Last night in Philadelphia, Kamala Harris did to Donald Trump what Donald Trump had done to Joe Biden: She broke her opponent on a debate stage.
I’ve been watching presidential debates since 1976, and I’ve even been peripherally involved in a few. And I’ve never seen a candidate execute a debate strategy as well as Harris did.
The night, for Harris supporters, went better than even the most optimistic among them could have hoped. For Trump supporters, it was not just a defeat but a public humiliation, the crushing comeuppance they probably secretly feared might one day arrive but, until now, never quite had.
What Harris appeared to understand, better than anyone else who has debated Trump, is that the key to defeating him is to trigger him psychologically. She did it by repeatedly calling him “weak,” mocking him, acting bemused by him, and literally laughing at him. As he lost control of events, Trump became enraged, his voice bellowing into an empty room, his face not just orange but nearly fluorescent. Trump realized that his opponent—and not just any opponent, but a woman of color—was dominating him. And so even as Trump exploded, he was, like a dying supernova, shrinking before our eyes.
Even so devoted a bootlicker as Senator Lindsey Graham declared the debate a “disaster” for the ex-president.
Trump needed to paint himself as the agent of change, to fuse Harris to Biden, and to make the vice president defend her most extreme past statements. Instead, Harris forced Trump to go on the defensive, wandering into the worst possible terrain for him.
Over the course of debate, Trump defended the violent mob that had attacked the Capitol. He insisted that the 2020 election had been stolen from him. He relitigated his slander of the Central Park Five. He defended his decision to invite the Taliban to Camp David and invoked Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, as a character witness. He couldn’t bring himself to say that he hopes Ukraine will win its war against Russia, even when pressed. And he spent valuable time emphatically insisting that the multiple indictments against him are “fake cases.”
But that’s not all. Trump savaged people he had appointed to his administration who have since broken with him. He repeated his claim that Harris wasn’t Black. And then there was the pièce de résistance: Trump spreading the conspiracy theory, weird even by his standards, that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian migrants are abducting and devouring their neighbors’ pets. “They’re eating the dogs!” he roared. “The people that came in—they’re eating the cats!” And he still couldn’t stop himself. When one of the moderators, ABC’s David Muir, rebutted Trump’s claim, the former president said, “I’ve seen people on television! People on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food!’”
By the debate’s end, it was easy to forget that Trump had started reasonably well—he was, by his standards, fairly controlled and focused—and Harris was nervous. It looked like it might end in a draw.
But about 15 minutes into the debate, things began to change. Harris taunted Trump about his rallies: “What you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” Trump could not stop himself; he rose to take the bait. “People don’t leave my rallies,” he insisted. “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies, in the history of politics.”
Harris began to find her rhythm, launching a series of withering attacks, and Trump started to unravel. His countenance darkened, and the volume of his voice rose. He became less coherent and more insulting. His rhetoric became more extreme, at times taking flight from reality. He spoke in sentences that grew clipped, and sometimes barely comprehensible. Half an hour into the debate, Harris was not only in control; she seemed to be having fun. Trump looked desolate and furious. Harris made him see “matador red,” in the words of The New York Times’ Matt Flegenheimer. Trump never laid a glove on her.
Donald Trump is so feral and narcissistic, so unrestrained and so outside the norm of American politics, that he’s difficult to debate. It’s disorienting. Very few people have been able to stand up to him without being pulled into the muck. In the past, even when he lost debates on points, he dominated his opponents.
But on a Tuesday night in Philadelphia, Kamala Harris cracked the code. She took Trump apart without losing her composure. She worked to insulate herself against charges that she’s a left-wing radical, even reminding voters that she’s a gun owner. Harris succeeded in presenting herself, a sitting vice president in an unpopular administration, as the change agent. She appealed to unity, inviting Americans to “turn the page” on a man who belittles the country and seeks to keep it in a constant state of agitation and chaos. And she returned time and again to the argument that Trump cares only for himself, whereas during her career, she’s had only one client: the people.
“As a prosecutor, I never asked a victim or a witness, ‘Are you a Republican or a Democrat?’” Harris said in her closing statement. “The only thing I ever asked them: ‘Are you okay?’ And that’s the kind of president we need right now. Someone who cares about you and is not putting themselves first.”
Two minutes later, after a closing statement in which Trump referred to America as “a failing nation,” he exited the stage, into the shadows, a broken man atop a broken campaign.
