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Donald Trump mentioned Joe Biden more than a dozen times during Tuesday’s debate.
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Vice President Harris felt compelled to remind Trump that Biden was not there.
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The former president’s attacks on his successor were exemplary of Trump’s incoherent performance.
President Joe Biden watched the debate on television on Tuesday night like the rest of the country, but if you listened to former President Donald Trump, it seemed as if the president was standing across the stage from him.
Trump’s team telegraphed that he would repeatedly try to link Vice President Kamala Harris to Biden’s unpopular record. Instead, the former president seemed shocked to find himself railing against an opponent who didn’t even live in the same state.
According to the official ABC transcript, Trump mentioned Biden by name 14 times. He also referred to Harris’ boss four more times. Trump couldn’t shake his fixation on the man he routinely called “Sleepy Joe.”
Biden would, of course, be part of the discussion. But Trump’s attack on the president encapsulated his struggle to define Harris since Biden dropped out of the race after his disastrous June debate performance.
At one point, Trump took a question about how he would combat climate change and turned it into an attack on Hunter Biden, the president’s son and the first child of a sitting president to face criminal charges. Harris had nothing to do with the president’s son’s business practices, as most of the accusations center on Biden’s vice presidency while Harris was in California.
“He’s afraid to do it. Between him and his son. They’re getting all this money from Ukraine. They’re getting all this money from all these different countries,” Trump said. “And then you wonder why is he so loyal to this one, this one Ukraine, China? Why is he? Why did he get $3 1/2 million from the wife of the mayor of Moscow? Why did he get — why did she pay him $3 1/2 million? This is a corrupt government, and they’re selling our country out.”
Republicans have never directly proven that Biden profited from his son’s business dealings, a central premise of a months-long impeachment inquiry. The GOP is quietly stalling that investigation, with the possibility that there may not even be a formal floor vote. Instead, Republicans have shifted to investigating Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate.
Trump couldn’t even decide how to attack Harris in the context of Biden. He claimed the president “hates her.” He said Biden is the “worst president,” and then he said Harris would be worse. By the end, he decided that Harris, a 59-year-old woman of color, is actually Biden.
“She’s Biden,” he said. “She’s trying to get away from Biden. I don’t know the gentleman, she says. She’s Biden.”
Harris felt compelled to remind viewers that the re-run polls, long despised by voters, would not in fact be happening.
“Clearly, I’m not Joe Biden, and I’m definitely not Donald Trump,” she said.
Trump’s meandering attacks underscored an even larger problem with his performance: He kept referencing the past. After months of Republicans begging him to stop talking about 2020, Trump couldn’t bring himself to repeat his own recent statement that he lost to Biden “by a whisker.”
“Do you now acknowledge that you lost in 2020?” asked ABC News host David Muir.
Trump responded: “No, I don’t acknowledge that at all.”
Before Muir reminded him: “But you did say that.”
Harris seized on Trump’s compulsion for history, hammering home her theme of being a departure from the status quo much more consistently, despite currently being in power.
“We’re not going backwards. It’s time to turn the page,” Harris said, referring to the Capitol riots. “And if that was a bridge too far for you, well, there’s a place in our campaign for you.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
