Trump can’t accept his poor debate. So he’s spiraled into conspiracy theories.
Since Kamala Harris was widely seen as besting him at the debate, Donald Trump has spread conspiracy theories and spun false tales, losing focus on what polls say matters most to voters.
Former president Donald Trump has long inhabited a bizarre world of his own creation. He rewrites history — or makes it up entirely — to aggrandize himself, denigrate others and spread the basest of lies.
Since Tuesday’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, he’s spiraled ever deeper into conspiracy theories, falsehoods and grievances. He insists he is not a loser. He never lost the 2020 election, he says falsely, and he certainly didn’t lose that debate in Philadelphia. He claims victory in an event in which he spent 90 minutes chasing Harris’s barbs down every possible rabbit hole. He rarely managed to get off the defensive long enough to make a case against her — and when he did, he was barely coherent.
Trump can’t accept the widely held verdict that Harris outdid him, just like he couldn’t accept that President Joe Biden defeated him four years ago. On Friday night, during a rally in Las Vegas that was replete with baseless claims about a variety of topics, he spun up the tale that Harris was receiving the questions during the debate. Elevating a conspiracy theory that popped up on social media, he falsely claimed she had hearing devices in her earrings, that she was being coached on what to say in real time. He did it in classic Trump style, citing unspecified hearsay as proof.
“I hear she got the questions, and I also heard she had something in her ear,” he said. ABC News, which hosted the debate, denied these false claims, but Trump cares little for the truth. He prefers to spread lies to excuse his own poor performance and to stir up his supporters to think the game was somehow rigged. All that does is further divide the country.
He used a similar technique during the debate, notably about immigration. That night he repeated a claim that had spread on social media that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the pets of local residents. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats,” he said.
