Republicans tried to largely hide from former president Donald Trump\u2019s debate performance Tuesday, mostly cheering him on or just avoiding the issue altogether.<\/p>\n
Speaking to reporters Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) focused entirely on a failed government funding plan. What did he think of Trump\u2019s debate performance, reporters asked him. Johnson walked away, into the House chamber.<\/p>\n
Across the Capitol, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 2 GOP leader, fell into the passive voice to avoid criticizing Trump when asked about the missed opportunity to define Vice President Kamala Harris.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, um, that job\u2019s got to get done,\u201d said Thune, who is asking colleagues to promote him to majority leader.<\/p>\n
Who should take up that task? Thune ducked into a closed luncheon for GOP senators without answering the question.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s hardly a ringing endorsement from the two people who, if he won the presidency, Trump would rely on to advance his agenda on Capitol Hill.<\/p>\n
Almost 11 weeks after congressional Democrats faced a political come-to-Jesus moment surrounding President Joe Biden\u2019s standing, Republicans confronted their own version of a presidential nominee who handled his debate performance with confused, rambling answers that diverged into territory few voters care about.<\/p>\n
But they had far more reserved reactions than those exhibited by Democrats at the time, who showed up in mourning to a brief series of votes the morning after Biden\u2019s debate with Trump.<\/p>\n
Trump on Tuesday came across more energetic than Biden did back on June 27, but his grasp of issues left many Republicans privately expressing deep regret over how their candidate did not do much, if any, of the traditional debate preparation that has been common practice for a few decades.<\/p>\n
Other Republicans just blamed moderators for poor questioning, even though Trump spoke for more minutes than Harris and had ample opportunities to drive home those points.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think he preps every day. Like President Trump, I do a lot of meetings, town halls, roundtables, and I think that\u2019s the best prep in the world that you can do,\u201d Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has won three deeply contested statewide races through a disciplined, well-funded campaign operation, did not blame Trump for wandering into strange ideological cul-de-sacs and suggested he is so incredibly well known to voters that debate performances won\u2019t matter for him.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you don\u2019t know Trump, I don\u2019t know where you\u2019ve been,\u201d Scott said. \u201cUnder a rock?\u201d<\/p>\n
Other Republicans begrudgingly offered a slight critique \u2014 \u201cmissed opportunity\u201d was the description of choice \u2014 noting how Harris never found herself on the defensive about her two decades of elected service as a prosecutor, senator and vice president.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe that we missed a lot of opportunities last night,\u201d Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a huge missed opportunity to nail Kamala Harris on some very easy, easy points. Could have been a lot worse,\u201d said Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.).<\/p>\n
How could it have been much worse?<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, I don\u2019t think Trump, you know, became overly emotional or lost his cool. He remained stoic,\u201d Crenshaw said. \u201cHe never looked over at her the way she kept sneering and jeering at him like a child.\u201d<\/p>\n
Contrast that with Democrats\u2019 reactions after Biden\u2019s June debate.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people are panic-stricken,\u201d said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), a 20-year incumbent who serves as a minister and at the time cautioned colleagues not to make rash decisions. \u201cThey\u2019re panic-stricken, and I don\u2019t think that\u2019s a good time to think.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who would go on to play a behind-the-scenes role in helping push Biden aside, told reporters \u201cit could be\u201d when asked whether that debate was Biden\u2019s \u201cworst night\u201d as president.<\/p>\n
Republicans do not feel free to be that critical of Trump out of the fear that, even if he loses, he will continue to use his influence over base voters to extract revenge in primaries against the wayward lawmakers.<\/p>\n
Marshall, a onetime traditional conservative who reinvented himself as a far-right agitator, adopted the blame-the-moderators approach to explain how the Biden-Harris record on border security and crime did not become focal points.<\/p>\n
Yet he has no explanation for why Trump didn\u2019t make more of those issues in his nearly 43 minutes of speaking, which included plenty of topics that were not questions from moderators.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t have an answer,\u201d Marshall said.<\/p>\n
Crenshaw, who is not considered a MAGA ally of Trump, even defended Trump\u2019s diversion into an unproven claim, based on racist tropes, that Haitian refugees were stealing and eating pets in a small Ohio town, saying the issue has appeared on television.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like in the news right now, and it\u2019s disgusting. And it\u2019s, yeah, there\u2019s Haitian migrants in Ohio reportedly eating ducks and things at the local parks. Like, I don\u2019t know about pets but, I mean, it\u2019s a thing,\u201d Crenshaw said.<\/p>\n
In his formal statement, released moments after the debate ended, Johnson began with remarks that read as if they were written before the debate.<\/p>\n
\u201cTonight, President Donald Trump exposed Vice President Kamala Harris for the dangerous radical she has always been,\u201d the speaker said.<\/p>\n
By Wednesday morning, most Republicans had acknowledged that their biggest regret was that Harris had not been exposed and that, in some regards, she came off looking presidential.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople saw, \u2018Oh, actually, she\u2019s an intelligent, capable person who has a point of view on issues,\u2019 and she demonstrated that time and again,\u201d said Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), the retiring Republican who opposes Trump\u2019s election bid but has not endorsed Harris.<\/p>\n
Tillis stood out as the rare Republican who openly criticized Trump for not doing real debate preparations, evident from his lack of ready-to-use quips to criticize Harris for the Biden administration\u2019s handling of the border and inflation, issues on which voters tend to favor Republicans.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere you go again, Harris,\u201d Tillis said, offering his imaginary answer along the lines that Ronald Reagan used in his debates. \u201cYou want to do everything except talk about an agenda that you were partially responsible for implementing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump has openly mocked his senior campaign advisers at rallies and in interviews for their efforts to get him to focus on policy issues and not personal attacks or false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. According to news reports, those advisers made clear Trump was not doing the traditional mock debates with someone standing in as the opponent and trying to practice lines.<\/p>\n
Tillis recalled how, after trailing his opponent for a good portion of his 2020 election, he worked with senior aides who came up with a line that they made Tillis rehearse over and over again.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you will say that 11 times, I\u2019ll buy you a steak dinner,\u201d his debate coach said, according to Tillis. He uttered the line 11 times and narrowly won reelection.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got the steak dinner,\u201d he recalled, a bone-in porterhouse, medium-rare.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you do not heed the advice of experts in politics, you\u2019re probably going to go into dangerous waters,\u201d Tillis said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Republicans tried to largely hide from former president Donald Trump\u2019s debate performance Tuesday, mostly cheering him on or just avoiding the issue altogether. Speaking to reporters Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) focused entirely on a failed government funding plan. What did he think of Trump\u2019s debate performance, reporters asked him. Johnson walked away, into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9443\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}