VP Harris steamrolls Citizen Trump in a debate beatdown for the ages.
Having witnessed debates of all size and scope for well over half a century, and, if I may, excelled at these in an amateur setting in school many moons ago, I can confidently say that the first presidential stand-off between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was a monumental one-way affair. In every possible way, Harris not only bested Trump, stomping him on substance, rhetoric, comportment, and (most assuredly) sanity, but she deftly laid out her No. 1 goal as I saw it going in: Sell herself as presidential timber to the 28% of voters intrigued by her campaign, but needing more info. As a bonus, she strategically managed to bait the easily triggered Trump into a frenzy. Conversely, Trump looked as if he had exited on the wrong floor, embarrassingly unfamiliar with the concept of the event he’d attended, and in dire moments (of which there was legion) descended into a wild avalanche of monosyllabic anger, conspiracy meandering, and outright lies about everything.
Harris crushed this.
Trump crapped his diapers.
At no point in the 90 minutes did the Republican nominee score any points or express a cogent narrative. His Democratic opponent began, right out of the gate, combatting sticky queries by adroitly providing her middle-class bio, framing her vision of opportunity over grievance, and solidifying her economic and moral superiority to him. It was a masterful pivot from the jump – calcified by her opening gambit to shake hands with a visibly stunned Trump, who recoiled, and then reluctantly grabbed her hand as she introduced herself and said her name (correctly and out loud), confronting the former president, who has repeatedly mispronounced it in childish trolling on the campaign trail.
It was from that point that we witnessed a dramatic visual contrast for the ages; a reversal of the previous Biden-Trump debate, when the former looked frail and appeared confused with a distributing slack-jawed pallor. Contrarily, Harris was animated, vigilant, and always commanding, continuously glancing at Trump perplexed as he blathered incoherently (as New Yorkers usually do with the mentally ill on subways). Throughout, Trump scowled – his eyes barely open, his lips pursed like a petulant urchin – and refused to look her way while striking an irritated stance. If one watched this with the sound off, Trump appeared as if an old Bond villain as Harris scored time and again.
But where the rubber hit the road was in the verbal parry, of which there was almost no fair exchange that didn’t involve Harris swerving back into bolstering her bona fides as Trump veered off into madness, grab-assing coded insider right-wing memes and dog whistles, desperately trying to hold onto a semblance of offense in a constant backpedal. Harris repeatedly talked about “moving forward” and “turning the page” by controlling the narrative, pushing into a flustered Trump, keeping him at bay, and leading him into every dead-end alley in which she had the upper hand.
To wit: Even on the immigration issue, which should have been an easy way for Trump to hold his ground, Harris blithely referred to his dwindling rally crowds filled with bored sycophants who walk out disappointed, which visibly knocked him off his feet.
He never recovered. Watch it again – you can see Trump twitch, his eyes widening, and his head bobbing as if hit on the chin. At that point in the debate, less than 15 minutes in, the ex-president looked unmoored and proceeded for the remainder of the debate to lash out, completely forgetting to even comment on issues to instead offer a disjointed word-salad attack that seemed to circle itself like a soused ouroboros.
On the issues where he has major problems – inciting a riot on January 6, 2021, in which cops were beaten and killed as his mob sacked the Capitol, his striking down of Roe v Wade by appointing corrupt justices, and his overtly racist attacks on Harris – it was a slaughterhouse. And, for once, the moderators attempted to call him on his outlandish bullshit, especially the right-wing echo chamber craziness that included migrants eating pets in Ohio. Incredibly, instead of taking the “L” on that one, Trump wanted to expound on the dog-eating migrants by saying, “I saw it on TV!”
Of course he did.
Throughout all of this Trump-mania, Harris remained calm and continued to make a case that she wanted to be president for the middle class, talked small businesses and gave non-tariff laden answers to economic challenges and the protection of reproductive rights. Trump’s answer to the latter was to erroneously cite liberal states murdering children out of the womb and called his Supreme Court justices “geniuses” in an bizarre claim that “everyone” – Dems and GOPers – wanted their rights stripped away.
Especially damaging to centrists, right-leaning geo-politicos, and the sane, Trump would not confirm support for Ukraine, despite being given five chances to do so. He continued to come to the defense of Russia in an off-putting careen of nonsense, which ended with his using of Hungary dictator Viktor Orbán as a character witness to his foreign policy ideas. (Just to put a finer point on this, Orbán was the No. 2 most Googled name during the debate – and to say reading about him would not be of any help to Trump is an understatement. The No. 1 name? Kamala Harris.)
Mission accomplished.
Still, what might have been the finest moment came when the subject of the Affordable Care Act came up. Trump had nothing. He said, as he did in 2016, that he had a plan to repeal and replace it. (He did not and does not.) Instead, he spewed gibberish that ended when pressed with, “I have a concept of a plan,” and when further pressed about what hell that could possibly mean, he said, “I don’t know, I’m not president yet!”
Again, isn’t the concept of debates to bring up what you would do before you’re president?
To be fair, Trump was elected president in 2016 by promising with his ubiquitous “trust me” blather that he would reveal his taxes, build a wall and have Mexico pay for it, and, ahem, repeal and replace Obamcare – all without offering a scintillate of evidence on how this would happen. As a reminder, none of that happened.
When it was mercifully over for Trump, he was a humiliated husk of a man. Harris, beaming, ended with a flourish.
Immediately after this televised massacre, the Harris Campaign issued a challenge for another debate.
I bet.
Trump, on the other hand, made an unprecedented beeline for the Spin Room, where he attempted to clean up the dung heap he’d just erected.
Those two maneuvers are all you need to know about how things went.
Not sure if there will be another debate, but while anyone still paying attention might give Trump a 0.0 chance of actually winning the thing, it cannot be this bad. This was a beating of historically epic proportions that by all rights should leave the Republican candidate as political roadkill, and no matter how good a former prosecutor can bring the pain, it is hard to fathom that Kamala Harris could levy this level of evisceration again.
But then again… tee it up.
