Now that Donald Trump has agreed to at least one — and possibly three— debates with Vice President Kamala Harris, the editor of the conservative National Review Online, is cautioning supporters of the former president to not get their hopes up too high.
In his column, Philip Klein reminded readers that the postmortems following the first debate focused on President Joe Biden's age-related struggles while little attention was paid to Trump's nearly equal poor performance.
Against Harris, who is both 19 years younger and a former prosecutor, it will be a completely different ballgame, he argued.
With the first debate just weeks away, Klein wrote the former president has lots to do in the meantime lest he "very well get smoked when they face off."
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Noting that in the Biden debate, Trump was "often incoherent" and used "a sort of MAGA shorthand that is comprehensible to those who already support him," the conservative editor suggested the former president won't escape the type of scrutiny that helped drive Biden out of the race.
Pointing to Trump's much-derided Mar-a-Lago press conference on Thursday as an example of what to expect, Klein wrote, Harris would likely "... come to the debate well-equipped with many talking points on all of the issues most likely to come up and she will stick largely to script."
"There are a lot of avenues for Trump to challenge Harris and get her off her game, but that requires a command of details that he can use to make arguments in a comprehensible way," he wrote before predicting, "If Trump decides to wing it and thinks he can get away with the type of performance he did at the first debate or Thursday’s press conference, he will get his clock cleaned."
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