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(CNN) – The failure of US President Donald Trump once again to unequivocally condemn white supremacy on Wednesday, to clarify a chilling moment in his debate with Democratic candidate Joe Biden, shows how he may find it impossible to restart for his next crucial contest. .
When asked about not repudiating the Proud Boys, a far-right group, during the debate, Trump said, “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are. I mean, you’ll have to give me a definition, because I really don’t know. I don’t know. who are they “.
“I can only say that they have to withdraw, let the forces of order do their job,” the president told reporters, before turning around again saying that “the problem is on the left.”
Trump has never had a reset button, so if his hopes of preserving his presidency hinge on a change in focus and temperament after a first bellicose confrontation with Biden, then he is in deep trouble.
His comments on the Proud Boys show how his instinct when cornered is to fight harder, intensify personal attacks, and target punches lower than the belt. Such an approach worked well in 2016, when I was an outsider who appreciated the potential of a populist insurgent campaign when no one else did.
It is far from clear that an antagonistic approach is appropriate for 2020, when Trump is a sitting president and the country is mired in multiple crises. Those aggressive reflexes are one reason the president has handled the pandemic so poorly, which has killed more than 200,000 people. And they mean that any advice from Trump’s aides to clamp down on his behavior before the next debate in Miami on Oct. 15 will either fall on deaf ears or be ignored in the heat of battle.
The upcoming meeting also brings the added risk that a president who is not used to being challenged exploits a member of the public in a town hall format on live television.
Despite publicly showering him with praise Wednesday, some Trump aides are secretly deeply dismayed by the confrontation with Biden. One ally described the debate, in which Trump was seething with fury, constantly booing Biden and spouting lies and conspiracy theories, as a “disaster.”
Other people in the president’s orbit who spoke to CNN’s White House staff described Trump as obnoxious and unprepared. A source familiar with the president’s thinking told CNN’s Dana Bash that Trump thought he got it right in the debate and was surprised his team thought he was too aggressive. It may take several days of cable news coverage for reality to sink in, the source said.
Republican senators, who endured one of hundreds of awkward moments in the Trump presidency, were particularly uncomfortable by questions about the president’s order to “back off and stay out” of the Proud Boys. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, suggested it was a statement the Trump team needed “to clarify.”
Even Donald Trump Jr. admitted on CBS News that his father’s comment in the debate could have been a “language error.” But the Proud Boys had no doubts about Trump’s position, turning his comment into a new online logo.
Big bets for the second debate
The overwhelming consensus that Trump bombarded in his first debate means that the stakes for the second are now even more astronomical than Tuesday night. It will need a game-changing moment, with only three weeks left in the campaign. But he might have already missed his best chance.
Typically, the first debate attracts the largest television audience. Additionally, by mid-October, millions more voters will have cast their early votes and, if current trends continue, a new wave of rising Covid-19 infections will have a demonstrably more serious impact on American life. Such a scenario will underscore the president’s failure Tuesday night to offer authentic plans to conquer the pandemic and may deepen his vulnerability in healthcare, offering Biden a clear opportunity.
The debates are not always an accurate measure of who wins the presidential election. In general, the Democratic candidates John Kerry and Hillary Clinton were considered to have won their debates, but lost the elections. Trump’s destructive behavior likely attracted voters who see him as a murderer of Washington’s elites and a scourge of political correctness.
But if misgivings within his field are on the button, the president likely did little in Cleveland to undermine Biden’s lead in most state polls. It might even have weakened his own position, as many voters saw the full scope of rude behavior on their televisions in real time that is familiar to Trump’s cabinet members, foreign leaders and the journalists who cover him.
If the president entered the evening with the need to win back suburban voters and voters without college education, his tantrums and extreme rhetoric about race and his refusals to guarantee the transfer of power, even if he loses the election, they seem to have guaranteed safety. exactly the opposite result.
Worse still, from Trump’s point of view, his fury repeatedly drowned out Biden’s slips or uncertainty on the stage of the debate, including the former vice president’s inability to give a direct answer when asked if he was in favor of the demands. liberals that the Supreme Court packed up after Trump’s trio of picks for the best bank in the nation.
Compared to recent Democratic nominees, Biden wasn’t particularly impressive in the debate, though he was trying to operate with the constant harangue from the man on the other side of the stage. But it didn’t have to be.
The president’s behavior meant that snippets of the debate aired on television on Wednesday referred primarily to the president’s anger rather than Biden’s hesitant responses. Given that every day of the campaign is now crucial for a president who is behind, that was a small disaster in itself.
Biden was able to give the impression that he was the candidate with the drive to come out of the first clash, playing on what he saw as public disgust with the president’s performance.
“At one point I thought maybe I should have said this, but the President of the United States behaved the way he did, I think it was a national shame,” Biden told CNN’s Arlette Saenz on Wednesday.
Can Pence throw Trump a lifeline?
It will be difficult for the president’s political advisers to convince him that he has a problem. Since the beginning of his presidency, Trump has lived in a bubble of praise from conservative news anchors and has negotiated the conspiracy theories that they amplify in the shows he voraciously watches.
That helps explain why the president came out with his usual lines in front of a much more diverse audience in the debate, poking fun at the wearing of masks, claiming that he had saved millions of lives with his failed management of the pandemic, and launching unproven accusations about Hunter, Biden’s son.
“I thought the debate last night was excellent. We received tremendous criticism,” the president told reporters on Wednesday. This may be typical Trump bravado. But it doesn’t suggest the kind of humility and self-criticism that allowed Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama to bounce back from disastrous early debates in their own reelection races.
Trump has occasionally had teleprompter-driven moments where he has behaved in a more statesmanlike manner. But such efforts have been largely limited to fixed events like the State of the Union address. It is when the president gets off the teleprompter and his confrontational impulses are unbridled, as in the situation of Tuesday’s debate, which sets fire to the scripts and plans drawn up by his assistants.
The crucial point is that Trump doesn’t care. His actions show how he has long used the presidency as a channel for his personal complaints and to express how he feels, at any time.
One possible opening for Trump’s campaign is to use next week’s vice presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris to stabilize the campaign, much like then-Vice President Biden did in 2012, when Obama ruined his first debate against the Republicans. nominee Mitt Romney.
Pence, a quiet debater, is likely to make a much more conventional case for Trump’s second term than the president himself handled. Pence will detail what the administration sees as its main achievements: a conservative Supreme Court majority, multiple lower-court judges, trade deals with Mexico and Canada, a reordering of U.S. foreign policy, and an economy that thrived until the pandemic struck earlier. year.
The vice president will likely avoid indecent personal attacks on Harris, but will forensically try to exploit her record of liberal voters to present her ballot as the “Trojan horse” to the left that Trump believes him to be. The California Democrat is unlikely to target Pence with her punches and is expected to bring the inquisitorial skills that made her a renowned prosecutor to take on the president himself.
But being Trump Trump, there is no guarantee that he will hear what worked for Pence. And if the vice president receives a torrent of praise from the media for his performance, he is more likely to be jealous than grateful. It was only when Pence was garnering rave reviews for his presidency of the coronavirus task force press conferences that Trump decided to take the stage, confused the administration’s message, and proved incompetent and inept.
If that’s the case, the president will enter his second debate with Biden under even more pressure than he faced in the first. It will take a Hail Mary moment to turn the campaign around with Election Day fast approaching. As Tuesday night shows, that’s not a scenario in which he seems to be thriving.
This story was first published on CNN.com “Trump’s latest gamble on white supremacy shows that rebounding the debate will be tough”
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