US Vice President Kamala Harris has defeated former President Donald Trump in a landslide in their first and likely only presidential debate.
In a calm, nuanced performance, Harris turned the former president’s old playbook of insults against him, making Trump lose his temper — and then his composure — as he descended into angry, fact-free ramblings about dog-eating immigrants and bogus peace talks in Ukraine.
As the night progressed, with Trump’s upper lip sweating under pressure, Harris spoke directly to the camera as she defended her vision for America’s future, even as she portrayed Trump as a sad relic of the past. “We don’t have to go back,” Harris insisted, evoking the dark memory of Jan. 6, 2021. “It’s time to turn the page.”
The ABC debate, held in Philadelphia without an audience, began on a relatively even playing field between the candidates, with Harris appearing to resist some early nerves, while Trump seemed unusually clear and articulate in his early responses.
Harris tried to rebrand Trump’s preferred tariff policy — adding taxes to the cost of imported goods — as the “Trump sales tax.” Then the conversation turned to abortion. This was a very different take on the Biden-Trump debate — this time with the Democrat pursuing the case against Trump, slyly calling on him to fill the Supreme Court with reactionary justices who would overturn a new U.S. law. Roe v. Wade Erosion of decades of reproductive freedoms.
Trump once again revealed his bizarre lie that Democrats are seeking to “execute” babies even after they are born. He also celebrated the “genius” of his Supreme Court, which adopted MAGA to end this law. RoeWhile Trump has asserted, unrealistically, that Americans are eager to repeal the 50-year federal guarantee of abortion care and return the issue to the states, Trump has said, “We got what everybody wanted.”
In the first debate, Biden had rambled on, but Harris responded with a series of real-world harms caused by what she called “Trump’s abortion bans” in states across the country. Harris described a pregnant woman who had a miscarriage and was “denied emergency room care because health care providers feared she would be jailed” and “bled to death in a car in the parking lot.” Harris looked at Trump and said, “She didn’t want it. Her husband didn’t want it.” Harris also cited cases of “a 12- or 13-year-old incest survivor who was forced to carry a pregnancy to term. They didn’t want it.”
The debate turned decisively when the questions turned to immigration — an issue that Trump cares about and is generally seen as a Democratic weakness. But Harris cleverly used the question to bait Trump.
Harris kicked off the conversation, opening by attacking Trump for killing the bipartisan immigration deal so he could keep the issue “moving forward.” But then Harris veered off topic. She bizarrely brought up Trump’s campaign events, inviting Americans to “come to one of Donald Trump’s rallies, because it’s really interesting.” She chided Trump for his bizarre praise of Hannibal Lecter and his claim that windmills cause cancer. Then she took direct aim at Trump’s ego: “What you’ll also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early because they’re tired and bored.”
The effect was like a matador waving a flag in front of a bull. Harris quickly had Trump seeing red. When it came to his turn to address immigration, Trump veered off his main issue to address his own hurt feelings. “Let me first respond to the protests,” he said. “People are not leaving. We have the largest, most incredible protests in the history of politics.”
Trump then jumped awkwardly into a baseless, racist conspiracy theory about new immigrants coming to Ohio eating their neighbors’ pets: “They eat the dogs, the people who came, they eat the cats. They eat — they eat the pets of the people who live there. And that’s what’s happening in our country,” Trump insisted. Then he went back to defending his events: “As far as the rallies. As far as the reason they go is because they like what I say.”
Then, the entire dynamic of the debate changed, leading to disaster for Trump. The former president turned to an angry, rambunctious style of rhetoric — largely refusing to look Harris in the eye or at the camera. Instead, he directed his angry responses at ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis.
Harris, by contrast, was tuning into her own rhythm. She took her criticisms of her Republican counterpart by staring Trump directly in the eye, repeatedly putting him on the defensive. Then she would speak directly to the camera, creating a sense of familiarity with viewers that Trump has never quite gotten away with, when she called for American unity or made policy proposals that she insisted would uplift the nation’s families.
Harris was perhaps at her best when she responded to a question about Trump’s disparagement of her racial identity. Two weeks ago, when asked about those attacks in a CNN interview, Harris shrugged: “Same old boring thing to say. Next question please.” On Tuesday, she mocked Trump instead.
“I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president, who has tried throughout his career to use race to divide the American people,” she said. She commented on Trump’s past discrimination against black tenants, and his call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who were later acquitted. “This is the same person who spread lies about the birth of the first black president of the United States,” she said, addressing Trump with extreme disdain. “I think the American people want better than that. They want better than this.”
In the briefing room before the event, Trump campaign senior adviser Alina Habba indicated that the Trump camp knew what was coming. Habba said Rolling Stone “I think she’s going to try to piss him off,” Harris said. But she later added, with a sneer, that her boss was “not easily influenced.”
The two candidates entered Tuesday’s debate neck and neck in the polls — but they seemed to be campaigning in very different worlds. Trump has been threatening America with threats of “bloody” mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, vows to jail his enemies, lies about children running away from public schools to have unauthorized sex-change surgeries, and demands for a government shutdown.
Harris has been enjoying a “big tent” moment, with endorsements from conservative Republicans like Dick and Liz Cheney, as well as a list of former military officials. She recently announced her policy agenda as president — including measures to cut taxes for the middle class, implement a federal ban on raising food and grocery prices, and “address the climate crisis.” (The vice president also visited a New Hampshire cracker factory, pledging to take home a large bag of Tasty Ranch Dill flavor for her aide, Doug.)
Harris’s opportunity in the debate, beyond attacking Trump, was to fill gaps for voters who find her candidacy appealing but seek more details about how she might govern—a reasonable request from a Democrat who unexpectedly became the party’s standard-bearer just two months ago. On that front, she was modestly successful, mixing her dissection of the 45th president with descriptions of her plans to give new parents a tax credit to support their infants, her plan to build affordable housing, and her eagerness to fund innovation through a $50,000 tax credit for new small businesses.
For Trump, the tables have turned since the last debate with Biden. His age and intelligence are now under scrutiny, compared with Harris, who is two decades younger. And here Trump stumbled. He displayed not only his repeated incoherence — for example, when he came up with an answer about climate change, with absurd allegations that Biden was bribed by the wife of the mayor of Moscow — but also a strikingly unpresidential temperament.
Trump’s main goal was to portray Harris as a carbon copy of Biden, linking her to identifying unpopular perceptions of the current president. Here, Harris also outdid Trump. “I’m not Joe Biden, and I’m certainly not Donald Trump,” she said. “What I offer is a new generation of leadership for our country, one that believes in what’s possible, one that brings a sense of optimism about what we can do — rather than always belittling the American people.”
