Donald Trump went into Tuesday night’s presidential debate with a simple strategy: to limit the crazy. “We’re expecting ‘disciplined Donald Trump’ to show up,” a prominent Republican close to the campaign told me on Monday afternoon. According to sources, Trump advisers wanted the former president to focus on policy so that Vice President Kamala Harris would be forced to defend Joe Biden’s record.

Minutes into the debate, it was clear that Harris had successfully goaded Trump into blowing up the plan.

Kamala Harris Made Donald Trump Look Silly and Small at the 2024 Debate

Trump’s unhinged performance could have been titled American Carnage: The Sequel. He raged about the (false) social media conspiracy that pet-eating Haitians were overrunning America’s crime-infested cities. He angrily denied Harris’s claim that MAGA fans leave Trump rallies early because they’re bored. He warned about doctors delivering babies only to execute them. He defended extending a Camp David invitation to a Taliban leader named Abdul (it’s not clear who Abdul is). When the conversation turned to health care, he sputtered that he had “concepts of a plan” to replace Obamacare.

In the postdebate spin room, even longtime Trump ally Lindsey Graham diplomatically called the former president’s erratic night a “missed opportunity.”

By Wednesday morning, those in Trumpworld had fallen back on two lines of defense. First, they blamed the refs. The debate was unfair, they said, because ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis dared to call out Trump’s lies in real time. “ABC News Fact-Checked Trump 7 Times; Never Fact-Checked Kamala Once,” a Breitbart headline blared. Second, Trump’s proxies asserted that Harris’s performance wouldn’t win over undecided voters in battleground states. “Harris won on the performance, but she highlighted the fact that she’s really, really liberal,” a veteran of Trump’s 2020 campaign said.

The reclassification of his grievance-heavy, truth-light performance as a win was classic Trump. Ever since he flirted with running for president in 1988, Trump has relied on his mentor Roy Cohn’s three rules of winning: attack, attack, attack; admit nothing, deny everything; and always claim victory. “I thought that was my best Debate, EVER,” Trump posted on Truth Social about 20 minutes after leaving the stage.

Trump’s co-campaign managers Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita told people that the trajectory of the race didn’t change, according to a former campaign staffer. On Truth Social, Trump posted a flurry of rapid-response polls that showed him overperforming with undecided voters. Trump was more favorable to 6 out of 10 undecided voters in one Reuters survey. A C-SPAN poll on X (formerly Twitter) had Trump winning 64-36. “Their view is that Harris had a goal, which was to win undecided voters, and she failed that goal. She doubled down on being extremely liberal. That’s getting drowned out today by the talk about Trump’s performance. But by day two and day three, that will be the story,” a top GOP strategist said. (The first high-quality postdebate polling won’t start rolling in until later this week at the earliest.)

The Trump campaign declined to comment.

On Tuesday night, the Harris campaign released a statement calling for another debate. Whether Trump will accept the offer is an open question. Officially, Trump has agreed to appear at the NBC News debate on September 25. But Trump told Fox & Friends on Wednesday morning that he probably won’t debate Harris again.

“The first thing they did is ask for a debate, because when a fighter loses, he says, ‘I want a rematch,’” Trump said. “I’d be less inclined to [debate again] because we had a great night. We won the debate.”