The greatest difficulty when debating a bully like Donald Trump is sticking to your game plan despite a barrage of disorientating lies and low blows. But Kamala Harris not only adhered to her plan, she repeatedly derailed Trump from executing his.
Three moments stuck out to me, each involving issues in which Harris started with the disadvantage.
The first involves the very first question from ABC News’s David Muir to Harris. Noting that “the economy and the cost of living” are at the top of voters’ minds, Muir asked, “When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?”
The lingering effects of high inflation from the first half of Joe Biden’s term remain challenging for Harris to explain. But she avoided getting in the weeds with a classic approach to a first question: ignore it and introduce yourself to the public on your terms.
She defined her roots as “middle-class.” She outlined an economic plan to support the middle class, including an expanded child tax credit and a small business start-up tax credit. Then she concluded with a swipe at Trump’s tariff proposal, calling it a “sales tax” that “would actually result for middle-class families in about $4000 more a year.”
In his first rebuttal, Trump didn’t ignore what Harris had just said so he could deliver his own upbeat opening message. He described his “tariff” disjointedly and dishonestly: “First of all, I have no sales tax. That’s an incorrect statement. She knows that. We’re doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after seventy-five years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. In fact, they never took the tariff off because it was so much money, they can’t. It would totally destroy everything that they’ve set out to do.” (American consumers pay tariffs, not China.)
The second critical moment involved border security, which has bedeviled Harris. Muir asked her, “Why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act, and would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this?”
Harris sidestepped this question by citing her bio as “the only person on this stage who has prosecuted transnational criminal organisations,” then turning to the bipartisan border-security bill sabotaged by Trump. She ended with a non-sequitur, mocking his campaign rally stemwinders: “He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about [how] windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”
Trump could have hammered Harris for not answering the question directly. Instead, he took the bait and rambled mendaciously: “First, let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
Then Trump resurrected a debunked claim about Haitian migrants in Ohio, spread and partially walked back by his running mate J.D. Vance: “In Springfield, 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.” (Trump never made clear who the “they” were.)
This led to Muir fact-checking the forty-fifth president in real time, which allowed Harris to move the exchange away from immigration to the prominent Republicans who have endorsed her because Trump is too “extreme.” She saw Trump blow an opportunity and made sure he paid a price for it.
Later, towards the end of the debate, Muir asked Harris another tough question: “We witnessed a poignant moment today on Capitol Hill honoring the soldiers who died in the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan. I do want to ask the vice president: Do you believe you bear any responsibility in the way that withdrawal played out?”
Harris turned the tables, placing the blame on Trump:
Let’s understand how we got to where we are. Donald Trump, when he was president, negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine. He calls himself a dealmaker. Even his national security adviser said it was a weak, terrible deal.
And here’s how it went down. He bypassed the Afghan government. He negotiated directly with a terrorist organisation called the Taliban. The negotiation involved the Taliban getting 5000 terrorists, Taliban terrorists released.
And get this… the president at the time invited the Taliban to Camp David. A place of storied significance for us as Americans, a place where we honour the importance of American diplomacy, where we invite and receive respected world leaders.
Trump could have responded by detailing the Abbey Gate bombing that took the lives of thirteen American soldiers. But he can’t resist bait. So, he defended his diplomacy with the Taliban:
I got involved with the Taliban because the Taliban was doing the killing. That’s the fighting force within Afghanistan. They don’t bother doing that because you know, they deal with the wrong people all the time. But I got involved.
And Abdul is the head of the Taliban. He is still the head of the Taliban. And I told Abdul don’t do it anymore, you do it anymore, you’re going to have problems. And he said why do you send me a picture of my house? I said you’re going to have to figure that out, Abdul. And for eighteen months we had nobody killed.
We did have an agreement negotiated by Mike Pompeo. It was a very good agreement. The reason it was good, it was — we were getting out. We would have been out faster than them, but we wouldn’t have lost the soldiers. We wouldn’t have left many Americans behind. And we wouldn’t have left — we wouldn’t have left $85 billion worth of brand new beautiful military equipment behind. And just to finish, they blew it. The agreement said you have to do this, this, this, this, this, and they didn’t do it. They didn’t do it. The agreement was, was terminated by us because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do.
Several lies bogged down Trump’s word salad answer, but most viewers didn’t notice. What they saw was Trump being accused of cutting a deal with the Taliban and admitting it.
Harris was able to fight on her weak turf and knock Trump back on his heels. That implicitly conveys strength and savvy to undecided voters. And it may have been disorienting to Trump, who had been asserting for weeks that Harris was weak and stupid.
Recall that when the vice president first pressed Donald Trump to accept a debate in July, she said, “If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”
Trump was willing to hurl several insults at Harris on the debate stage. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t say a few from the campaign trail to her face.
“Not smart.”
“Low I.Q. individual.”
“Dumb as a rock.”
I suspect that’s because nobody watching her during the debate could conclude that Harris lacked the intelligence to serve as president of the United States. That includes the millions of Americans at home or the one watching from mere steps away. •
