Republicans tried to largely hide from former president Donald Trump’s debate performance Tuesday, mostly cheering him on or just avoiding the issue altogether.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) focused entirely on a failed government funding plan. What did he think of Trump’s debate performance, reporters asked him. Johnson walked away, into the House chamber.
Across the Capitol, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 2 GOP leader, fell into the passive voice to avoid criticizing Trump when asked about the missed opportunity to define Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Well, um, that job’s got to get done,” said Thune, who is asking colleagues to promote him to majority leader.
Who should take up that task? Thune ducked into a closed luncheon for GOP senators without answering the question.
That’s hardly a ringing endorsement from the two people who, if he won the presidency, Trump would rely on to advance his agenda on Capitol Hill.
Almost 11 weeks after congressional Democrats faced a political come-to-Jesus moment surrounding President Joe Biden’s standing, Republicans confronted their own version of a presidential nominee who handled his debate performance with confused, rambling answers that diverged into territory few voters care about.
But they had far more reserved reactions than those exhibited by Democrats at the time, who showed up in mourning to a brief series of votes the morning after Biden’s debate with Trump.
Trump on Tuesday came across more energetic than Biden did back on June 27, but his grasp of issues left many Republicans privately expressing deep regret over how their candidate did not do much, if any, of the traditional debate preparation that has been common practice for a few decades.
Other Republicans just blamed moderators for poor questioning, even though Trump spoke for more minutes than Harris and had ample opportunities to drive home those points.
“I think he preps every day. Like President Trump, I do a lot of meetings, town halls, roundtables, and I think that’s the best prep in the world that you can do,” Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said Wednesday.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who has won three deeply contested statewide races through a disciplined, well-funded campaign operation, did not blame Trump for wandering into strange ideological cul-de-sacs and suggested he is so incredibly well known to voters that debate performances won’t matter for him.
“If you don’t know Trump, I don’t know where you’ve been,” Scott said. “Under a rock?”
Other Republicans begrudgingly offered a slight critique — “missed opportunity” was the description of choice — noting how Harris never found herself on the defensive about her two decades of elected service as a prosecutor, senator and vice president.
“I believe that we missed a lot of opportunities last night,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said.
“It was a huge missed opportunity to nail Kamala Harris on some very easy, easy points. Could have been a lot worse,” said Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Tex.).
How could it have been much worse?
“I mean, I don’t think Trump, you know, became overly emotional or lost his cool. He remained stoic,” Crenshaw said. “He never looked over at her the way she kept sneering and jeering at him like a child.”
Contrast that with Democrats’ reactions after Biden’s June debate.
“I think people are panic-stricken,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.), a 20-year incumbent who serves as a minister and at the time cautioned colleagues not to make rash decisions. “They’re panic-stricken, and I don’t think that’s a good time to think.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who would go on to play a behind-the-scenes role in helping push Biden aside, told reporters “it could be” when asked whether that debate was Biden’s “worst night” as president.
Republicans do not feel free to be that critical of Trump out of the fear that, even if he loses, he will continue to use his influence over base voters to extract revenge in primaries against the wayward lawmakers.
Marshall, a onetime traditional conservative who reinvented himself as a far-right agitator, adopted the blame-the-moderators approach to explain how the Biden-Harris record on border security and crime did not become focal points.
Yet he has no explanation for why Trump didn’t make more of those issues in his nearly 43 minutes of speaking, which included plenty of topics that were not questions from moderators.
“I don’t have an answer,” Marshall said.
Crenshaw, who is not considered a MAGA ally of Trump, even defended Trump’s diversion into an unproven claim, based on racist tropes, that Haitian refugees were stealing and eating pets in a small Ohio town, saying the issue has appeared on television.
“It’s like in the news right now, and it’s disgusting. And it’s, yeah, there’s Haitian migrants in Ohio reportedly eating ducks and things at the local parks. Like, I don’t know about pets but, I mean, it’s a thing,” Crenshaw said.
In his formal statement, released moments after the debate ended, Johnson began with remarks that read as if they were written before the debate.
“Tonight, President Donald Trump exposed Vice President Kamala Harris for the dangerous radical she has always been,” the speaker said.
By Wednesday morning, most Republicans had acknowledged that their biggest regret was that Harris had not been exposed and that, in some regards, she came off looking presidential.
“People saw, ‘Oh, actually, she’s an intelligent, capable person who has a point of view on issues,’ and she demonstrated that time and again,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), the retiring Republican who opposes Trump’s election bid but has not endorsed Harris.
Tillis stood out as the rare Republican who openly criticized Trump for not doing real debate preparations, evident from his lack of ready-to-use quips to criticize Harris for the Biden administration’s handling of the border and inflation, issues on which voters tend to favor Republicans.
“There you go again, Harris,” Tillis said, offering his imaginary answer along the lines that Ronald Reagan used in his debates. “You want to do everything except talk about an agenda that you were partially responsible for implementing.”
Trump has openly mocked his senior campaign advisers at rallies and in interviews for their efforts to get him to focus on policy issues and not personal attacks or false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. According to news reports, those advisers made clear Trump was not doing the traditional mock debates with someone standing in as the opponent and trying to practice lines.
Tillis recalled how, after trailing his opponent for a good portion of his 2020 election, he worked with senior aides who came up with a line that they made Tillis rehearse over and over again.
“If you will say that 11 times, I’ll buy you a steak dinner,” his debate coach said, according to Tillis. He uttered the line 11 times and narrowly won reelection.
“I got the steak dinner,” he recalled, a bone-in porterhouse, medium-rare.
“When you do not heed the advice of experts in politics, you’re probably going to go into dangerous waters,” Tillis said.