THE (UNIMAGINABLE) DEBATE RULE THAT COULD DEFEAT TRUMP: NO TIME LIMIT ON STATEMENTS

The headline of this Washington Post story pulls no punches:

Trump rants, resurfaces sexual assault allegations for 49 unfocused minutes

The story -- written by four Post reporters, three of them women -- is equally straightforward:

Donald Trump railed against women who have accused him of sexual assault. He baselessly blamed the Biden-Harris administration for his legal difficulties. He appeared to criticize the physical appearances of some of his accusers. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said of one, later adding that he would “not want to be” involved with another accuser....

And those were only some of the ways he veered away from topics voters have said they care most about in what his campaign billed as a “press conference” Friday.... Trump took no questions from the news media....

In a roughly 49-minute appearance that sometimes verged into a stream-of-consciousness rant that was hard to follow, Trump also reminisced about his early career as a real estate mogul and reality television star. (“I was,” he said, “a celebrity for a long time.”) He lamented his two impeachments, calling them “impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two.” And he mentioned Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern who had an affair with President Bill Clinton, at least three times....

For much of the summer in a tight presidential contest, Trump’s advisers have urged him to hew to a more disciplined message....

They have tried for weeks to pull him out of a self-pitying stage....

You get the picture. This was bad. I didn't think Trump was incoherent, but he was obsessive, bitter, and nasty. Try watching a little, if you can bear it:



I'm reading this alongside stories about the debate prep being done by Trump and Kamala Harris. Harris, according to Gabriel Debenedetti of New York magazine, isn't looking for a knockout punch in the debate:

The debate, say Democrats close to Harris, is simply not the venue for just pumping up her partisans or trying to fulfill a liberal fantasy of so aggressively confronting Trump that his own supporters have second thoughts about voting for him. Instead, Harris’s team believes it needs to be about finding moments to educate and convert the voters on the margins. And for a candidate whose rallies feature “A NEW WAY FORWARD” signage and repeated audience chants of “we’re not going back,” that primarily means trying to keep the focus on her own vision for the future and contrasting it with Trump’s.

Her campaign's research tells her that undecided voters are more likely to be swayed by positive messages about her than negative messages about Trump:

Just last week, the Democratic research group Blueprint tested messaging and found that pro-Harris forces would be smarter to rely on ads featuring a contrast and positive lines about Harris over negative ones on Trump — voters are twice as likely to be moved by the former than the latter, which are only useful on the margins. (The absolute worst-performing ads in Blueprint’s tests were purely anti-Trump ads, which were in some cases three times less effective at moving voters than ads focusing on the contrast in the candidates’ abortion-policy proposals.)

Hey, whatever works. But if I think about the debate in a realm of pure fantasy, I can easily imagine a Trump knockout that might influence the votes of undecided and swing voters. It could happen if there were a debate rule that would never be permitted in the real world -- no news outlet would agree to it, and Trump's advisers would reject it.

The rule: no time limit on the candidates' statements.

I understand that the swing voters who are supporting Trump without being MAGA superfans or Fox News cultists are people who've accepted that Trump is an angry blowhard, but believe he's a person who can make inflation go away and intimidate other world leaders, in part because he's an angry blowhard. They have naive ideas about Trump's anger, believing it's an outward manifestation of a toughness he developed as a New York businessman. They also have a naive understanding of his business career, most of it based on The Apprentice.

So when they see "mean tweets," as his fans call them, they shrug them off. But people who know Trump's temperament only from short social media posts and 25-second video clips may never have seen Trump at great length. It's exhausting -- and he looks exhausted. Get Trump revved up and he just seems sourer and sourer. He wears himself out with his own rage. He doesn't look like the doer Apprentice watchers imagine he is. He just looks like a frustrated, ineffectual old man.

In my fantasy debate, Harris gets the first opening statement and ends it with a crisp, subtle zinger. The zinger gets under Trump's skin and he fills the rest of the 90-minute timeslot -- all of it -- with a rambling babelogue full of paranoid theories, resentful digressions, and Fox News buzzwords. He wears the audience out and wears himself out. To swing voters, it doesn't look presidential at all.

I'm sorry it can't happen. But I think it's possible that, between now and November, Democrats, liberal commentators, and social media video clippers will succeed in focusing the rest of America on what this angry, weary old man is really like. The liberal effort to highlight Trump's rambling answer to a question on child care this week was a start. We need more of that.