The Right Resistance: Can Trump overcome the ABC moderators and Kamala Harris to win tonight?

Tonight’s for all the marbles. Or is it?

I guess it depends on who you ask, this evening marking the first – and probably only – face-to-face meeting between 2024’s presidential contenders, Donald J. Trump for the Republicans and Democrat cackling Kamala Harris as a stand-in for the mentally and physically faltering incumbent president, senile Joe Biden.

The 90-minute verbal tussle will take place at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a state/commonwealth that’s received more than its share of attention and visits from both campaigns of late. Yes, it could be said that how goes the Keystone State goes the future of the country and the world.

The matchup will be moderated by ABC News anchor and managing editor David Muir and ABC News Live “Prime” anchor Linsey Davis. The candidates will stand at podiums and microphones will be muted when their opponent is speaking. Kamala won’t be permitted to say, “Hey! I’m speaking!” like she’s done in the past.

There will be no live audience, either, just like with the June 27 version. Just different participants. How will Kamala Harris approach her debut on the big, big stage? Some say it’s all about the result, not what she has to do to get there. In an opinion piece titled “Harris campaign strategy: Win first, answer questions later”, W. James Antle III wrote at the Washington Examiner last Friday:

“A top spokesman for Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign laid bare her strategy for dealing with her and President Joe Biden’s record: Just win, baby. ‘We don’t have time to sit around and think about why, over the last few years, certain things may have happened or may not have happened,’ Ian Sams, who was previously an attack dog for Biden, told CNN ... ‘We’ve got to go win an election.’

“Sams had been laying out Harris’s plans and contrasting them with those of former President Donald Trump, her Republican opponent. He said more than once what Harris was proposing was ‘new’ and ‘really different.’ ‘It’s really different. OK,’ CNN’s Kasie Hunt pressed him at one point. ‘Can you — wait, can you tell me what is really different? I got the capital gains rate, but what else on the list makes it really different from what was going on the past few years?’”

Well, there you have it. Ian Sams, perhaps unwittingly, just previewed what Kamala Harris’s debate plan will feature tonight: mumble anything and everything that will get you elected. It doesn’t matter what Harris says, it’s essentially about how she says it. Like ordering biscuits at Cracker Barrel – it isn’t what you ask for, it’s how you ask it.

Kamala won’t go right out and say it, but winning is her only prerequisite. If she could spend the balance of her campaign time picking flies out of some leftist miscreant’s filthy portable tent – she’d do it. Just show up, look presentable, and make everything about Trump. Then go back into hiding. That’s what we’ll see tonight.

What to expect when you’re not expecting Kamala to offer much – substance

Rumors have abounded the past couple weeks regarding how Harris was preparing for the debate, which supposedly involved a great deal of pure grade school cramming and boning up from binders full of material on foreign policy, taxes, culture, the words to the National Anthem (kidding) and anything else she might be asked to recite in front of a national audience.

It’s seemed odd that she would need to study so intently the things she should already know, but you must also keep in mind what it must be like to be a Democrat in today’s day and age, where issue positions don’t necessarily mean anything compared to the need to do whatever it takes to win. Don’t forget that two months ago senile Joe Biden was still doggedly determined to be the Democrats’ nominee despite his awful June debate performance and everyone this side of Barack Obama’s house staff imploring him to “do the right thing” and get the heck out of the way so some other Democrat schlep can memorize the lines and smile nicely for the cameras to pose as presidential nominee.

That’s right, a couple months ago “Tampon Tim” Walz was still only a twinkle in Kamala’s “What do I gotta do today?” eyes. Before being boosted up to the top job, really all Kamala was tasked with performing was being seen in public reciting a canned line about how “smart and loyal and capable” senile Joe was, and how the ancient Delawarean was the best Democrat to defeat the hated Donald Trump.

Because Joe knew how. He’d done it before. Or so the line of argument went.

Kamala left the hard “book stuff” to the cobwebbed brained octogenarian to handle, so she didn’t need to do anything except stay above room temperature another day so as to fulfill her constitutional duty. Lots of folks have suspected that cackling Kamala was intimately involved in the political coup d'état to nudge Biden to the side, but I don’t believe it.

