How to Lose a Debate, Featuring Donald J. Trump

It’s come to my attention that many readers of The Roundup have a deep desire: to lose a debate in as avoidably a fashion as possible. So, I thought I would write a bullet-point guide to losing completely winnable arguments using the best template I know of: Donald “J for Jenious” Trump.

Pre-Debate Preparation

Success in any field requires many days or even weeks/years of preparation. Similarly, success in failing debates depends largely upon the foundation one lays.

• The first step of the “Preparation” phase is have laid a solid long-term foundation. You want to have said as many sentences as possible that are either completely insane or easily taken out of context, all in the years and months before the debate.
• The second step to charge headfirst into a studio that you are well aware hates you. What are they gonna do? Eviscerate you with fact checking? That’s ridiculous. You never lie, and Donald Trump never lies.
• The third step is to subscribe to “InfoWars” because it’s a reliable, truth-telling source. Alex Jones should be regarded in much the same way as Tucker Carlson, which is to say a god among men. Later, in the debate itself, you must say what they say, because what they say is correct.

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• The last step in losing a debate is to regard practice as being for nerds. To a real American Patriot, a debate against a well-prepared opponent should be regarded as merely a formality. It’ll be easy! All you have to do is call your opponent mean names and everyone will be so infatuated with you they’ll ignore all that “policy” stuff you’re supposed to talk about.

During the Debate

Obviously pre-debate preparation is important, but the real time to shine is during the debate. Here are several strategies to fall-flat in the gentlemanly arena of ABC Studios:

• This part is very important. DO NOT ANSWER THE QUESTIONS. The questions are silly obstacles that impede you from talking about migrants. Only talk about migrants. It doesn’t matter that your opponent is answering a couple of the questions (however wrong she is). She’s just wasting her time.
• You want to look as racist as possible. Anything you can find to alienate the Latino and Black vote is welcome. Make utterly insane-sounding generalizations about migrants eating dogs and cats. Act like the Central Park Five were not exonerated so as to slander a famous group of men emblematic of Black empowerment. And, of course, always focus obsessively on migrants.
• You always want to pander to the base. The moderates don’t matter. It also doesn’t matter that your base already worships you as they would God himself. You only want to rile them up. Which means you need to talk about migrants.

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• Give zero hard evidence and zero accurate statistics regarding your opponent’s past performance. It doesn’t matter if they are extraordinarily easy to find. Numbers are boring; hyperbole is better… and also talk about migrants.
• Better yet, don’t even bother attacking your opponent on policy at all. Just call her a marxist at the beginning and go radio-silent on comebacks for the rest of the debate.
• Lastly, you want to catastrophically derail the use of your entire response time after minor insults. You want to spend the entire time going “nuh uh” to whatever minor dig your opponent just got in. This prevents you from talking about substantive matters, which as we have established, are boring and don’t really matter to the average American.

In All Seriousness

But to round off this article, I wanted to be very blunt about what happened at the September Presidential Debate. Trump shunned preparation, and then waltzed right into an ambush. The moderators made a concerted effort to derail him while leaving Harris unimpeded. But despite valid complaints about the neutrality of moderators (and attempts to chalk up Trump’s performance to being the victim of left-wing media bias), Trump earned this. He decided to act like a child, and was made to look like one on stage.

He refused to prepare, refused to acknowledge the debating prowess of his opponent, and, ultimately, refused to look moderate. Harris shouldn’t have won the debate because Harris has a god-awful track record that, importantly, Americans feel in their pocketbooks. But Donald Trump won it for her, because he is a child. That is what happened.

So, valued Roundup reader, I hope I’ve laid out for you the exact steps on how to lose a winnable debate. Using Donald J. Trump as a template, you too can go on to miss  opportunities, create them for your opponent, and make your campaign manager’s blood pressure rival a hydraulic press.

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