Trump's 4 big confessions at the debate

Donald Trump made a lot of confessions at the debate -- mostly through his evasions and omissions. Here is what we learned about the extremist Trump agenda and the implementation of Project 2025.

Donald Trump is fond of cringy all-caps hyperbolic superlatives, but he really outdid himself in his debate with VP Kamala Harris: that was potentially THE VERY WORST, MOST INCOMPETENT, MOST UNHINGED, MOST DEVASTATING DEBATE PERFORMANCE IN RECENT AMERICAN HISTORY.

He slid into this debacle courtesy of an equally superlative performance by Harris, who successfully baited Trump into rants, tangents, and distractions, which have been covered elsewhere, including on my most recent podcast episode. (And now he is completely chickening out and refusing to debate Harris again.)

But Trump did something else equally notable at the debate. He had quite a few tells — signals regarding the policies and actions he would undertake in a second term, especially given what we already know of his agenda from Project 2025, the most extreme set of proposals from a major party in American politics since the Civil War.

Mind you, some of these things we already knew, or could surmise — but one of the useful functions of a debate is that it presents at least the possibility of politicians being forced to answer questions about their planned policies. And indeed Trump, albeit often through evasions or omissions, confirmed many of his plans while on stage in Philadelphia. Here are the four biggest ones:

(1) Trump would absolutely support a federal nationwide abortion ban — and will sign it if Congress passes it.

The contrast of the candidates’ answers on reproductive rights were especially dramatic and telling. Harris delivered her best answer of the night in her ringing and evocative defense of reproductive rights and fighting government intrusion into women’s healthcare decisions.

Trump, meanwhile, had one of his worst moments of the debate when the moderators cornered him on his boasting of being the president to end Roe v. Wade — and how he would handle a federal nationwide abortion ban if it were to land on his desk as president.

Trump refused to answer the question of whether he would veto such a ban, instead trying to muddy the waters by confusing the question of a ban with the question of whether Harris and Democrats could codify Roe by passing a bill in Congress. (Of course, which bill, if any, emerges from Congress depends immensely on which party wins the House and Senate this fall — but it’s clear that if Republicans take Congress, they will try to pass the nationwide ban.)

Republicans have been desperately trying to have it both ways on this issue. The Republican National Committee (RNC) omitted the ban from their 2024 platform (at Trump’s direction, given that he now controls the RNC and installed his daughter-in-law as a puppet national chair).

Yet where it really counts, Republicans in the House endorsed a nationwide ban of all abortions after 15 weeks (when many women don’t even know they’re pregnant until they’re already 6-8 weeks along), as well as additional measures that would likely have the effect of restricting or even eliminating in vitro fertilization (IVF) across the country. This came in March, right after TRUMP HIMSELF stated that he would support a nationwide ban — which he has since tried to back away from.

In other words, he supported the ban before he opposed it.

What did we learn at the debate? He almost certainly still supports a national ban. ABC’s Linsey Davis, one of the moderators, cited JD Vance’s recent statements that Trump would veto a national ban. Trump refused to confirm that — instead throwing Vance under the bus: “Well, I didn’t discuss it with JD in all fairness. JD — and I don’t mind if he has a certain view — but I think he was speaking for me — but I really didn’t.” Then he danced around the question and tried to segue to something about student loans.

Yet the GOP’s actions speak louder than Trump’s failure to articulate words. The House Republicans’ endorsement of a ban is crystal clear — as is Project 2025’s proposed creation of a federal nationwide pregnancy and menstruation surveillance database, which would literally force the states to collect and report data on the pregnancies of every woman and girl in America.

In other words: Trump and the Republicans want to create a national surveillance and enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance with the national abortion ban they want to pass.

Trump could have disavowed such an extreme position — he had a very clear and easy chance to do so at the debate — and instead he has doubled down on the ultra-radical far-right agenda.

(2) Trump would immediately end support for Ukraine and let Vladimir Putin have his way with 38 million Ukrainians — with the rest of Eastern Europe to follow.

Donald Trump’s coziness with Vladimir Putin is, of course, not news. But it was still appalling to watch him completely confirm what we already suspected: if elected president again, Trump will sell out Ukraine and hand it to Putin.

ABC’s David Muir, the other moderator, pressed Trump on the question of whether support for Ukraine is in America’s national interest. This was a question that Trump could easily have said yes to, without sacrificing the pro-appeasement position that Ukraine should settle for peace by sacrificing territory. All Trump had to do was to say “of course we’d prefer a Ukrainian victory, we support Ukraine, but it’s more complicated than that.”

