In advance of next week’s encounter with Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump says he’s not devoting much time to debate prep.
By Dana Milbank
He has been debating his running mate, who has voted against the right to in vitro fertilization treatment.
But most of the time, Trump has been debating himself.
The former president recently suggested he would vote for a referendum lifting Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks, because “we need more than six weeks.” But this argument drew a strong rebuttal the next day — from Trump. “I will be voting no,” he announced.
It was far from the first he-said/he-said dispute occurring entirely between Trump’s ears. This past spring, he blessed the idea of voting by mail (which his campaign is encouraging) when he posted an all-caps message that said: “ABSENTEE VOTING, EARLY VOTING, AND ELECTION DAY VOTING ARE ALL GOOD OPTIONS.”
But this argument was roundly refuted last week — by Trump. He said mail-in voting is “terrible” and said at a rally: “We want to get rid of mail-in voting.”
Trump took these formidable debating skills down to Georgia in August, where he sliced and diced the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, for refusing to assist him in overturning the state’s 2020 election results. At a rally, Trump spent 10 minutes calling Kemp “bad” and “disloyal” and even attacking the governor’s wife.
But three weeks later, this Trump argument was defeated — in a debate with Trump. “Thank you to @BrianKempGA,” Trump posted on X, “for all of your help and support in Georgia, where a win is so important.”
The Trump vs. Trump faceoffs occur with near-daily regularity. One moment, the GOP nominee is claiming Harris is a Marxist; the next, he’s claiming that Harris stole all of his policies. One moment, he’s branding President Joe Biden a criminal mastermind; the next, he’s calling Biden a senile fool who can’t lift a beach chair. Here is Trump saying he doesn’t know anything about Project 2025; there he is praising its authors — his once and future advisers.
One day, he’s claiming responsibility for ending Roe v. Wade (which “everybody” wanted overturned). Another day, he’s positing that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” He submits that women “love me” and “like me a lot” — then shares a crude post about Harris performing a sex act, or embraces the support of Elon Musk, who just reposted with approval the idea that “a republic of high-status males is best for decision making.”
Trump is even debating himself over the debate. He originally accepted the Tuesday ABC News debate, then withdrew his acceptance, then reaccepted — only to threaten to withdraw again. While his aides, fearing Trump’s outbursts could hurt him in the debate, were negotiating to have microphones muted when it isn’t a candidate’s turn to speak, Trump argued against the proposition. “I’d rather have it, probably, on,” he said.
What is he smoking? Funny you should ask. Trump has been debating himself on pot, too. Last week, he threw his support behind a Florida referendum legalizing marijuana in the state, arguing, “We do not need to ruin lives & waste Taxpayer Dollars arresting adults with personal amounts of it on them.”
This put Trump squarely at odds with Trump. When he was president, his administration rescinded federal guidelines that limited prosecutions of marijuana sales that were legal under state law. It even floated ending protections for medical marijuana.
None of these self-contradictions seems to reflect an evolution of thought. Rather, they suggest the opposite: He just says whatever pops into his head at the moment. This has always been so with Trump, to some extent. But now that a redrawn presidential race has upended his strategy, he is expanding the bounds of what can be said unburdened by what has been done.
Trump is now touting an increased child tax credit — $5,000 per child, according to running mate JD Vance — but, during the Trump presidency, Republicans forced Democrats to settle for much lower amounts. Trump recently proclaimed that he wants the government to pay for or mandate free IVF treatments — yet the GOP platform and a majority of congressional Republicans call for changes that would restrict if not ban the procedure. Trump is promising to abolish taxes on gratuities — even though his administration made it easier for employers to pocket their workers’ tips.
During an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Trump claimed that he was justified in trying to overturn the 2020 election. “Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it?" Trump asked host Mark Levin.
Yet he undermined this rather innovative argument in another interview this week, with podcaster Lex Fridman — during which he admitted that Biden won the 2020 election. Trump said he “lost by a whisker.” But a moment later, Trump was back to complaining about fraud.
The contradictions and reversals seem all the more glaring, because Trump is now emphasizing Harris’s changed views on fracking, decriminalizing border crossings and the Green New Deal. Harris says her “values have not changed.” Over the years, Trump has changed his values as regularly as most people change their clothes.
He went from “totally pro-choice” to appointing the Supreme Court justices who toppled Roe. He once favored universal health care and a ban on assault weapons, and he called himself “somewhat liberal on social issues” while saying that “in many cases I probably identify more as a Democrat.” He identified himself as Swedish before he happened to turn German.
