The former president visited with reporters after the ABC debate as his surrogates struggled to defend his performance
Former President Donald Trump speaks at the presidential debate on Sept. 10, 2024, in Philadelphia.
The clearest sign that Kamala Harris’ campaign thought she won the ABC presidential debate was the fact that her elated surrogates in the post-debate spin room were gloating about “finally landing a punch on Donald Trump” — and floating the possibility of a rematch.
The clearest sign Trump knew he lost was the fact that Trump himself appeared in the spin room to defend his debate performance on Tuesday night.
Shortly before 11:30 p.m., the former president shuffled into the Pennsylvania Convention Center, where an armada of surrogates, including Robert Kennedy Jr., Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, former advisor Stephen Miller, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) — as well as running mate J.D. Vance — had been struggling mightily to make a case that Trump did anything other than burst into flames on the stage.
“We thought it was our best debate ever — it was my best debate ever, I think, and it was very interesting,” Trump, who was immediately met with throngs of reporters and cameras, said. “The polls are very good but beyond the polls, I felt very good, I had a good time doing it. I hate to speak about our country so negatively, but that’s what happened, they ruined our country.”
The former president’s visit to the spin room caught much of Team Trump by surprise. Some aides received word he would be appearing only just before he walked in, accompanied by an entourage including top advisers like Steven Cheung, Boris Epshteyn, and Corey Lewandowski, a source familiar with the matter says.
Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign official who was present for the mad dash to shove cameras in Trump’s face, said Trump’s surprise appearance “shows fearlessness and confidence. Kamala Harris would never do it.” A Harris aide, who got swept up into the large huddle as Trump entered the spin room, remarked that it was a mistake for the former president to appear and that it looked “desperate.”
“If you’re so confident you won tonight, why are you here? Why not let the performance speak for itself?” one reporter shouted at him.
“Well, I think it did, but people [asked] would I come here? And I made an obligation to a couple of people,” Trump replied.
He was right to be concerned, as his team was struggling to cast the performance as anything less than a cataclysmic disaster for Trump. Asked to address directly whether Trump had a bad night, Sen. Tom Cotton said he had seen “any of the commentary.” Asked why Trump didn’t detail any plans for his next term, Cotton said simply: “You don’t have to worry about what Donald Trump is going to do — you know what he’s going to do.” Lara Trump, his Republican National Committee co-chair, bemoaned the fact that there wasn’t enough focus during the debate on immigration
Even the dead-eyed Stephen Miller was having trouble defending Trump’s fixating during the debate on conservatives’ racist, debunked claims about Haitian immigrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio. (“They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our county,” Trump said on Tuesday.) Miller repeatedly referenced a 911 call raising concerns about geese instead; Gaetz referred to the same call when questioned.
The muted reaction from Republicans could not have stood in starker contrast to Democrats’ eagerness to dissect the event.
“We have been waiting for someone to just land a punch on Trump on abortion — since 2016! — American women have been waiting for this moment. It was deeply satisfying,” Mini Timmaraju, the president of Reproductive Freedom for All, said. “She nailed him. She pinned it on him. She didn’t flinch. And she got him, in his rambling, ranting way to double-down on what he did: He took credit for overturning Roe tonight. He would not commit to vetoing a national ban. She got him on the record.”
Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who has led Democrats’ efforts to codify protections for in-vitro fertilization, laughed when asked about Trump’s insistence tonight he was “a leader on IVF, which is fertilization.”
“He obviously doesn’t understand how IVF works,” Duckworth said. “That was really the point in the debate when he began his downward spiral that he never recovered from. He was clearly on the defense, and it was clear he did not know what he was talking about.” Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.) pointed to a different moment, the moment Harris invoked Trump’s rallies, as the point at which he “started to unravel.”
It was California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), though, who offered one of the most prescient observations early in the night. Asked how significant the debate would be in the grand scheme of things, he predicted it would be make a difference — because of the way Trump himself would react.
“Donald Trump will not be capable of not overreacting to how badly he did tonight over the course of the next days,” Newsom said, roughly 40 minutes before Trump made his shock appearance in the spin room. “I think this will shape shift in a way that’s even more profound than the evening itself — we will see him reacting to this for weeks and weeks and weeks, with his pity party and his grievance mindset. I’m sure he’ll be complaining about the refs and the rules for weeks.”