The most consequential moment of Tuesday's presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump was their exchange over Obamacare. Specifically, moderator Linsey Davis asked Trump, “So tonight, nine years after you started running, do you have a [repeal and replace] Do you have a plan and can you tell us what it is?
Trump didn't do it. Therefore, he couldn't do it.
Opinion columnist
Granderson Landing Station
LZ Granderson writes about culture, politics, sports, and navigating life in America.
“Obamacare was terrible health care, it always was, but it’s not very good today,” he began. “What I said was that if we came up with something and we were working on it, we were going to implement it and we were going to replace it.”
He then went on to complain about Democrats, even though Republicans controlled both houses of Congress when he was elected. He later said he had saved Obamacare from rotting away, in a plot twist mid-rant.
As evening fell, some observers expected the focus to be on policy, not personalities.
In retrospect, that was foolish.
“What we’re going to do is look at different plans,” Trump continued. “If we can come up with a plan that costs our people less money, our population less money, and is better health care than Obamacare, then I will do that without hesitation.”
Davis: “So, whether yes or no, you don’t have a plan yet.”
Trump: “I have ideas of a plan.” That was all the 78-year-old could say. Trump’s performance in the June debate wasn’t great either, though that fact was overlooked because President Biden disappointed. And on Tuesday, the carnival barker, who once wrote that “truthful hyperbole” was “an innocent form of exaggeration,” had nothing substantial to offer. Like cotton candy in the rain.
During the Trump administration, we saw the value of Obamacare. Remember, nearly 80 million people lived in a household where someone lost their job during the early days of COVID-19. Of that number, about 48 million lost their insurance through their employer. Obamacare plans, while not perfect, were one option to help soften that blow. The Affordable Care Act also ensured that parents could keep their children on their insurance until age 26, which was helpful when the world came to a standstill. The same can be said for ensuring that Americans with preexisting conditions could get coverage.
As president, Trump repeatedly tried to repeal Obamacare. We now know that he did so without having any plan in place to replace it.
This man loves campaigning and standing in front of crowds. Governing and managing a diverse nation… not so much. And for most of the 90 minutes Harris spent six feet away from him, she played to Trump’s fragile ego. She baited him with comments about the crowd sizes at his rallies, and he took the bait by making more outlandish claims. Harris baited Trump by mentioning his string of bankruptcies and the wealth he received from his father. He took that one, too.
At times Harris won points by doing virtually nothing, simply standing back and letting Trump talk.
“They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” he baselessly claimed about migrants in Springfield, Ohio. When ABC News anchor and co-moderator David Muir told Trump that Springfield’s city manager had said there was no evidence of that, the former president said he saw it on television.
Before the debate, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told me about the race: “It’s been over 100 years since we’ve had two people in the White House, so it really comes down not to promises and commitments but to a clear contrast in backgrounds.”
The opening theme underscored Cotton's point with questions about the economy.
The 2020 global pandemic and the Trump administration's failed response led to the highest inflation rate in 40 years. It skyrocketed in the US between May 2020 and July 2022, when it exceeded 9%That's Trump's record.
The Biden-Harris administration's passage of the Inflation Reduction Act has helped bring the rate down to below 3%.
Still, despite historically low unemployment under the Biden administration and slowing inflation, many Americans are struggling to afford the cost of living, largely because food, housing and health care prices continue to rise. Many blame the current administration.
So Harris and Trump had plenty to mine in their history to play off each other. And the former president tried to do so, vaguely drawing the kind of policy contrasts Cotton had said needed to be made. Unfortunately for Republicans, their candidate isn’t disciplined enough to stay true to his message over his record, nor is he exactly a model of consistency. California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, told a group of reporters before the debate that the former president’s erratic legacy would work against him.
“You want radical change? Let’s talk about abortion with Donald Trump,” the governor said. “You want radical change? All of a sudden, he’s in favor of legalizing marijuana. You want radical change? The guy said he would reduce the debt; it went up $8.4 trillion. I can go on.”
Of course, there was no need. We know Donald Trump as a guy.
A secret plan to defeat ISIS? Is Mexico going to pay for the wall? Take your pick. In 2016, Trump the candidate was constantly writing checks that Trump the elected official couldn’t cash. It’s not unique in history. But the fact that Trump came across as so unprepared and in poor condition on Tuesday night is remarkable. He looked old and sounded reckless. When asked about health care, he couldn’t even offer voters an empty promise and false hope. Just a blank slate. (Perhaps that’s why Taylor Swift, the world’s most famous childless cat lady, endorsed his opponent shortly after the broadcast ended.)
This is how it was in 2015: all complaints and no solutions. This is how it is today and there is a good chance that it will be this way in November.