After his election in 2016, he said he would be “very restrained” on Twitter, “if I use it at all.” Also in 2016, he said, “I’m not going to have time to play golf” as president, because “I’m going to be working for you.” He boasted about hiring the best people for his administration — then savaged them with insults after they left. He resigned as head of the Trump Organization when he became president then later said under oath that he had never stepped down. He inflated the values of his properties when raising money then deflated the values when paying taxes. As the coronavirus pandemic raged in 2020, he said covid-19 was “like a flu” and “will disappear.” During his hush money trial this year, he alternately complained that the trial was taking too long and that the judge was “rushing this case through.” And so on.
Yet there are some constants about Trump that are not subject to his internal debates. He has always had a knack for demagoguery, insult and division. And he has always lusted for unrestricted power. And that is the challenge facing Harris in the debate on Tuesday: Her opponent will say and do absolutely anything, no matter how off-the-wall, to advance himself.
One of the fiercest Trump vs. Trump debates seems to have been conclusively resolved: While his advisers keep scheduling events where he is supposed to focus on issues such as the border and inflation, Trump has resolved that, as he put it recently, “I’m entitled to personal attacks.”
And so he claims Harris is Marxist and fascist, stupid and crazy, an idea thief and a fake Black person. This week came the most devastating attack of all: Trump claims Harris didn’t really work at McDonald’s when she was in college in the 1980s.
This curious allegation arose when Trump claimed an unspecified “they” had “found out she never worked there.” On social media, he added: “SHE NEVER WORKED THERE, they think she’s ‘nuts.’”
In a farcical reprise of his demands for Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Trump said on Fridman’s podcast that Harris will have to “show something” — 40-year-old pay stubs? — to prove her burger-flipping bona fides. “I’ll keep hammering it,” Trump vowed.
True to his word, he pursued it with Sean Hannity when the Fox News personality hosted a rally for Trump on Wednesday night.
“By the way, she didn’t work at McDonald’s,” Trump said.
“There’s no evidence of it,” Hannity agreed.
“Did she work at McDonald’s?”
“So far, no evidence.”
“I don’t think so, based on what I saw.”
This devastating line of attack has been paired with a Trump claim that Harris deploys a “fake Southern accent,” as Vance puts it — which apparently is a euphemism for sounding Black.
The Trump campaign posted a video of the vice president delivering speeches in Detroit and in Pittsburgh in which she delivered the same lines in a different tone, adding, “Let’s see if you can spot the difference.”
Fox News went with saturation coverage of this latest scandal. “It’s like a Southern accent, it sounds like,” Maria Bartiromo said on Fox Business Network. Fox News host Jesse Watters said that “Kamala was raised by an Indian mother in Canada, but now she sounds like Fani Willis,” referring to the Georgia prosecutor.
Fox News White House reporter Peter Doocy demanded answers at a White House briefing.
“Since when does the vice president have what sounds like a Southern accent?” he demanded.
Replied White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre: “Do you think Americans seriously think this is an important question?”
Trump has so many important questions to ask. In another Fox News interview, with Mark Levin, Trump was still raising questions about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Former Trump adviser Roger Stone has raised questions about whether the media knew in advance about the Trump assassination attempt (“extraordinarily suspicious”). Trump sent a fundraising solicitation urging supporters to enter a sweepstakes for a trip to join him at the scene of the shooting, asking them: “Can we take a picture on stage together during my rally in Butler, Pennsylvania?” And Trump has been raising (bogus) questions about Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s “stolen valor” — even though Trump, who never served in the miltary, literally pocketed a supporter’s Purple Heart in 2016. (“I always wanted to get the Purple Heart,” he said then. “This was much easier.”)
Podcaster Fridman, in his sympathetic interview, repeatedly tried to coax Trump to focus on “a positive vision of the future versus criticizing the other side.” He politely explained that Harris isn’t a communist. He asked Trump to name something that he respects about Democrats or “people who lean left.” He reminded Trump that there’s a “middle of America that is moderate.”
Trump responded by saying his opponents are “nasty,” adding: “I believe they are very evil people. These are evil people. You know, we have an enemy from the outside and we have an enemy from within and in my opinion the enemy from within are radical left lunatics.”
So there you have it: Americans who aren’t MAGA true believers are nasty, evil, traitorous, radical lunatics. Paranoia is the one constant in Trump’s life that isn’t subject to debate.
