100% this. Hillary was incapable of the second part. She may have prepped well, but she was incapable of getting away from her canned, workshopped, politician speak, sound bite responses. Biden had the same flaw in 2020, and obviously couldn’t even handle the canned prep in 2024. Kamala put on a master class on prep and execution. It was so incredibly refreshing to watch someone who could competently dismantle Trump and come across well in the process.
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I was shocked they did their job. As CW said - it was amazing seeing someone actually stand up to this oaf.
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Yes, one reaction I had in real time was realizing just how inadequate Biden and Hillary were at debating Trump. Harris made it look easy.
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Combined with the first competent moderating we’ve ever seen in a Trump era debate, it was a stark contrast to Hillary and Joe.
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I don’t think it can be overstated just how huge was to have a moderator at least feel empowered to say look that obviously is not true. This is why I don’t think Harris should do another, any potential moderator going to have massive pressure to keep mouth shut so Harris should just use her war chest to play highlights in commercials if needs to remind folks
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Harris having spent most of her career in and out of courtrooms was insanely obvious with the thinking on her feet part. She’s used to prepping for a situation like this the way an athlete prepares for a game, which is to say she was studying how to destroy her opponent. Yes she knew the plays because that’s also her job, but more importantly she came in with a plan to get Donald under her thumb and keep him there the whole 90 minutes.
I gotta say I do remember being extremely fucking jealous of the Germans with Angela Merkel. Kamala might just end up being our Gen X Angela Merkel. A solid professional who consistently makes good decisions, says the right things at the right times (even finding the really good thing to say ala Obama)… basically she just seems to show up every day and do good work.
I think Kamala is going to be our president for 8 years and then the GOP is going to have to run against Tim Walz with 8 years worth of the American people knowing him really well. I’m pretty optimistic.
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From the idiot who I keep as a FB friend so that I can see what the absolute dumbest faction of the trump cult hive mind is thinking…
Does anyone think there’s a legit complaint about the moderation from the standpoint of the instances of Trump being given a question, giving an answer, and the moderators pressing him for a direct answer to the original question?
Harris dodged a lot of questions, and I don’t recall her ever being pressed for a direct answer after her response.
“are people better off than 4 years ago”
“do you feel responsible for Afghanistan soldiers”
“why did you wait so long to restrict asylum seekers at border”
Walked in to work and one of my supervisors, who if I had to guess I’d say is likely a republican voter who is at a minimum entertained by Trump, immediately says to me “you eat any cats yet today?”. Then went on about how insane Trump was and how stark the contrasy between him and Kamala was. I’ll take that.
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If there had been a “contract” saying there was to be absolutely no fact checking I guess objectively Trump has a complaint but he still should fuck off. Sometimes you just gotta do the right thing
I’m making no reference to fact checking.
Many of Trump’s worst moments came when the moderators pressed him for a more direct response to their question.
I assume that if Kamala had spent a lot of time talking about stealing and eating pets and that Trump wanted to drink the blood of newborn babies, she may have gotten fact-checked a bit too. But, I suppose we’ll never know.
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Saddest post-debate headline:
Donald Trump’s social media stock plunges to record low after his rocky debate performance
You hate to see it.
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Yup, lots of “if then” preparation with a healthy dose of knowing which “ifs” were a certainty.
Thought the Afghanistan question was unfair anyway, she wasn’t commander in chief. Would have been better to ask her if she would have handled it differently, especially with hindsight.
My Dad kept complaining that she wasn’t answering any questions and my pushback was to ask if he was unclear on where she stood on anything that was discussed. He was not. He hates her, of course, but he couldn’t say she was unclear and he couldn’t maintain the “she’s an idiot” take under any pushback either. He retreated to her policies are stupid, then failed to name any GOP policies he likes other than immigration and tax cuts for the wealthy (and he’s nowhere near benefitting from them).
At the end of the day he likes strongmen and hates immigrants and if you give him a dollar back in a tax cut, he won’t notice/care that you’re giving a thousand times that to the wealthy and running up a deficit.
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LOfuckingL, he’s about three “Truths” away from demanding a Russian judge for the next debate.
https://twitter.com/alaynatreene/status/1833838253306179862?t=x3Np89wbDQocNiKe6MiICg&s=19
By the way, did anyone else have a surreal moment last night watching Trump, as they realized, “Oh my God, he actually believes this shit!”
Like up until then I knew he was racist but I thought he knew he was pushing lies to try to win. But between his tone and facial expressions, he seemed genuinely frustrated and I think he’s high on his own supply - even on the cat eating thing.
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Overnight projection is about 65M viewers for the debate nationally.
https://twitter.com/mulvihill79/status/1833900230464741573?t=vXIyxH3RF0xqzKDmT4dYqw&s=19
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