Personally I subscribe to the theory of debate proposed in the book “The Art of Controversy” by Arthur Shoppenheimer. He makes a great case that substance of a public debate is of actually very little consequence—that what impacts impartial onlookers is not facts, but poise. The person who appears less emotional and frazzled is perceived by undecided onlookers as the winner. regardless of facts or logic or anything. Given the fact that unbiased onlookers basically don’t exist in a presidential debate between competing political parties though, the performances in this case, as I explained in my post, were irrelevant. Buy if I was unbiased, I would have definitely said that Kamala came off less emotional. Trump came off angry and annoyed, just like he did in 2020 against Biden, which doesn’t play well. When you look back at 2016 when Trump was tearing through the republican candidates in the primaries, he never came off that way. He always came off with “amused mastery.” Like “a wise old cat dismissing his opponents as if they were nothing but mice playing with his tail” (to borrow a line from Mark Twain’s description of how Brigham Young came off when dealing with him).

Trump knows what wins debates and he’s shown to be a master at it. Which is why I suspect that this tactic was done intentionally, for the reason I state in my post—to show the world that he could win even without winning; that this is now Trump country and anything short of a landslide victory in November could only be a result of fraud. But at no point did I feel he handled this debate the way he did in 2016, no.