In any presidential campaign in which Donald Trump is running, anger will have a central place at the table. Trump’s anger can take many forms, from sarcastic bullying to raging frothing. In the three debates he had with Hillary Clinton in 2016, she had no idea how to deal with him. She tried to rise above his anger, to dance around him. She looked weak as a result, as if she was unprepared to face him. And in the first 2024 presidential debate, Joe Biden was revealed to be a broken branch of the candidate, weakened by age, so much so that Trump, in his wits’ end, was smart enough to control his anger (mostly). He stood back because he knew Biden was self-destructing.
But in tonight’s debate with Kamala Harris, the anger equation became something entirely new. Trump was angry from the start—angry at immigrants, angry at Democrats, even as he tried to offset his anger with his bizarre theory about tariffs, which he seemed to view as a windfall handed out by Santa Claus. Yet there was one factor in the debate that Trump wasn’t counting on. And that was Kamala Harris’ anger. In Trumpian terms: It was a beautiful thing.
Harris had a bit of a nervous start, launching into the same points she made in her CNN interview (the $6,000 child tax credit, etc.). She had a flaky side, and my fear, in the first few minutes, was that she would come across as a bit bureaucratic and neutral—as she has on CNN, and as so many Democratic presidential candidates have done over the past 40 years (Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, Hillary).
But that didn’t happen. Instead, Harris, the prosecutor, came out with all the force she had. Not only did she argue her case relentlessly, like a lawyer. She spoke with steady, powerful, poetic anger, waving her hands like a conductor. And the source of the anger was truly ironic. She could never have been in such a position. this Harris would have been livid in a presidential debate if Trump himself hadn’t been in a state of explosive populist rage. In fact, Harris was feeding on his anger, holding it in as if the two candidates were fighting over weapons systems. “When they go down, we go up,” Michelle Obama famously said, but the problem with this strategy under Trump was that Donald Trump had a genius for going down and making it seem like he was telling the dirty truth that everyone wanted to avoid. That’s the key to his power.
So Harris didn’t just talk about Trump. She jumped on Trump’s wave of anger and said, as they say on “Celebrity Deathmatch,” “Let’s get on with it.” And when she did, Trump got even angrier. He was stunned; she was fighting him on his terms. And the angrier he got, the more he began to assume the role Joe Biden had played in the previous debate: the man who inadvertently reveals himself as unfit to be president.
Trump, who seemed more like a broken record than ever, had only two issues, because he kept bringing them up no matter what the question was. He had immigration, which was always a dystopian horror movie where immigrants steal your jobs, commit violence, and destroy the fabric of the country. And he had the issue of how “great” the economy was under his watch—a lie fueled, with obvious opportunism, by the reality of the current inflation, which Trump exploited as any politician would.
But Harris, confronting his lies, was more than just a voice of reason. She scolded him. She slapped him verbally. She called Vladimir Putin “a dictator who would eat you for lunch.” Of the 2020 election, she said, “81 million people threw out Donald Trump.” You could see it starting to rub off on him when she talked about his rallies, and how people who came to those rallies started leaving out of boredom.
This strikes a blow to the bullying narcissist where he lives. She was provoking him, provoking his weak spot. And he took the bait. When a presidential debate has any bearing on the outcome of an election, it often boils down to a single line, a masterstroke (“There you go again”). But in this case, the line that may resonate for the next few months didn’t come from Harris; it came from Trump himself. He was talking about how immigrants are guilty of cooking and eating your cats and dogs, and, picking up a viral “rumor” about the town of Springfield, he said, “They eat the pets of the people who live there.” Trump probably lost the election in those five seconds. Because for a moment, he looked like he was losing his mind.
It turns out that the angrier Trump gets, the more unpredictable his thought patterns become. Which is why, in key parts of the debate, he began to sound like a parody of his Saturday Night Live self. The “weaving” was a word salad, with Trump taking free-wheeling leaps of logic, making statements so extreme (“If I become president, I’m pretty sure Israel won’t exist two years from now!”) that the hyperventilating, slurred quality of it all is what most people would take for granted. The case he made for himself on the world stage boiled down to: “Viktor Orban is my friend! And so is Putin!” Would you like to belong to a club that had both of those people as members? It was the perfect setting for Harris’s scathing observation that Trump, true to his word, would end the war in Ukraine in a heartbeat…because he would hand the entire country over to Putin.
But even as Harris managed to get Trump to reveal himself as the most grotesque bully and jerk, none of this would have happened without Kamala herself showing presidential power. She had real authority. She had vital speed. She had empathy. She had concrete plans for America’s central issue: how to save the middle class. True, she had to navigate the awkwardness of her flip-flopping on several key issues, especially fracking. She is a politician—which means she will make moral compromises to win. (No one wins who doesn’t.)
But most of all, she had passion. She had a kind of intelligence. fireThis is a factor that many Democratic presidential candidates have not had. And it was on full display in the debate. I felt it gaining momentum during the lengthy discussion of abortion. Clinton attacked Trump’s lies, ridiculed the absurd idea that Democrats support abortion after the baby is born, and championed reproductive rights with a passion that was painful and inspiring.
From that point on, I felt Harris was dominating the debate. She set the tone; she set the terms. As Trump grew angrier, his eyebrows lowered in a look of pure hatred, I knew she had gotten to him. There’s no denying that Trump’s anger has been his strength all along. But this wasn’t his rebellious, rock-star-like rage acting out. He sounded like a prophet of doom, and Harris had prepared him to sound like one. In the end, his anger seemed to describe the world he’d actually prefer to live in. Kamala Harris’s well-adjusted rejection of Trump’s reckless narcissism is sure to resonate for months to come. Let’s be clear: Harris’s raw anger is something a candidate can’t fake. It’s something she can’t paint. But you know a leader’s fire when you hear it.
