PHILADELPHIA Former President Donald Trump had a rough first debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night in large part because he could not help but revert to some of his worst rhetorical habits . He invoked bizarre, debunked claims about immigrants eating pets in an Ohio town; took Harris bait on his rally crowd sizes; doubled down on the 2020 presidential election being stolen; and wasted valuable airtime falsely arguing that Democrats have legalized baby murder in parts of the country.

But soon after the ABC News debate came to a close, Trumps allies began flowing into the post-debate spin room to put their best gloss on it.

The best they could do? Pointing out that the rare parts when Trump stayed on message actually were effective.

Vivek Ramaswamy, an entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate who is now a Trump campaign surrogate, even touted Trumps effort to get Harris to say at what point late in a pregnancy seven, eight or nine months she believes abortions should still be legal.

For the portion of the debate that was focused on policy, which is the most important part of a presidential debate, I think in that area of it, Im not going to make an overall claim, but with respect to the policy aspect of this debate, Donald Trump won hands down, Ramaswamy said.

Ramaswamy also maintained that Harris benefited from low expectations.

Did she exceed the low expectations of her? Perhaps she did, he said. We heard a lot of words better delivered than usual, I will admit, from Kamala Harris , Ramaswamy added. But actions speak louder than words.

Of course, Harris had her own arguments to make against Trumps economic record, including faulting him for botching the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

He mismanaged a pandemic that caused thousands of businesses to shut down and dismissed that it was a real thing, and millions of people died, and it also crashed the economy, Ian Sams, a Harris campaign spokesperson, told HuffPost. These are facts that she wanted to make sure that people remember.

And presidential debates are rarely ever exclusively about policy. Harris was well within her rights to zero in on Trumps character and authoritarian tendencies.