The first and likely only presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is in the books, and the reactions have been fast and furious.
How do I think it went? Given I wrote pre-debate about the traps the former president should avoid, and he proceeded to walk into essentially all of them, it’d be dishonest for me to say I think he did well. I wanted a repeat of the disciplined, cool, and collected Trump we saw against Joe Biden, and that didn’t happen. Whether that helps or hurts him (or doesn’t change anything) will be decided soon enough.
With that said, I could also talk about how historically terrible and biased the moderators were. They made Candy Crowley look honest. All of the “fact-checks” went in one direction. All of the interruptions went in one direction. All of the follow-ups went in one direction. It was so bad that no Republican should ever agree to do a debate on ABC News again. Perhaps I’ll write more about that in another piece.
What about the merits of what was said, though? I know substance doesn’t matter to the chattering class, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to ignore it. On that front, there was one moment during the debate that sent Democrats rushing to social media to mock Donald Trump. It came during the immigration segment, with the former president proclaiming that Haris wanted to use taxpayer money to provide transgender sex-change surgeries to detained illegal immigrants.
Crazy, right? That dastardly orange man was just making stuff up again, I guess. Who would ever support such a wild idea?
There’s just one very big, exceptionally large problem: What Trump said is true.
CNN’s K-File recently unearthed an ACLU questionnaire from Kamala Harris’ first presidential run. She literally pledged her support for using taxpayer money to provide transgender sex change operations to detained illegal immigrants and federal prisoners.