His dishonesty reigned supreme at debate but triumphant Trump returns to South Florida | Opinion

After the first presidential debate, there’s a sense of triumph for Donald Trump as he prepares to come to South Florida for a rally in Doral on Tuesday.

A sense of triumph not because Trump had a remarkable presentation at the CNN debate in late June. He’s lucky that the focus of attention has been not on how he shamelessly spread misinformation, but on Democrats’ panic and attempt to replace President Joe Biden after his disastrous performance raised reasonable questions about his mental acuity.

When Trump takes the stage at Trump National Doral Miami Tuesday evening, the bar will be set low for him. Trump has to do the bare minimum — looking and sounding vigorous will likely be enough as the news cycle turns to 24/7 coverage of how many Democrats are calling on the president to pass the torch to a younger candidate.

Not even Trump’s outrageous comments — so run of the mill at this point — or his criminal conviction on 34 felony charges will steal the spotlight from the Democrats’ internal struggle as Biden refuses to relinquish his reelection bid.

Trump might want to wait to announce his vice-president pick to allow the Democratic Party to stew in the negative attention a little longer. At the same time, Doral would be the perfect location to announce his VP pick if it’s Miami’s own U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, who’s reportedly on the former president’s shortlist.

Biden handed Trump a gift at the debate with his rambling, and at times incomprehensible, answers and his deer-in the-headlights facial expressions. It was an easy distraction from the falsehoods Trump spewed with little pushback from his opponent or CNN moderators.

For example, Trump claimed Democrats’ abortion rights stance is so radical “they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that less than 1% of abortions in the U.S. happen after 21 weeks. If they do occur, it’s usually because of fetal abnormalities or life-threatening emergencies for the mother. Most democrats support abortion up until the point of viability, the standard applied under the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling for more than 50 years. Taking the life of a child after birth would be murder.

Trump accused Biden of allowing “millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions.” Federal numbers show that, from 2021 to 2024, immigration authorities arrested 103,700 noncitizens with criminal convictions in the U.S. or abroad — not “millions.” Not all of them were let into the U.S. and some had legal status in the U.S., PolitiFact, which rated Trump’s claim “pants on fire,” reported.

Trump also accused Biden of calling Black people “super predators” when pushing for a crime bill in the 1990s. Biden in 1997 said just the opposite in a speech: that youth in the criminal justice system “are not the so-called ‘super predators,’” according to a CNN fact check.

Voters brushed off Trump’s casual relationship with the truth before. After a disastrous night for Democrats, his lies became nuance lost in the bigger drama of a president who failed to assure the American people that he can hold the world’s most powerful job for another four years and into his late 80s.

The stage for Trump’s next rally is emblematic of the crossroads Biden’s party finds itself in. The losses Democrats have had in South Florida — and Florida as a whole — in recent years are largely self-inflicted wounds and lack of proper voter engagement. Thanks to growing support among Hispanic voters, in 2020 Trump made large strides in Miami-Dade, where Biden won by 7% after Hillary Clinton carried it by a 30-point margin in 2016.

You can bet that Trump will use his speech in Doral to gloat over his supposed triumph at the debate and Biden’s apparent cognitive decline while ignoring his own. Expect him to continue to inject his supporters with a dose of fear-mongering — a la immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country — and anger over the falsehood that abortion-rights supporters are ripping babies out of the womb to kill them.

While he does that, America will be too busy worrying about a Biden’s fitness for office. Trump couldn’t ask for a bigger distraction.

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