Donald Trump Nailed It (Just Kidding)
Kamala Harris had two goals in Tuesday night’s presidential debate. The first was to convince the small but significant segment of undecided and persuadable voters that she can make their lives better economically. The second was to provoke Donald Trump into saying something sexist, racist, incoherent, crazy-sounding, or all of the above.
On the first one, meh, who knows, check back later. On the second one, mission accomplished. Mission really accomplished. Wow!
Harris took the evening’s first question. Moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis asked whether Americans were better off now than they’d been four years ago, given all the inflation that’s taken place under the Biden administration. Dodging the inflation issue, Harris gave an answer about her economic plans; while somewhat halting, it did get across that she is proposing tax cuts for homebuyers, parents, and small-business owners, and it mentioned Trump’s plan to impose heavy tariffs on imported goods, which would likely cause further inflation if enacted. There was some back-and-forth about that. The Washington Post’s live panel of undecided voters basically called this portion of the debate a draw.
From there on out, things went better for Harris from the perspective of what political consultants probably call “the contrast piece” and what regular people might call “easily tricking Donald Trump into talking nonsense.”
Well, that’s not entirely fair: Sometimes Trump did it entirely to himself. Next the moderators asked Trump about abortion, an issue on which voters widely agree with Harris that the protections of Roe v. Wade should be reinstated. His best strategy would have been to say that he would leave the matter to the states and move on. Instead, he defensively insisted on repeating one of his strangest and most empirically untrue talking points, which is that a majority of the country’s voters and legal scholars “wanted” to see Roe overturned, and that overturning it was a “great service.”
This, in turn, set up Harris to describe some of the consequences for pregnant women who’ve suffered miscarriages in parking lots or been told to take their rapist’s child to term, and in an effective (and seemingly spontaneous) rhetorical twist, to ask if that’s what they “wanted.” Trump dug a further hole for himself when pressed on whether he’d sign a national abortion ban, telling moderators that his running mate J.D. Vance’s claim that he would veto one was false, but then also refusing to say whether he would or wouldn’t.
The subject then turned to undocumented immigration, which a majority of voters see as a weak point for Harris. Here she gave a (mostly) factual description of the bipartisan border security bill that the Biden administration supports but which Trump told Republicans to kill, stating that it would have raised staffing levels at the border (true) and relieved an overtaxed system (sure), and implying that it would stop the flow of fentanyl into the country (not really, since most fentanyl that’s seized is found on people who otherwise have permission to cross the border. But this was a perverse sort of political fair play, given that Vance has probably done more than anyone else in the country to blame the problem on the undocumented.).
A few times over the course of the night, Harris said something to the effect of: You’ll notice here that I’m going to talk about stuff that will be useful for you to hear, and he’s going to talk about himself. During the immigration segment, she placed the world’s largest piece of cheese on a mousetrap when she said that people walk out of Trump’s rallies halfway through because they get bored of hearing him whine. Here’s where he started his next comment—again, at the opportunity cost of not talking about immigration, which should probably be his strongest issue:
First let me respond as to the rallies.
Here’s where he was a few sentences later:
People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.
Here’s when it finally got to immigation:
They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating— they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.
But here’s what it went back to before concluding:
As far as rallies are concerned, as far—the reason they go is they like what I say.
What about the dogs, you might ask? Well, that was apparently Trump’s fanciful interpretation of an already debunked right-wing rumor about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, stealing and eating cats. (When Muir fact-checked him on this, Trump said he’d heard it from “the people on the television.”) Harris adroitly used this as a segue into what seemed like a carefully planned, but effectively delivered, list of statements by past Trump advisers and Cabinet members about how he lacks judgment and self-control.
She laid several other similar traps over the course of the night, including a list of the crimes Trump has been charged with, a reference to his having inherited $400 million from his father before filing multiple bankruptcy cases, an aside about world leaders “laughing” at him, and this, which is probably the best Democratic Apprentice reference to date, although that’s a low bar:
Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. So, let’s be clear about that. And clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that. But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts as he did in the past to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election.
Harris was listening to what Trump was saying and thinking on her feet, for instance observing that it was “rich” for him to have accused the FBI of fraud (honestly, it’s not worth your time for me to explain why he said this) given the various fraud-related charges he faces himself. This gave her attacks a soap-opera element of drama—like, Ooooooooooh, did she just say that, oooooooh—which could benefit her in the post-debate meme circulation phase and perhaps contributed to Trump’s inability not to take the bait.
He responded defensively, every time, at self-sabotaging length and with references to right-wing arguments that the average viewer probably didn’t understand. He referred to Capitol rioters as “we” and to the police who were defending the counting of electoral votes as “the other side,” and passed on a chance, offered by Muir, to admit he lost the election, arguing still that he can prove that fraud took place in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and other states where fraud did not take place.
Trump was hunched over and peeved throughout all of this, while Harris chuckled and stayed relaxed but dignified—you know, presidential. Her own answers sometimes slid into fluffy politician-speak—her repeated invocations of phrases “the opportunity economy” and “what unites us is greater than what divides us” probably went in one ear and out the other for a lot of listeners. But she kept her composure, delivered organized thoughts, and seems likely to have gotten across the basic idea of protecting the middle class at home and maintaining stability and leadership abroad. If voters were looking for a contrast in “temperament” (her word), it was there.
But what does it mean?
At the moment, Harris holds a two-point lead in the New York Times’ national polling average, which basically means that the Electoral College itself is a toss-up. In the most recent New York Times/Siena poll, almost 30 percent of voters said they needed to learn more about her; half of undecided voters in particular said that. And not surprisingly, given inflation, voters have told poll-takers that the economy is currently the most important issue to them. Harris did repeat her promises regarding housing, child, and small-business tax cuts a number of times, and made reference to the Biden administration’s successful efforts to cap the cost of insulin and lower the price of certain prescription drugs purchased through Medicare; how much of that got through is TBD.
The other stuff will probably matter too, though.
Democrats, no longer burdened by Joe Biden’s flaws and volubility, have been trying to put attention on Trump’s even before Tuesday night. This is actually a bit tricky; a lot of Americans who are perfectly willing to say they don’t like or trust Trump personally have been planning to vote for him anyway. His best pitch to swing voters at this point is that he may be a bastard, but he’ll be your bastard—using his crass and crazy methods to get things done for the USA.
Harris’ job, as such, wasn’t just to remind viewers that they don’t like him, but that having him as president is an actively unpleasant and invasive experience, that he does not use the government to advance the general good, and that his legal problems and views about (for example) race are germane to the issue of whether he should be president because they create a kind of black hole that sucks the citizens of the country in after him. The challenge was to make him seem like the person that voters in a presidential election would be relieved to turn the page on, even though she is the one who currently helps run the country from the White House. The early indications, at least, are that she did that.
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