ABC Debate: Trump Risks His Life to Save America...
... and faces lies and insults, as voters weigh who can lead us from the precipice
Honestly, the lies that Vice President Kamala Harris told at last night’s ABC debate were epic—even as lead moderator David Muir dutifully provided needed backfill in what was a shameful low point of American democracy, journalism purportedly being its vanguard.
The lies were framed by ABC’s side-by-side split screen making Harris, who is a foot shorter, look taller than her six-foot-three-inch opponent, President Donald J. Trump.
Nor were the questions at all probing into Harris and who she is and how she got there.
Let’s recall that Harris became the Democrat Presidential nominee after she and her party insisted for years that her brain-addled boss, President Joseph R. Biden, who snagged a gravity-defying 81 million votes in 2020 catapulting him into the Oval Office, was fit as a fiddle. When he went wandering off at the G-7 summit and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni needed to coax him back, they said it was just a “cheap fake.”
But when Biden went up against Trump in that June 27 debate, the long knives came out and Harris wrested power by July 21—after they threatened to use the 25th Amendment against him, riding roughshod over its intended purpose, that of ensuring the stable governance America has craved, not to win the next election.
Yet, not one question about the “coup,” as Pres. Trump rightly calls it, at the debate.
Meanwhile, Trump’s performance was pilloried in spite of how stacked the deck was and, bigger picture, how he risks his life to save America. Not even a gracious, ‘How are you feeling in the wake of your near-assassination?’
It all calls to mind that scene from Thoroughly Modern Millie where “Jimmy” (James Fox) is trying to visit “Millie” (Julie Andrews) in her high-rise office building in Manhattan, 1922, and gets thrown out by the jealous old biddy, so he climbs the side of the building onto the ledge outside Millie’s office whereupon another secretary bats him away by swinging open the large window and, averting death, he catches the flag pole.
Of course, Trump is, after all, not running for “Debater-in-Chief,” but “Commander-in-Chief.”
If he was a debater, he would have honed in on this whopper told by Harris:
“I was at the Capitol on Jan. 6,” she said (2:59 mins. into this debate clip).
Oh really?
The truth is, reports Dan Bongino, she was at the DNC, with no explanation as to why, in spite of the fact that she should have been at the Capitol to preside over the counting of the electoral votes and bask in the glory of that historic moment.
But, according to the provisions of the Electoral Count Act of 1887, the Republican request to check certain electoral slates, including Pennsylvania, was in order; but then a funny thing happened. Right on cue, as soon as Senator James Lankford (R-OK) noted this, the proceedings came to a screeching halt because of the disturbance outside the Capitol, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) should have prevented by granting Trump’s request for 10,000 National Guard troops. When they came back into session later that night, emergency rules became operative and the Electoral Count Act provisions were tossed and all the electoral slates certified.
So, why was VP Harris not at the Capitol?
Why was she at the DNC?
Did I mention that they found a pipe bomb at the DNC that could have taken her life?
And why is this fact obscured?
An expert debater would have honed in on this.
Trump could have asked about this and whether, as Bongino and others surmise, it was a backup plan to shut down the proceedings and require that emergency session to derail the 1887 Electoral Count Act provisions to get to the bottom of the alleged irregularities in those respective electoral slates, to reveal whether Trump had been re-elected or Biden’s victory was as solid as Mount Rushmore.
Of course, if ABC’s Muir was doing his job, he would have asked this question to provide clarity on this troubling set of facts, perhaps garnering a Pulitzer Prize.
But evidently, they have a bigger prize in mind.
Now, after over 1300 days in office, Harris has got a plan on the way to winning, she hopes, the ultimate prize.
A plan, as President Trump described it, that is “Run Spot Run!”
Brilliantly, he suggested, let’s end this debate, let’s see you go to Washington and sign an executive order to close the border now.
She has the power.
Trump knows.
He did it!
And, the American public knows how much better it was under his leadership.
Apropos of which, the key question—the first question— Harris did not answer was whether she could honestly say voters feel better now than four years ago.
Not answering that question was perhaps her most honest response.
Mary Claire Kendall is author of Oasis: Conversion Stories of Hollywood Legends. The sequel, Oasis of Faith: The Souls Behind the Billboard—Barrymore, Cagney, Tracy, Stewart, Guinness & Lemmon, was published in July. Her biography of Ernest Hemingway, titled Hemingway’s Faith, is being published Christmas 2024 by Rowman & Littlefield, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. She writes a regular bi-monthly column for Aleteia.