. As for the rest of what remains of the GOP, they are a much more spineless lot than they were even five years ago.