She had him at the word 'rallies': Trump takes the bait, Kamala Harris takes him apart
She had him at the word “rallies.”
During Tuesday night's presidential debate between Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump, she exploited one of Trump's underrated negative traits: His superficiality.
Harris brought up the fact that people were leaving Trump's campaign rallies early. This was too much for him. Crowd size means everything to him, which is why he lies about it all the time.
He took the bait.
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His eyes grew wider. His angry expression grew angrier.
She had knocked him off-balance and he never really recovered for the rest of the debate, watched by 67 million people. The exchange happened about 30 minutes into the nearly two-hour debate.
Trump lamely tried to defend himself by claiming Harris had people bused in to her comparatively huge campaign rallies. But only people already in Trump's MAGA cult would believe something so patently ridiculous. His frustration played right into her hands, and soon he was babbling on about "transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison" and such.
When Harris commanded two venues
This was not the first time that Harris trolled Trump on his crowd size. On the second night of last month's Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, beamed in by video feed from Wisconsin to formally accept her party's nomination.
At the time, she was holding a packed rally with 18,000 people at Fiserv Forum, the same Milwaukee venue where the Republicans held their convention in July. The DNC crowd in Chicago watched her video from another full venue, the nearly 20,000-seat United Center. Harris had managed to command an audience between the two facilities pushing 40,000 people, a feat Trump had not accomplished in his peak days when he ran in 2016 and certainly not today with his act wearing thin during a third campaign for president.
Harris' move was clearly meant to illustrate that if size matters, Trump was found lacking.
Today in North Carolina, she has scheduled rallies for both Charlotte and Greensboro.
Trump's 'cats and dogs' moment: Trolled by his own vice president
I watched the debate with my family on the big screen at the Cameo Art House Theatre in downtown Fayetteville.
I have to say the crowd was decidedly pro-Harris. So naturally, they enjoyed seeing Trump come undone, as the vice president, a former prosecutor, pressed her advantage by going after Trump on some of his most sensitive topics, including his role in citing the Jan. 6 insurrection and his multiple criminal charges and convictions.
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But the former president reached his low point of the night when he found himself trolled by his own side, repeating a racist lie that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating cats and dogs in a community in Springfield, Ohio. It was a rumor that had been spread on social media, with Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who is Trump's running mate, serving as one of the chief spreaders of the disinformation.
One of ABC News' debate moderators, David Muir, fact-checked Trump even as Trump insisted he saw the story on TV. If I had to pick a moment that he definitively lost the debate, I'd pick that one.
Kamala Harris makes use of the debate's silent moments
While Trump seemed flustered, Harris came off as the opposite — particularly during a stirring passage where she talked about the cost to women of overturning of Roe v. Wade, which Trump has taken credit for because of his appointment of arch-conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump repeated a claim that everyone wanted the issue of abortion rights returned to the states. He made the point during his winning June debate with President Joe Biden -- who dropped the race and endorsed Harris in July. Biden never really countered the lie, to the frustration of many of the Democratic faithful.
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But Harris, who would be the first woman president if she is elected, wasn't having it. In sharing horror stories from women she had talked to around the country, she made brilliant use of the silence resulting from ABC News' decision to have no studio audience and microphones muted for the candidate not speaking. She talked about pregnant women who suffered miscarriages and who were denied care in an ER because doctors feared going to jail.
"She didn't want that," Harris said of one woman. "Her husband didn't want that. A 12 or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don't want that."
Hillary figured Trump out, too
This is not the first time that a strong female candidate debated Trump and exposed his superficial nature. During Hillary Clinton and Trump's third and final debate in 2016, he would not commit to accepting the election results if he lost. It was a moment that would presage the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, after Biden beat Trump -- or as Harris put it Tuesday, after 81 million Americans told the former reality TV show star, "You're fired." (Trump did not like that.)
Clinton at the time called Trump's position horrifying and ran down a litany of all the times he refused to accept defeat, including Republican primary contests he didn't win that year and that he claimed were "rigged."
"There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him," she said.
This was the dig that got to Trump. He interrupted to say: "Should have gotten it."
People laughed, but he was serious.
Harris' soft closing, Trump's final attack
Harris capped off Tuesday's debate with a poignant closing statement in which she said that, when she was a prosecutor, she never asked a victim or witness whether they were a Republican or Democrat.
"The only thing I ever asked them, are you okay?" she said.
This drew a big, positive reaction among the Cameo crowd.
Trump followed her with what was less a closing statement than a rehashing of attacks that he apparently felt had not landed in the debate. His main theme: Harris had four years as vice president to do what she claims she wants to do now as president.
While not a bad point, the moment felt small and he looked small in it, next to her statement.
It only threw into sharper relief what the rest of the debate made obvious: Even though the two candidates met for the first time on Tuesday, Harris knew Trump, while he did not know her at all.
Opinion Editor Myron B. Pitts can be reached at [email protected] or 910-486-3559.
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: The word Kamala Harris deployed to score knockout over Donald Trump