If it was a fight, they would have stopped it.
Vice President Kamala Harris triumphed over Donald Trump on Tuesday night, with an aggressive, surgical and sustained debate performance that forced a glowering, rambling and sputtering former president into a defensive posture from the opening moments of the event.
Coming into a high-stakes showdown before which nearly one-third the country said they wanted to know more about her, Harris was in command throughout the 105-minute affair in Philadelphia, highlighting her agenda for a middle class “opportunity economy” while largely blunting attacks on her greatest policy weaknesses.
She successfully and repeatedly triggered Trump, who responded with ranting, repetitive rhetoric, streams of consciousness, and exaggerations that made him seem like angry Uncle Al at Thanksgiving, who's been spending too much time on MAGA Twitter.
“They’re killing pets!” Trump bellowed, at perhaps his low point of the evening, as he sought to assail Harris on immigration by recycling a debunked, right-wing online story about Haitian immigrants allegedly eating the cats and dogs of citizens in Springfield, Ohio.
Harris seemed to catch Trump by surprise, even before the affair began: When the two were introduced, she strode confidently past the six feet between them to where Trump stood, head down behind his podium, introduced herself and held out her hand, which he weakly shook with a mumble.
An instant CNN poll of debate watchers reported that 63 percent said she won, compared to 37 percent who favored him. Before the debate, it was 50-50 when the respondents were asked who they thought would prevail.
With the race between the two a statistical tie, both nationally, and in all of the seven toss-up states, her debate performance could help Harris to persuade some of the few, undecided and independent voters remaining, that she has the character, ability, intelligence, temperament and presence to occupy the White House, although the contest is so close last night’s event is unlikely to make any dramatic shift in its shape.
Here are five instant analysis takeaways:
The frame. By keeping Trump on defense throughout the 105-minute affair, Harris succeeded in defining the basic choices before voters in her terms: hope vs. fear, change vs. more of the same, middle class vs. billionaires, anger vs optimism, national security policy that supports democratic allies vs. an isolationist leader who admires and aspires to be a strongman.
Harris kept baiting Trump with biting political and personal criticisms about his presidency, business career and legal problems, and triggered him into spending many of his two-minute answers defending the past (when he wasn’t quarreling with the moderators) -- what happened in the Charlottesville KKK rally and Jan, 6, what happened during Covid, what happened before Covid, even the crowds at his rallies -- at which point she would pivot, speak directly into the camera and portray herself as a future president who would be “focused on you, the American people” while “Donald Trump only cares about himself.”
The two-shot. For much of the affair, ABC cameras showed both of the candidates at once, and the split screen images not only served to underscore her generational argument with a clear contrast between an old man and a much younger woman, but also juxtaposed her lively facial expressions – smiling broadly at his stream of consciousness improvisations, shaking her head at his exaggerations, arching an eyebrow in disbelief, putting a finger to her chin in bemusement – with what appeared to be his simmering anger.
Harris repeatedly looked and spoke directly at Trump, while he rarely looked in her direction, either keeping his eyes narrowed and down or at the moderators, as if it was them rather than the tens of millions of people watching at home that he needed to persuade.
Abortion. No issue was a stronger one for Harris than the discussion of abortion rights. Moderator Linsey Davis phrased her question as a recitation of Trump’s multiple-choice positions on the issue and his response verged on the nonsensical: he claimed that “everyone…every Republican, every Democrat” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned, insisted over the fact-checking of Davis that pro-choice parents and doctors “execute babies” after they are birthed, and refused at least twice to answer a simple yes or no inquiry about whether he would sign a federal abortion ban.
Her answers were both substantive and specific, as she brought up several heinous cases of women who have turned away for medical care by doctors and in emergency rooms in states that have very restrictive abortion bans since Roe was repealed, pointing out the inanity of women wanting to abort babies they fought so hard to carry to term and promising to sign a codification into law of the right to an abortion if she becomes president (although Trump was correct in pointing to this as political pandering given that the chances of such legislation passing Congress are slim and none).
Character references. Harris succeeded in setting Trump off by mentioning that several top defense and military advisers who served under him – including Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Chief of Staff Mark Milley – are supporting her and repeating their comments that he is “unfit” for the presidency and a “disgrace” in his attitudes toward the military.
Yet again finding himself defensively arguing about his record, he answered with bluster that sounded as if it might have come from his old reality TV show, “The Apprentice”: “they had to be fired he said, accusing them of having done “bad things, very bad things (no word on what any of these might have been)” and accusing them all of just wanting to sell books.
At the same time, he offered a few dubious endorsements of his own.
At one point, after Harris said that foreign leaders around the world “laugh at you,” Trump recounted Viktor Orban, Hungary’s authoritarian leader, delivering the highest praise during a recent visit to Mar-a-lago, implicitly proving Harris’s point about him cozying up to dictators. At another, he claimed she was lying about him having said “there were good people on both sides” after Charlottesville, citing as his three sources the Fox News provocateurs Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, and Jesse Watters, none exactly a reliable source.
How’s the fishing? Perhaps worst of all or Trump, Harris had a well-planned, and well-executed, strategy of baiting him on topics that succeeded in setting him off:
After she said people were bored at his rallies, he spent several moments extolling the size of his crowds and accusing her of faking her own crowd sizes; when she attacked him for his unbelief in the rule of law by recounting the scores of local, state and federal criminal and civil charges he has faced, including his conviction for criminal fraud in New York, he answered with a lengthy attempt to debunk all of them, which only called more attention to them; when she went after him for “inciting” a seditious riot on Jan. 6, he offered some revision about his speech to the crowd that stormed the Capitol after his speech that day, yelled about it being the fault of “Nancy Pelosi” and expressing sympathy for the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt, who was killed by a security agent trying to break onto the House floor.
He said not a word about the 140 cops injured that day, or the five who died in the immediate wake of the violence.
JR
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