Nearly a half hour after the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris concluded, the former president paid a surprise visit to the spin room at the Pennsylvania Convention Center where campaign surrogates weighed in on the debate.
The unprecedented move saw a fever of activity in the room as Trump directly addressed reporters on his debate performance.
“I think it was the best debate I’ve ever personally had,” Trump said.
He told reporters he had seen favorable polls showing he won the debate.
“We’ve got poll numbers showing 98-6, 88-11 … We’re having a lot of great polls that just came out,” Trump said.
An early poll from CNN the following morning showed that most viewers thought Harris had won in a 63-37 split, but that didn’t stop Trump from citing a poll from NewsMax and a series of X polls as evidence that he won the debate in a Truth Social post.
The former president also responded to the Harris campaign’s calls for a second debate.
“Under the bright lights, the American people got to see the choice they will face this fall at the ballot box: between moving forward with Kamala Harris, or going backwards with Trump,” Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said in a statement directly after the debate. “Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?”
Trump, who had previously called for three debates against Harris, did not indicate a desire for a rematch as he talked to spin room journalists.
“She wants to do another one because she got beaten tonight, but I don’t know if we’re going to do another one. I wouldn’t mind,” Trump said in response.
One of the more notable interactions of the debate was when moderator David Muir fact-checked Trump for pushing debunked rumors that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets. The former president doubled down on his take in the spin room when asked saying “Oh it’s true. You take a look at it.”
Trump said the moderators Muir and Davis were “very unfair,” though when was asked about them a second time he instead said, “I actually thought they were just average.”
“It basically was 3-on-1,” Trump said to reporters, calling ABC the “worst” of all the news networks.
Some have pointed to Trump’s appearance in the spin room as evidence of a bad debate performance, but the former president said he was only there because he had made an obligation to do a news appearance.
Trump made an appearance on Fox News from the spin room alongside Sean Hannity.
In the interview, he further distanced himself from Project 2025, which came up multiple times during the debate and that he would be more inclined to debate again if it was on a “fair network.”
“When you’re a prizefighter and you lose you immediately…want a rematch,” Trump said.
Last summer Trump himself called for a second debate against Joe Biden just a week after their first June matchup which polls showed Trump won handily.
On Wednesday morning, calling into the show “Fox & Friends,” Trump did not change his position saying, “When you win the debate, I don’t know that I want to do another.”
