Former President Donald J. Trump went into sales-pitch mode immediately after Tuesday night’s debate, walking into the spin room to extol his own performance, crowing on Fox News and going on a late-night posting spree to hype unscientific online polls that he said showed he had crushed Vice President Kamala Harris.
“That was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, minutes after the debate ended, referring to the two ABC News moderators.
Mr. Trump was insisting the same things privately to advisers and allies in the hours after the debate, according to three people with direct knowledge who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversations. Mr. Trump appeared jubilant, as if he truly believed what he was telling them, the three people said.
But Mr. Trump’s actions after the debate told another story.
In the lead-up to his debate with President Biden in late June, Mr. Trump’s aides suggested that he might want to go into the spin room afterward. But he rejected the idea, and after his triumphant performance that night he felt no need to enter the spin room, understanding that his victory over the enfeebled president was so comprehensive that he could sit back and watch the press tear Mr. Biden apart.
His aggressive spinning on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning appeared to be an unspoken acknowledgment that his performance was suboptimal.
The day after Mr. Trump’s debate with Ms. Harris, his aides and his allies were largely echoing his praise of his performance in public, but privately several conceded that the former president had a rough outing, in stark contrast to his more controlled appearance against Mr. Biden.
An exception was the recent Trump endorser Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“Vice President Harris clearly won the debate in terms of her delivery, her polish, her organization and her preparation,” Mr. Kennedy said on Fox News on Wednesday, adding that while Mr. Trump “wins” on substance, “he didn’t tell that story.”
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Some of his allies chose to publicly blame his debate preppers instead of Mr. Trump himself. And yet at the same time, the supporters who are close to him were also of the hope that one bad night would ultimately not amount to much for an unpredictable, norm-busting presidential candidate who has had dozens upon dozens of bad nights over the last nine years.
His advisers began to brace for a wave of negative news coverage immediately after the debate, and for this to perhaps result in a temporary, modest polling boost for Ms. Harris. Some are expecting days of bad news cycles instead of a period of momentum in which they had planned to hammer Ms. Harris for her liberal record and connection to Mr. Biden.
The Harris campaign immediately embraced a second debate. Mr. Trump was more circumspect.
“The reason you do a second debate is if you lose — and they lost,” Mr. Trump told Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday night after the debate. By Wednesday, Mr. Trump was lashing out at ABC News. “They ought to take away their license for the way they did that,” he said in another Fox News appearance. He mused instead about which moderators from Fox he would find acceptable to host a second debate.
Few if any of Mr. Trump’s close allies and advisers share his purported view of his performance against Ms. Harris, though it is unclear how honest they have been with him so far. When Mr. Trump asks, “What do we think?” — as he did repeatedly to people he spoke to overnight and on Wednesday — the easiest response has been to tell him that he was great. And many took that path of least resistance.
Mr. Trump will most likely receive some of his toughest feedback through the television, even on what would normally be friendly shows. While some Fox News opinion hosts, such as Jesse Watters, hunted for the positives in Mr. Trump’s performance, many of the commentators on the network on Wednesday morning did not offer glowing reviews.
“The moderators didn’t fact-check her, but there’s no reason he can’t do it,” Trey Gowdy, the former South Carolina congressman, said on Fox News.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina praised Mr. Trump on social media after the debate for making the case that America was safer under his administration. But in the spin room afterward, according to Politico, Mr. Graham was clearly disappointed, outlining what he wished he had heard: “What I was hoping for was: ‘When I left we had the most secure border in 40 years, mortgage rates were below three percent, gas was $1.87, the Abraham Accords, energy independent, you screwed it all up.’”
Several Trump allies and advisers who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity said they saw the night as a colossal missed opportunity. He had one overriding goal for the evening: to force Ms. Harris to own her left-wing policy record and to attach her in voters’ minds to the most unpopular aspects of the Biden-Harris record. Instead, he found himself defending many of his decisions and past positions, while spreading unfounded claims about immigrants eating pets.
