Regular readers may remember that I've rarely spoken of the candidate debates as revelatory moments. As I've written before, the skills assessed in debates are not necessarily the skills required for the presidency.
Still, debates can help shed light on or highlight candidates' thought processes.
This is especially true for a candidate like Donald Trump who proudly claims to be unpracticed and unrehearsed.
For example, it's not news that Trump is a habitual liar.
The Washington Post fact checkers counted 30,573 false or misleading claims made by Trump During his time in the White House, he averaged a staggering 20-plus calls per day while in office.
The debate was full of Trump's lies.CNN's preliminary count is 30..
But what struck me during the debate wasn't just the number or frequency of the lies, but how willing Trump seems to be to lie even under the slightest pressure.
When Vice President Harris pointed out that the Wharton Budget Model showed that Trump's economic plan would “explode the deficit,” Trump could have responded in a number of ways.
He could have ignored the attacks and reiterated the merits of his plan, or he could have mocked ivory tower economists, MAGA style, or he could have attacked Harris' plan, or he could have focused on the inflation felt by voters under a Biden-Harris administration, or he could have taken some other path.
What was his first reaction? To lie.
“…I went to the Wharton School of Finance and many of the professors there, top professors, think that my plan is a great plan…”
In fact, not a single professor at Wharton seemed to endorse his plan, much less call it “great.”
Whatever the case may be, Trump's first reaction is not to research the facts and weave them into a cogent argument, but simply to invent outright lies.
That's not a desirable personality trait for a six-year-old or a president.
Trump also appears frighteningly gullible and unable to distinguish between reliable and highly questionable sources.
Trump accepted a story from Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had eaten their pets, because “People seen on TV.”
Republican mayors, Republican governors, mayor And while police chiefs say the allegations are unfounded, that means nothing to Trump, because “he's seen the people on TV.”
The fact that the lies he spews are causing great harm to the residents of Springfield seems irrelevant to Trump, because “I've seen the people on TV.”
On an entirely separate occasion during his presidency, Trump was asked whether he believed U.S. intelligence agencies or Russian President Putin when it came to the question of whether Russia tried to influence the U.S. election.
A privileged source for Trump? Putin.
Now, it is unwise to trust intelligence agencies on all matters, but it is foolish to single out Putin as the more reliable source of information.
But as the debate has demonstrated, it reflects a dangerous pattern of gullibility.
What's even more frightening is Trump's seeming inability to understand basic process.
Consider Trump's basis for concluding that he must have won the last election: “There is a mountain of evidence… I won nearly 75 million votes, the most votes ever won by a sitting president. 63 [million]The title I won in 2016 is second to none.”
As any 5th grader knows, our electoral system doesn't work that way. Trump seems to believe that some bureaucrat sets vote levels before the election and that if he gets that many votes, he will win.
He doesn't seem to understand that the candidate who receives at least 270 electoral votes is declared the winner, and that the number of votes needed to win a state is determined by voter turnout: the more people who vote, the more votes are needed to win.
The voting-eligible population has grown every four years since at least 1980, but the turnout rates of that population vary.
In 2020, roughly two-thirds of eligible voters cast ballots, meaning roughly 80 million people who were legally eligible to vote but didn't — enough to net either candidate millions more in votes.
It is shocking that Trump has demonstrated a misunderstanding of the fundamentals of an electoral system in which he has participated three times.
Never before has a major political party fielded a candidate for president with a mental and intellectual disability as severe as Donald Trump.
Hopefully people will become aware before Election Day.
Mark Melman is a pollster and president of the political consulting firm Melman Group, and chairman of the Democratic Majority for Israel.
