Kamala Crushes Donald

This stakes couldn’t have been higher, and the VP rose to the challenge. The ex-president? Not so much.

Graphic courtesy of NBC News

We can all breathe a lot easier after last night.

The much anticipated debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was the first and probably last impression of the candidates side by side, going toe to toe. The night had been billed as a defining moment for the race, an opportunity either for Harris to solidify her candidacy or for Trump to put a stop to her momentum.

And it wasn’t even close.

In today’s piece, I’ll review the things I said I’d be watching for and compare how the performances stacked up to those expectations. As I’ll explain, Harris prevailed over Trump on every important measure—policy, reaching undecided voters, and command of the moment. In fact, she kicked his orange ass.

In many ways Trump’s debate performance was worse even than Joe Biden’s final debate, except there’s no way now for the GOP to switch horses. And with under two months to go in the race, that means Harris may remain in a position to maintain a narrow polling lead over Trump, with few meaningful opportunities left for Trump to change the dynamic. 

As election analyst Simon Rosenberg likes to say, “I’d much rather be us than them.”

Policies over pugilism

In yesterday’s piece, I predicted that Harris would address numerous policy questions, with particular emphasis on how those policies will affect real working families. Meanwhile, I expected Trump to respond with nonsensical ramblings. And that is what happened.

Harris laid out her plans to help families with young children earn a higher tax credit of $6,000. She proposed a first-time home buyer credit of $25,000. And she offered a $50,000 tax deduction to start-up businesses for their initial expenses (up from the current $5,000) to help ignite American entrepreneurs and power the economy from small businesses. She pointed out that Trump’s only “plan” is to keep giving tax breaks to his wealthy buddies.

For his part, Trump played on fears of immigrants taking jobs held by African Americans and committing rampant crime, none of which is actually true. He dodged questions about the economy and his tariff proposals by returning again and again to the question of border security while calling Harris a “Marxist” and a “radical leftist,” neither of which is true. He made up figures about inflation and said that the nation would be utterly destroyed if Harris were elected.

In so doing, Trump came off sounding angry and apocalyptic, while Harris spoke of promise and a future of economic opportunity. The former might appeal to Trump’s base, but it won’t win him many of the key voters in the middle.

About those undecideds

Both candidates knew they needed to play for the middle where, somewhat maddeningly, there remain many voters who are just tuning in and are still undecided. Most of these are former “double-haters” who didn’t like either Biden or Trump but are now open to Harris. She needed to show them that unlike Trump, she isn’t focused on the past, and instead is a chance to turn the page. Trump’s job was to tie her to the Biden administration, which many still blame for high inflation.

Harris was successful here while Trump was not. On several occasions during the debate, Harris emphasized that we “can’t go back” and that hers was a vision for the future, free of the divisiveness of the past. Trump didn’t successfully link her to Biden until near the end of the debate, when it was far too late.

On hot button issues, Harris proved Trump throws gasoline on fires while she is a cooling, calming presence. On the subject of race, she zeroed in on Trump’s divisive record, from when he was first hit with allegations of housing discrimination as a landlord, to his full page ad calling for the death penalty of the now-exonerated Central Park Five, to his birther lies about President Obama, to Charlottesville and his normalizing of white nationalism, to his current claim that Harris isn’t actually Black.

This caused Trump to get defensive and be mired down, defending his past record like an incumbent instead of attacking the current administration of which Harris is a part. His go-to was to return to bashing immigrants, which was itself a form of divisive race baiting. He repeatedly brought up crime, trying to scare voters into thinking immigrants were coming for their neighborhoods and bizarrely claiming they would eat their pets. 

On crime, Harris was more than ready. She deftly flipped the narrative to Trump’s own criminal record of 34 felony counts, the espionage charges, the insurrection on January 6 and an adjudication of sexual assault.

Trump stumbled worst—and Harris fared best—on the other hot button question of abortion. Trump’s oft-repeated, false claim that “everyone” wanted the question of abortion returned to the states was met by Harris with specific horror stories of what the “Trump Abortion Bans” have wrought across much of red state America. She turned the question into a moral one, on which Trump stood on the wrong side and against what most Americans want.

I won’t subject you today to many clips of Trump’s ramblings. But the Harris campaign put together highlights from her night in a reel that is about four minutes long. If you missed the debate or want to relive some great moments, it’s worth a watch.

Who was in command?

Debates normally have plenty of policy discussions to them, but they’re remembered mostly for their vibes. And on this question Harris handily prevailed over Trump.

Most notably, she got under Trump’s skin several times, including over everything from his rally sizes to how world leaders all laugh at him. The rally comment particularly irked him. As commentator Ron Filipkowski noted,

When she said people walked out of his rallies early because his act had become boring, you could just see something in him snap. It was like getting hit by a knockout punch you couldn’t recover from. Whoever decided on that knows Trump very, very well and it worked perfectly.

You can see Trump shift and visibly react to Harris’s barb, and then try absurdly to respond here.

Somewhere else, the debate preppers for Harris began to cheer while Matt Gaetz and Tulsi Gabbard, who were part of the Trump debate prep team, probably closed their eyes and hoped it would just end.

Harris’s bemused, superior expression in the clip above wasn’t the only time she got to deploy it. For yucks, here she is listening to Trump claim immigrants were eating people’s pets.

And one underreported moment was when it was clear that Harris really wished she could use her favorite word to describe Trump but opted for something G-rated.

The MAGA right tried to blame the moderators for Trump’s poor performance—a sign of how bad things were going last night.

Charlie Kirk even called it a “public show trial” of Trump.

Leave it to MAGA crybabies to blame the refs for a loss. They seemed particularly irked that the moderators fact-checked Trump in real time over his false claims of post-birth abortions and immigrants eating people’s pets. But when you tell over 30 lies, you should expect some pushback. 

Trump did manage to bully his way into getting a lot more airtime than Harris. According to an NBC analysis, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke for 22.6 minutes, and ex-president Donald Trump spoke for 28.6 minutes. Harris spoke 15 times while Trump spoke 26 times. Indeed, according to Politico, Trump got the last word in on every topic broached by the moderators.

But even that didn’t help. Trump got just enough rope with which to hang himself. CNN’s Chris Wallace called the debate “devastating” to Trump, and even Fox’s Brit Hume admitted, “Trump had a bad night.”

To cap things off, Trump even went to the spin room afterwards to claim he had a great night, a big no-no. After all, the “spin room” is where people go to try and put the best “spin” on a performance after the fact. One reporter asked Trump, quite rightly, “If you won tonight, then why are you here? Why not let your debate performance speak for itself?”

As Trump was leaving, word spread that mega popstar Taylor Swift had posted a full-throated endorsement of Harris on Instagram and even signed it “Childless Cat Lady.” When asked by a reporter whether he had any reaction to Swift’s endorsement, Trump responded, “I have no idea.”