A Pre-Debate Letter to Donald Trump

If there is another debate, it won’t be for a few weeks or so, leaving you, Trump, plenty of time to tidy up some of the missed opportunities from the first round with Kamala. Try some of these ideas. They’ll work on the trail, too.

For any of Kamala’s new programs under her “opportunity economy,” such as tax cuts for small businesses and a measly $25,000 for first-time home buyers (the average house costs $412,000, so Kamala’s offer is only about half of the down payment in many places. Try things in California where the average housing cost is $793,000), punch back with this: “You’ve had three years. Why haven’t you just done it?” Follow-up: “And how are you going to pay for that? With tax increases on the middle class?”

One of your most effective points in the first debate was in your closing statement, when you asked Kamala why she did not initiate any of her special programs as vice president. The question should next time be aimed directly at her, as it puts her in a real bind; either she can admit that, as VP, she did very little, or throw Joe under the bus and claim he stymied her initiatives. It is a win-win for you.

In addition, the question drives home the larger point of tying Kamala to the Biden administration. Harris needs badly to show something to the public to give them a reason to think she would be different than the last four years. She is desperate not to run as the pseudo-incumbent, all that “turn the page” and call for change stuff she borrows from Obama 2008, and you should be equally desperate to hold her to what has and has not taken place these last four years. Remind the public the Biden-Harris administration created all the major issues raised (economy, immigration) during the previous debate.

On the economy, remind people food prices rose 5.3 percent under your administration while in Biden’s first three years food prices increased, conservatively, by a whopping 20.3 percent.

Almost half of Americans think the U.S. economy is in a worse state now than it was when Biden-Harris took office in January 2021. The Census Bureau released an update earlier this month on income, poverty, and health insurance in the United States. Income-wise, many Americans were still not better off than they were in the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, nor necessarily even than they were in 2020. In the latest Times/Siena poll, Harris trailed you by 13 points on the economy, the issue that matters most to voters. It’s one of the reasons why she’s tied and not ahead of you in the race overall.

So create a simple app that calculates what groceries would have cost four years ago. People plug in their current register tape numbers and are told what a similar basket of goods would have cost under your administration.

It actually looks like someone had once done most of the heavy lifting on this one already. One of your official Super PACs launched a website (now defunct) named “Biden-Mart” that let users compare Trump-era grocery prices to current costs under Joe Biden’s administration.

Biden-Mart.com, published by the Make America Great Again Inc. PAC, featured an interactive grocery checklist encouraging users to “check off the items… to compile your weekly grocery list and see how much more expensive your bill has become under Joe Biden.” There were over two dozen common food staples to choose from, including coffee, dairy products, and a variety of different fruits and vegetables. For example, a two-pound bag of apples, two pounds of ground beef, seven lemons, one gallon of milk, and one pound of sugar and coffee each totaled $30.07 — a killer 57.1 percent increase from the $19.14 it cost during your administration. Egg prices re 72 percent higher today than when Biden entered office in early 2021. Biden-Mart used data mostly from the United States Department of Agriculture so it should be relatively quick to reconstruct the app.

It will remind people during your first three years in office, food prices rose by 5.3 percent as wages soared past them at 12.7 percent growth. Wages have not kept up with food prices during Biden-Harris. It is one thing to talk about inflation as this percentage or that, quite another to reach into a voter’s pantry and hit them with a specific dollar amount.

As even the Harris-favoring New York Times wrote, “Optimistic words and some admirable proposals aren’t enough to overcome the discontent and anger that a large majority of Americans feel about the economy.” Harris word-checks “freedom” with abandon, but never mentions freedom from debt, from living paycheck-to-paycheck because of inflationary practices under Biden-Harris. Harris, as vice president, cast the tie-breaking vote for the measure economists point to as the cause of inflation—the ironically named “Inflation Reduction Act.” Remind the people they deserve better.

The Biden-Harris administration admitted some 21 million aliens, dramatically more than under the Vietnam War evacuation and the Mariel Boatlift combined. Will you, Kamala, admit another 21 million under a Harris administration? Talk about what that number means; in 2021, there were around only 3.66 million live births in the United States.

Focus on narrative, personal stories about ordinary Americans unfairly burdened by unchecked migration. Never mind the dogs and cats; Springfield, Ohio, a semi-rural town of only some 60,000 people, ended up playing host to 15,000 Haitian immigrants. They overwhelmed the city’s medical and social services systems to the point where the governor had to send in state troopers and millions of dollars as a palliative. The poverty rate for the city is 22.7 percent, well-above the state average of 13.4 percent. Fatal car accidents in Springfield increased fourfold last year, due to a surge of Haitian migrants unfamiliar with American driving rules.

Or mention the slaughterhouses and meat packing plants that employ migrant children. Talk about individual victims of migrant street crime in New York City, showing photos of a zombie Midtown overtaken by the homeless and drug users. The latter ties also in Harris’s time as a prosecutor and attorney general in California where, same as in New York, many criminals who should have been taken off the street were given bail or simply released in the wake of “woke” law enforcement post-Floyd.

Whenever possible, follow Ronald Reagan, who at the close of his 1980 debate against President Jimmy Carter, asked simply, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” It is a rare American who will be able to answer unequivocally “yes.” The ones who say “no” are likely to be among middle-of-the-roaders who can swing your way in November.