Safe to say, it went nothing like the last contest.
After weeks of rising tensions, Vice President Kamala Harris finally came face to face with former President Donald Trump in their first presidential debate. Safe to say, it went nothing like the last one.
Harris goads Trump, says world leaders are laughing at him
Harris kept her cool, testing Trump’s patience with jibes throughout. She told him that military leaders say he’s a “disgrace,” world leaders are laughing at him, and that 81 million voters had fired him. “Clearly, he’s having a very difficult time processing that,” she added.
After some initial exchanges about the economy, Harris attacked in earnest.
“Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression,” she said. “Donald Trump left us the worst public health epidemic in a century. Donald Trump left us the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. And what we have done is clean up Donald Trump’s mess.”
Trump attempted to paint Harris as a radical leftist, retorting: “She’s a Marxist. Everybody knows she’s a Marxist. Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics. And he taught her well.” (Harris’s father is a professor of Marxism at Stanford. Harris has made it clear that she supports capitalism, and has the backing of many major business leaders.)
Harris seemed unperturbed, resting her chin on her hand and fixing Trump with a steady gaze.
Trump returns to his typical topics
Trump deployed his usual rabble-rousing talking points. He claimed that Harris “wants to confiscate your guns” — something she’s never indicated she intends to do. Harris has advocated for stronger gun safety laws and checks, but as she told Trump, “This business about taking everyone’s guns away? Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away.”
Trump loses his cool
Trump consistently took Harris’s bait, at one point exclaiming testily, “Wait a minute, I’m talking now. You don’t mind? … Does that sound familiar?” when she tried to call him out on his claims about her “defunding the police.” She replied calmly: “Don’t lie.”
Trump was particularly upset when Harris questioned the size of the crowds at his rallies.
She said: “I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about ‘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 was clearly rattled, and insisted that her crowds were sub-par. “First, let me respond as to the rallies,” he said. “People don’t leave my rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
At one point, goaded by Harris calling him out for tanking the immigration bill, he veered into a strange rant about migrants eating Americans’ pets. (We’ve got more on that very odd claim from the GOP camp, here.)
“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” he said.
Going in on abortion rights
Trump was on particularly shaky ground when it came to reproductive rights. He protested that the American people had wanted Roe v Wade to be overturned, to which Harris replied:
“You want to talk about this is what people wanted?
“Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. 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.”
While Harris chose a more emotive tack, her arguments are backed up by numbers. According to the Pew Research Centre, 62% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases — reflecting similar values to those held before the ruling was overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson.
The verdict from Republican pundits
With a few exceptions, Harris tended not to interrupt Trump’s deviations, allowing them to run their course. Her strategy appeared to pay off.
Three Republican pundits who appeared on Fox News agreed that Trump seemed “angry,” and one fundraiser said: “Trump is so angry he can’t clearly get his message across. She’s cool, calm and able to provoke him. I was stressing hearing it.” However, they added, American voters “are stressed and angry. Maybe they very well identify with Trump’s anger.”
