Trump had an opportunity to hit Harris on the economy. Instead, he walked into her trap.

This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 11 episode of “Morning Joe.”

The first question Vice President Kamala Harris was asked at Tuesday’s debate against Donald Trump read, in part: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago”? In her answer, Harris did not definitively say yes. She didn’t really even address the question directly. The reason behind that is, it’s complicated. Housing is still expensive, insurance is still expensive, food is still expensive; it’s just not an easy question for her to answer. 

Despite that, Trump did such an awful job addressing the economy during those 90 minutes it was practically a gift to the Harris campaign. The former president tried to rationalize his support of higher tariffs by explaining that during the pandemic, he realized the U.S. didn’t manufacture enough, pointing specifically to semiconductor chips.

We’ve heard this from Trump before and it plays well with his base. When he gets onstage at a rally and tells his supporters that we’re going to tariff China, those people get excited and hold up their “Made in USA” signs. But the truth is, all tariffs end up doing is costing the American people more money.

On that stage, Harris looked him square in the eye and told the truth. She told him, you’re right we don’t produce enough here — that’s why the Biden administration passed the CHIPS and Science Act and invested nearly $53 billion to boost semiconductor manufacturing in this country.

The economy should have been a good point for Trump in the debate. Even if you lay out all the data that shows the U.S. is heading in the right direction, people still feel that life is more expensive and Trump should have been able to do something with that. Instead, he just walked right into Harris’ trap.