It Was Donald Trump’s Night — in the Worst Possible Way

The pre-debate chatter was almost unanimous: Voters know pretty much everything they need to about Donald Trump, but they’re still wondering about Kamala Harris and her presidential plans. For Democrats who grimaced at recent polls, it’s a potential silver lining — that she still has room to grow as voters hear more from her.

The debate was one of her best opportunities to make her case, so did she?

Fundamentally, there are three key takeaways from the debate. First, Harris did herself a world of good; second, Trump confirmed the most serious doubts of anyone not firmly in his corner. But the third conclusion is yet to be determined: If Trump does not suffer any political damage from this debate, it means he is even more invulnerable to the traditional ebb and flow of politics than we have imagined.

Let’s go through what happened.

Harris knew the points she wanted to hit, and hit them. She did so well enough that the Trump folks might have suspected a hidden teleprompter had been smuggled in. She repeatedly talked about her plans to lower the cost of housing, to give tax relief to new parents, oh and did you hear that she won’t ban fracking and owns a gun?

But perhaps even more impressively, Harris made it Trump’s night — in the worst possible way. The campaign armed Harris with a series of trip wires hoping that Trump would be unable to resist setting them off. Not only did Trump take the bait, he brought a couple of his own, which he tripped over again and again. It was as if Lucy showed up with half a dozen footballs for Charlie Brown to kick, and Charlie himself brought a few more for good measure.

The fact that Trump had more speaking time will not be a source of complaint from the Harris camp; they’d likely have ceded him a lot more minutes.

Harris knew exactly what she was looking for when she taunted Trump about crowds leaving his rallies “out of boredom and exhaustion.” She knew he could not resist claiming that his crowds were bigger, that she had to pay her followers to attend. But even the Harris team could not have expected that Trump would pivot immediately back to the “millions and millions” of undocumented immigrants and claims that they’re “eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!” (As sportscaster Warner Wolf might have said, “You could’ve turned your sets off right there.”

More broadly, Harris anticipated that Trump would resort to “Donald’s Greatest Hits.” She wants to convince the country to turn the page on Trump and as soon as she said that Trump had been “fired by 81 million voters,” she watched Trump dive deep into the rabbit hole of the “stolen 2020 election.” She all but invited Trump to profess a remarkable neutrality between Russia and Ukraine, and then argued that with Trump in power, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv and then staring down Poland — and that there just so happens to be hundreds of thousands of Polish Americans in Pennsylvania.

Even the optics played out in Harris’ favor. She trumped Trump at the outset of the debate by going over to him and shaking hands. She certainly wasn’t afraid of being seen as smaller than Trump.

During the debate, she repeatedly looked over at him while she was assailing everything from his record on race to his global troubles to the refusal of so many of his top aides to support him. Trump looked doggedly ahead — something the occasional two-shots made clear. It was one of a number of key differences between the debate Trump had with President Joe Biden, who often looked listless in the split screen on television.

You’ll be able to gauge how the Trump supporters feel about this debate by their sharp criticism of the moderators for repeatedly fact-checking Trump and not Harris. Some of that imbalance may be due to the imbalance of flat-out lies by the two candidates, but it is true that ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis never followed up on the issue of just why Harris has changed her mind on so many key issues.

You’ll really know how bad Republicans think it went if a bunch of senators and House members start reading through the rules on how to replace a candidate after he’s been nominated, like some wanted to do after the Access Hollywood tape emerged in 2016.

But no, Trump isn’t leaving the GOP ticket; his control over the party is complete, and he surely has a strong chance to return to the White House even after a dismal debate.

In the days following the debate, keep an eye on the polls. They don’t mean everything — Election Day is what matters — but we’re about to find out how baked in sentiment really is about Trump, and whether Harris needs to find some other way to win over the few remaining swing voters in a polarized electorate.