But no. Instead, he said that he wants to end the war and would end it “in 24 hours” — before even taking office.¹

What does that actually mean? Project 2025 has all the details. There, Trump’s own senior officials make it clear that they would completely end all American support for Ukraine. Without that support — money, weaponry, ammunition — Ukraine would likely only be able to keep fighting for a matter of months, after which the Russian military would be able to roll into Kyiv.² And thus, without American support, Ukraine would likely have no choice but to stop fighting and cut the best deal they could get from Putin.

That is how Donald Trump would end the war in 24 hours: by cutting Ukraine off and betraying them, thus handing Putin a wholly undeserved victory after nothing but humiliating defeats ever since his invasion began.

Again, it is not just what Trump said, but what he very deliberately did not say. And for every omission or obfuscation in Trump’s verbiage, Project 2025 provides the comprehensive details as to exactly what a second Trump administration would do.

(3) Donald Trump would try to enact a mass deportation of 11 to 25 million people — without due process, via tent city concentration camps.

On immigration, Donald Trump was again handed an easy opportunity to smooth over the razor-sharp edges of one of his most extreme proposals, a mass deportation of anywhere from 11 to 25 million people. Once again, he declined to disavow his extremism.

Instead, reading together his public statements with Project 2025, it is clear that Trump is deadly serious about a mass deportation — and it would entirely lack any kind of legal due process, plus it would be carried out through the construction of massive concentration camps that would not even have housing for detainees but would force them to sleep in tent cities.

Project 2025’s section on immigration, which we’ll be covering in much more detail soon, calls for completely undoing the normal legal process for removal, in which an immigrant is sent a legal notification of the removal process and has a chance to make his or her case in front of an immigration official. Trump would engage in mass detentions first, without due process — and then there is no mention of when or how or whether due process would be carried out. Yet there is mention of massive detention camps. With tents.

This is, effectively, Guantanamo Bay multiplied by the Japanese-American internment camps — and we should have zero doubt that Trump would try to enact this policy if he gets back into power.

(4) Trump and the Republicans would once again try to gut the Affordable Care Act — or kill it outright.

While Trump may claim that he has “concepts of a plan” on how to replace or to reform the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it’s very clear that he has zero plan to make any productive proposal for improving healthcare — and instead will simply try to destroy or water down the ACA, as he attempted during his first time.

His laughable “concepts of a plan” answer is a lot more disturbing when placed in the total context of Trump Republicans’ actual plans for healthcare, embodied in Project 2025.

The Trump policy blueprint proposes two major changes that could effectively destroy the ACA: (a) allowing circumvention the ACA’s prohibition on discriminating against patients with pre-existing conditions, and (b) stopping Medicare from being able to negotiate lower drug prices for patients.

The provision on pre-existing conditions is one of the most important in the ACA, forcing insurers to cover everyone, not just healthier patients who are unlikely to need care. Going back to the bad old days would be great for insurers and absolutely heartbreaking for Americans whose lives have been saved and improved by this reform.

More recently, the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to use Medicare’s market power to negotiate lower drug prices — not just for Medicare recipients but for all Americans — has been a landmark set of achievements, bringing insulin costs and inhaler costs down to $35/month, to cite just the most well-known examples. And according to Project 2025, Donald Trump would reverse that, reinstating the former longstanding prohibition that forbade Medicare from engaging in such negotiations.

This would then have a terrible domino effect. The success of the ACA — and the longterm health of Medicare and Medicaid — is greatly benefited by reductions in healthcare costs. Conversely, exacerbated increases in healthcare costs undermines the entire system.

Donald Trump indeed has no plan. But his “concepts of a plan” would mean drastically higher healthcare costs for individual patients — and an attack on the entire American healthcare system, hurting patients and benefiting the largest industry giants.

So there you have it. And while we may be done analyzing the debate, we’re far from done with Decoding Project 2025. More on that starting next week.

1. Never mind for now the fact that this would constitute a gross violation of the Logan Act, the federal law that forbids private citizens from conducting foreign policy — or that Trump has likely already violated the Logan Act according to PBS reports that he pushed Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu to refuse a cease fire because it would help Harris. I mean, it’s hard to keep up with Trump’s criming.

2. It is possible that European support could bridge the gap, but it is hard to envision European countries being willing to go it alone without the leadership that the US has provided the last two and a half years.