If there’s one thing we’ve learned about Donald Trump by now, nine years into his career in public life, it’s that his ego invariably gets in the way of what others might consider political good sense. Before the start of his first and likely only debate with Vice-President Kamala Harris, the former President posted a video clip on his social-media feed, along with a quote from an admirer: “Donald Trump is probably the greatest political debater we’ve ever had in American History.” So much for expectations-setting.
But it took only a few minutes into Tuesday night’s face-off at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, for it to be clear that greatness was not in reach for the ex-President. To be fair, Harris started out a bit shaky, launching into a canned speech on her first answer about her plans to boost small business rather than addressing a straightforward opening question from ABC News’s David Muir about whether Americans are better off today than they were four years ago. From that point on, however, the debate stage was all hers. Who says a petite woman in a pants suit can’t own a six-footer with a hundred pounds on her? For someone like Trump, whose entire public persona has been an exercise in projecting dominance—physical and otherwise—it must have been more than a little humiliating. He even seemed flustered by Harris’s opening gambit of coming over and shaking his hand.
By the end of the evening, prediction markets and the instant polls were calling Harris a big winner, Pete Buttigieg was dunking on Trump’s “crazy uncle vibe,” and, adding insult to injury, Taylor Swift decided to pick this night to endorse Harris in an Instagram post to her two hundred and eighty-three million followers. The historian Michael Beschloss concluded: “From start to end, Kamala Harris has just delivered what is easily one of the most successful Presidential debate performances in all of American history.” No wonder Trump’s son Don, Jr., was reduced to tweeting his fury at the moderators: “The Fake News is the enemy of the people!”
In June, Trump survived the first debate of the 2024 Presidential election season owing to the self-immolation of his opponent, Joe Biden. But this time, with Harris at the podium next to him, rather than the octogenarian she replaced on the Democratic ticket, Trump visibly struggled. He belittled Harris. He called her a “Marxist.” He said that she was “the worst Vice-President in the history of our country.” But in truth Trump’s moves failed him in Philadelphia. Harris came into the debate with a plan, and it was a simple one: set as many traps for Trump as possible and wait for him to walk right into them. Again and again, it worked. She got him ranting about the court cases against him. “They weaponized!” he sputtered. He doubled down on election denialism and complained about Biden and bragged about how well he knows Vladimir Putin.
Harris’s bet was that Trump would say a lot of crazy and unhinged stuff if she got him going. It was a safe bet. I’ve watched every Presidential debate for the past two decades, and I can’t think of anything that ranks higher in pure stupidity than Trump ranting and raving to a national audience about immigrants supposedly eating people’s cats and dogs. His line about how the Vice-President “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison” was pretty memorable, too. What the hell was he talking about? No one knows, which was, of course, exactly Harris’s point. Trump was so unprepared for the debate that even he himself did not seem to know what he was saying at times. Asked to describe his proposal for jettisoning Obamacare and replacing it with something better, Trump tried to blame Democrats for the fact he didn’t have one yet. Rather, he said, “I have concepts of a plan.” Yeah, right.
An early question about the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade offered one of the starkest contrasts I’ve ever seen in one of these contests. First, Trump served up an incomprehensible screed about Democrats supporting abortions after birth and insisting, repeatedly, that absolutely everyone in America was in favor of getting rid of Roe. Harris pounced, calling Trump’s argument “insulting to the women of America” and passionately expounding on why she would, as President, do everything in her power to stop what she called the “Trump abortion bans” that have proliferated since Roe’s demise.
Harris’s passion in this answer was real; here was the authenticity that voters say they crave from their politicians. Given the political resonance of the abortion issue in the two years since the Supreme Court’s decision, Democrats have every reason to hope that the Vice-President’s response to this question might well have been the most important one of the night.
Harris certainly knew she was on a roll. A few minutes later, gaining confidence, she began openly trolling Trump, suggesting that perhaps all Americans should go and see one of his rallies, where they could hear him ramble on about Hannibal Lecter and carcinogenic windmills and the like. The ostensible subject at this point in the debate was immigration—supposedly one of Trump’s top policy priorities. But when he demanded a rebuttal, all thought of the issue was gone. He wanted only to disprove Harris’s attack. There’s no way anyone was leaving his rallies early, as she had claimed. They are, he insisted, “the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
Next to him, Harris had an electric smile on her face. She looked like she wanted to jump for joy. She didn’t need an instant CNN survey to tell her what was happening.
It’s quite possible that none of it matters all that much, that the country is so divided that no one’s mind will be changed by the debate. Perhaps the visible evidence of Trump’s mania is already too baked into the polls for it to register anew. Perhaps there truly are no undecided voters left. The polls going into the debate indicated that Harris’s remarkable honeymoon since replacing Biden on the ticket might finally be coming to an end. According to the Web site FiveThirtyEight, Harris’s national lead has narrowed recently to 2.7 per cent—the closest the polling average has been in a month. New surveys from the battleground states also suggest that, in almost all of them, the race is a dead heat.
But, in an election this close, one would like to think that a drubbing like the one Trump received on Tuesday night ought to matter at least a bit. The stakes, as the former President himself has emphasized repeatedly in recent days, could not be higher. It is no accident, I’m sure, that Trump had spent the hours and days leading up to the debate raising questions about the integrity of American elections, past and present. Over the weekend, he threatened to lock up “those people that CHEATED” and robbed him of victory in the 2020 election. On the afternoon of the debate itself, he insisted that congressional Republicans vote down a pending measure to keep the federal government open, claiming, bizarrely, that Democrats were using the resolution to somehow secretly enable illegal aliens to vote this fall. “DON’T LET IT HAPPEN – CLOSE IT DOWN!!!” he demanded. For Republicans on Capitol Hill, it was a flashback moment, a reminder of what the Trump Presidency, with its sudden peremptory orders issued via tweet, had been like for those trying to negotiate legislative deals, and what it could soon be again.
Even more to the point, however, Trump’s statements suggested how much he is already committed to undermining the results of this fall’s election—a playbook he deployed in 2016, when he thought that he would lose, and did not entirely abandon even after he won, and, unforgettably, in 2020. Will he do it again? You can bet on that as surely as the proposition that Kamala Harris, veteran prosecutor, has now proved beyond all reasonable doubt: Donald Trump, offered the political bait, will always, always take it. ♦