Sure, Kamala definitely wanted to be president – someday – but for now, she was more than content to serve out her days as broken-down old goat Joe Biden’s beck-and-call girl, a role that she’d honed over decades of serving at the feet of a long line of men who’d used her for what she was good at – namely smiling a lot, occasionally saying something scripted, and doing what she does best – being a visibly minority female whose specialty was keeping the support of the party’s abortion single-issue voters.

But things changed the weekend after the Republicans held their convention. Senile Joe had been sick with COVID, remember? Trump had just been nearly assassinated the week before and gleeful Republicans were making spectacles of themselves gloating about being ahead in the polls and that nothing could stop them from winning this year, because no force on earth could turn Joe Biden into an attractive candidate.

So Joe had to go. And that’s why Kamala had to vastly ramp up her studying for tonight’s debate. Sure, she would’ve had to put in many of the same types of sessions as vice president to prepare to verbally duel with J.D. Vance. But she’d only need to brush up on Biden’s positions, and she was conditioned to saying whatever senile Joe had been blubbering for all this time. She wouldn’t actually have to know anything, either, since no one really pays attention to what the vice president says anyway, right?

Being promoted practically instantaneously to the top of the ticket comes with a raft full of pressures, however. Casting Biden’s decrepit old body to the side came with all sorts of new opportunities for the Democrats. All of them had been too ecstatic to get rid of Biden that they barely had time to realize that they were no longer tied to his vastly unpopular agenda.

Democrats didn’t even need to talk about “democracy” anymore. Their “new start” included substituting a new theme – Freedom!!! – in for Joe’s “Let’s finish the job!” nonsense and she felt absolutely no compulsion to be grouchy and cantankerous all the time like he did. Heck, Kamala could easily make her campaign about “joy” and go around the country talking about how great everything is, was, and will be when Donald Trump is sent packing back to the doldrums of history, a two-time presidential loser with a bad orange hairdo.

It's different for this debate, however, since Kamala, at least for the allotted time, will be required to say something and explain her answers in two-minute intervals.It’s hard enough to know what you know and be able to explain it. It’s that much more arduous when you don’t know what you’re supposed to know and then recite the words as though you do know the material – and believe it. Here’s thinking that Kamala will struggle mightily because she’s not really capable to begin with. Her list of qualifications isn’t long to start. She’s coasted off the coattails of a long line of men who essentially told her what to do.

I don’t envy her for what she has to do tonight. But I don’t feel sympathy for her, either.

Trump has a strategy, but he’s not exposing what it is

Last week at the town hall forum Sean Hannity hosted for Fox News, Trump borrowed a line from Mike Tyson that he’s used before to illustrate his philosophy on overpreparing for something like a presidential debate: “Everybody has a strategy until they get punched in the mouth.”

During the same Hannity event, Trump said he feels like what he does every day prepares him for the types of situations he’ll encounter in a formal setting, and here’s thinking that regularly conducting interviews and taking questions from “ordinary” citizens is excellent preparation for what he’ll likely encounter in Philadelphia.

The only variable/unknown being ABC News, which has demonstrated a competence for unpredictability. But Trump has more or less been running for president for well over four years now and has given hundreds if not thousands of interviews. Unlike cackling Kamala, Trump is used to feeling the heat and seemingly thrives on pressure situations. He doesn’t need to lock himself away for days at a time to discover his positions.

Trump knows them by heart.

This doesn’t mean Trump should not prepare at all, or take Harris lightly. What the woman doesn’t know, she’s more than capable of inventing on the fly. And lying comes second nature to herself and all Democrats. Don’t forget that she’s learned from some of the best, including her boss and mentor, senile Joe Biden.

We’ll see tonight

One can’t help but sense that most of the pressure will be on Kamala Harris to establish herself as a credible candidate who can handle the toughest job in the world. Even with Barack Obama’s leftist minions backing her up, she’ll have to show she has minimal competence. Trump knows what to do and is impervious to nerves. How will it play out?

• Joe Biden economy

• inflation

• Biden cognitive decline

• gas prices,

• Nancy Pelosi

• Biden senile

• Kamala Harris candidacy

• Donald Trump campaign

• Harris Trump debates

• J.D. Vance

• Kamala vice president

• Speaker Mike Johnson

• Donald Trump assassination

• 2022 elections

• Donald Trump

• 2024 presidential election

• Tim Walz