Asked to comment, Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, said the former president went to the spin room “because he’s fearless and unafraid to take questions from reporters, unlike Kamala Harris,” and knocked her for not giving one-on-one interviews or holding news conferences.
She added that Mr. Trump “strongly drove home” his message that Ms. Harris was “responsible for the problems we are facing today,” a point Mr. Trump rarely made on Tuesday night. And she insisted that Mr. Trump’s advisers “could not be more proud” of Mr. Trump “for delivering a masterful debate performance in a three-on-one fight,” accusing the ABC News moderators of ganging up on the former president.
Mr. Trump’s advisers and allies had hoped he would turn every question on Tuesday night back to Ms. Harris’s incumbency, asking her why she hadn’t accomplished her plans in the three and a half years she has served alongside Mr. Biden. His aides felt good about how he had performed in his prep sessions. One person briefed on the sessions said before the debate that he expected Mr. Trump to ask the television audience a version of the devastating question that Ronald Reagan posed in his 1980 debate with President Jimmy Carter: Were voters better off now than they were four years ago?
Yet Mr. Trump waited until the end of the debate to deliver a version of that argument, seeming to recall his key objective for the night only during his closing statement. He repeatedly took Ms. Harris’s bait, getting caught up on personal grievances like the size of his crowds, the dollar amount of his family inheritance and whether he won the 2020 election that he lost.
In his debate prep sessions, Mr. Trump’s advisers suggested “pivots” for many of the lines of attack that came up on Tuesday night. These were typically responses that would turn the focus back to Ms. Harris’s partnership with Mr. Biden and their joint stewardship of the economy and immigration. But instead of using those pivots, Mr. Trump snagged himself on every trap Ms. Harris laid out for him.
The question now for Mr. Trump and his aides is how to move ahead with eight weeks left in the race.
He went to a memorial ceremony for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday, shaking hands again with Ms. Harris and appearing to greet her cordially. He later visited a fire station, bringing along Laura Loomer, the right-wing provocateur who also traveled on his plane to the debate and who last year shared a video on social media calling Sept. 11 an “inside job.” Ms. Loomer, who has advanced the pet-eating story line, posted conspiratorial questions about Ms. Harris’s earrings on Wednesday.
In the past, when he has faced similar moments of self-inflicted peril, Mr. Trump has tried to change the subject with an outlandish gambit or a campaign shake-up. He has publicly defended his campaign leadership but his recent empowerment of Corey Lewandowski to a senior role in the campaign has already caused friction within Mr. Trump’s team. Mr. Lewandowski, who was fired as his 2016 campaign manager, is known for having sharp elbows and encouraging a “let Trump be Trump” approach.
It’s unclear whether there will be any changes to the campaign’s approach — or to his own approach — after Tuesday.
After a disappointing performance, Mr. Trump typically casts around for others to blame. But at no point during his debate prep sessions was Mr. Trump advised to get hung up on responding to jabs about the size of his inheritance or over wild rumors about Haitian migrants eating pets, a person with knowledge of the sessions said.
Readied for a tough stretch, his advisers now hope he can turn his focus back to the economy, with plans to hold events to highlight the high cost of living under the Biden-Harris administration and to compare it with the much lower prices before the coronavirus pandemic when Mr. Trump was in office.
Mr. Trump is following the debate with a West Coast swing that includes one of his busier fund-raising stretches. He will travel to Tucson, Ariz., on Thursday afternoon for a campaign speech billed as focused on the economy and housing, will hold a news conference at his golf course near Los Angeles on Friday morning and then a rally in Las Vegas that evening. In between the campaign events are a series of fund-raisers, including in Los Angeles on Thursday night and in Silicon Valley on Friday afternoon.
One remaining question is whether Mr. Trump will debate Ms. Harris again. In 2020, the former president pushed his disastrous first debate with Mr. Biden out of the news in part because he contracted Covid and wound up hospitalized. But he also stabilized his standing with a stronger second debate in October.
