Two Trumps -- a side by side comparison

Take a minute to watch this clip. It's well worth your time.

Phillip: We compared Trump’s debate answers from 2016 to the ones he gave this week after the very first question on immigration.. He veers off topic several times.. watch pic.twitter.com/AnNO3EVtgr

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 13, 2024

 CNN deserves tremendous for making a point this important this powerfully.

A big part of the story behind Trump's catastrophic performance is how badly the press underestimated Kamala Harris (a topic we've discussed before and will be getting back to), but the bigger part is how Trump has changed. The man has been in a lot of debates over the past nine years and a lot of rivals have tried to throw him off his game. We can debate how many of those debates he won, but we never saw anything like the implosion of last week. 

Marco Rubio is an interesting point of comparison. Probably the most dramatic take-down of any of the 2016 election was when Chris Christie destroyed Rubio with one exchange (a blow so devastating that Trump congratulated him after the debate). Lots of people, including Christie, went after Trump, but no one ever scored that kind of point against him. 

 It is possible that Harris is the best debater Trump has faced. She's very good, particularly when a prosecutorial approach is called for (I first started thinking about Harris as a potential candidate during the Kavanaugh hearings specifically because of how a debate might play out), but I don't think she could have been nearly as effective against the Trump on the left.

We've all aged in the past nine years, but most of us haven't almost died of covid and survived an assassination attempt. Most of us aren't approaching eighty and very few of us are looking at the possibility of spending the rest of our lives in prison. All of these things have clearly taken and continue to take, their toll. 

For reason's too complicated to go into here, Trump's decline has never gotten the attention that Biden's did, but the signs have been there for a long time, and given that Biden is steady-tempered and surrounded by highly responsible and competent people, his decline was less of a concern. Trump is erratic, prone to rage, and surrounded by sycophants, grifters, and extremists. The fact the press paid less attention to his cognitive decline under those circumstances is indefensible.