Not Even the Spin Room Could Help Donald Trump Save Face

It’s called the “spin room” for a reason. It’s where campaign people go to peddle their bullshit, to reenact their debate club days with a tired press, to scratch their own itch to gab—almost as much as to advocate for their candidate. The absurd lies and half-truths and wishful thinking these spin room surrogates offer up are easy to brush aside, more often than not.

But there is one specific argument, put forth by a number of Republicans following Kamala Harris’s debate beatdown of Donald Trump on Tuesday, that is worth drilling down on more, both because it is utterly wrong and because it is so pernicious: The idea that Trump is some kind of misguided policy wonk, who could win if only he could keep his focus on the issues rather than the bile and blather he’s baited into.

“Kamala Harris has been completely opaque about what her policy positions actually are,” Vivek Ramaswamy said minutes before the debate. “It’s the job of not only the moderators, but also Donald Trump, to focus on what his policies actually are.” When he failed to do that, instead repeating a racist lie about Haitian immigrants in Ohio that his allies Charlie Kirk and running mate JD Vance pulled from the sewer of X, one Republican lamented to Axios: “Kirk, Catturd, Gunther, and DC Draino got Trump to go after cats on his single best issue.”

“He’s given zero answers tonight,” the GOP pollster Frank Luntz wrote. “This is not the same candidate as we saw in 2016.”

That much is true: Trump looked and sounded worse than he did eight years ago, and everyone by now is familiar with what Harris described Tuesday as his “tired old playbook.” But that doesn’t mean that the Trump of eight or four years ago had a coherent policy agenda. He was always a venal buffoon, and to suggest otherwise is to play into a revisionist history of the Trump years as basically normal, but with some “mean tweets” here and there—a white-washed view of his first term that may make some voters receptive to another.

Tuesday evening’s debate gave a small taste of what those four years were actually like—ugly and destructive, yes, but also just relentlessly stupid. The dumb, awful shit Trump said didn’t get in the way of more substantive discourse; the dumb, awful shit is all he’s got.

Harris, less than two months into her unprecedented campaign, still has some details to fill in on her own policy proposals. But there was no equivalence between the two: Harris’s governing blueprint may still be sketched out in pencil, but Trump’s is scribbled in crayon. “I have concepts of a plan,” he claimed at one point in the debate, after being asked what he’d put in place of Obamacare if he got his wish to repeal it.

He couldn’t say Tuesday night. He couldn’t seven years ago, either.

It was a brutal performance by Trump—so bad, in fact, that he made a visit to the spin room to hold forth on his own behalf. Always a sign of confidence. “It was the best debate I’ve ever had,” he insisted.

But even some of his closest allies said otherwise: It was a “disaster,” Trump lackey Lindsey Graham acknowledged. “I’m just sad,” one pro-Trump House Republican told the Hill. “The road just got very narrow,” the lawmaker continued. “This is not good.”

Don’t expect them to do the kind of soul-searching Democrats did after Joe Biden’s washed-out debate performance in June, though. Their party now just a cult of personality, all Republicans could seem to do was defend their leader and whine that the format and the moderators were unfair: “This is an interesting debate format: 3-on-1,” Ramaswamy wrote. “They’re only proving how biased they are,” Ari Fleischer chimed in, criticizing ABC News’ efforts to fact-check during the debate. But, as CNN’s Abby Phillip put it, “When there is asymmetrical lying, there will be asymmetrical fact checking.”

Those lies are worn out by now, but they’re all Trump really has to offer. The GOP, in throwing in their lot with him, doesn’t have much more than that either.