My Harris-Trump Debate Thoughts

"Siri, what is an ass-whupping?"

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The last 2024 presidential debate knocked one of the nominees out of the running. That context alone meant that the stakes for tonight’s ABC presidential debate felt super-high.

But that was not the only reason. Another factor is the polling, which has shown a narrowing of the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. There is also the fact that Kamala Harris has only done one media interview since replacing Biden as the top person on the ticket. Last week’s New York Times/Siena poll that showed the race as essentially tied also revealed that 28 percent of voters wanted to know more about Kamala Harris (as compared to only 9 percent for Trump). Outside of Harris doing more free media, the debate would be the best opportunity to learn more about her.

I was curious about how Trump would do against an opponent who is a pretty decent debater — not to mention someone 20 years younger. As I noted after the June debate, Biden’s abysmal performance saved Trump from much commentary about his woeful performance: “Trump lied constantly — constantly. His answer on the environment was the least coherent assemblage of words I have ever heard…. When he wasn’t lying, Trump too talked mostly inside baseball and I doubt many lay people understood what he was saying. While Trump won the first thirty minutes of the debate by default, he devolved as the debate wore on.”

Trump’s more rambling answers as of late have finally started to penetrate the media. Over at The Hill, Joseph Bosco also noted Trump’s June incoherence as well:

Biden’s infirmity was so painfully obvious in the June debate that observers failed to notice the weakness of Trump’s own rambling, nonsensical performance….

Now that the worst case of Biden’s cognitive deterioration is no longer relevant to the campaign — except for the Democrats’ coverup — Trump’s own decline is increasingly noticeable….

Democrats acted first, since Biden’s deterioration was more striking; now, if Trump performs as badly as he did in June and as he has on the campaign trail, spewing venom and personal insults instead of offering coherent, substantive answers to questions and Harris attacks, he will demonstrate again his own unfitness for the presidency.

On the other hand, Harris had a prior reputation of someone who has occasionally given word salad answers. So what did the debate reveal?

It revealed a cold-blooded prosecutor who knows how to play Donald Trump like a fiddle.

In her DNC acceptance speech, Harris said that Trump, “is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors.” At the debate, Harris revealed that she could manipulate Trump equally effectively — by bringing up things that she knew would cause him to lose his cool. And good Lord did he oblige.

I lost count of how many times she did this, but they include:

• Mentioning that people leave Trump’s rallies halfway through because they were bored;

• Bringing up “the late, great John McCain”;

• Mentioning the endorsement of the Cheneys and the 200 other Republicans;

• Mentioning that economists at the Wharton School — Trump’s alma mater — pooh-poohed his economic plan;

• Saying, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, and he’s clearly having a hard time processing that.”

The result was that Trump, who had bouts of incoherence in the June debate, melted down in September. Being fact-checked by the ABC moderators did him no favors either.

Trump also suffered from his usual flaws, which include being so down the Newsmax Cinematic Universe that he repeated lies about pets being eaten by Haitian immigrants in Ohio. He talked for way longer than Harris did, but it was talk that was unhelpful to his cause. For normal folks tuning into the debate, it had to seem pretty weird.

As for Harris, she came in with a clear debate strategy and executed it pretty well. She talked about policy specifics on her small business tax credit in a way that Trump could not — at one point, on health care, he said he had a “concepts of a plan,” which is politician for “the dog ate my homework.”

Not all of the vice president’s answers were great, but her rhetoric on reproductive freedoms and foreign policy was eloquent and impassioned. Those were the answers where Harris cut loose and injected the most emotion into her responses, and that was effective. One the whole she was far more coherent and cogent than former president Trump — a fact that seemed to irritate him as the evening wore on.

The other problem for Trump was that the superficial stuff went horribly for him. During the June debate, Biden looked and sounded awful. In this debate, Harris never lost her temper, never acted belligerently, and mostly kept a bemused expression on her face when Trump was ranting.¹ Trump, on the other hand, sounded angry and unfocused. Watching this debate on mute would have still revealed which of these two candidates was winning.

Towards the end, Harris said, “I'm not Joe Biden. And I'm not Donald Trump. I'm offering a new generation of leadership.” Harris’ campaign is predicated on the notion that a solid majority of voters want this new generation of leadership. We will find out in 55 days if she is correct. For tonight, however, Kamala Harris’ supporters should be very pleased with how this debate played out.

1. Also, shaking Trump’s hand at the outset near his podium was a power move.