Kamala Harris Goads Donald Trump Into a Frenzy at Presidential Debate
The ABC News-hosted presidential debate held in Philadelphia on Tuesday night saw Republican hopeful Donald Trump needled and goaded into a frenzy of shouting by Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, who over nearly two hours took the former president to task on several issues as he was repeatedly fact-checked by the network’s anchors, who called out multiple false claims he made from the stage.
The former president and vice president’s face-off almost immediately became testy when the candidates traded accusations over economic and immigration issues, with Harris pummeling the former president on proposed tariffs as he accused her and the Biden administration of lax border policies that he claims have allowed too many immigrants to pour into the country and take jobs and commit crimes.
More from The Hollywood Reporter
The two candidates faced off for the first time on Tuesday night to debate the nation’s top issues in front of a national audience, with ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis refereeing what may be their only meeting ahead of the election. The debate blew past a planned 90-minute runtime, as back-and-forth responses and cross-talk ruled the stage during several tense moments.
“My opponent has a plan that I call the ‘Trump sales tax,’ which would be a 20 percent tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month,” Harris said, stumbling slightly in her opening answer. “Economists have said that Trump’s sales tax would actually cost middle-class families about $4,000 more a year, because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.”
Trump, seemingly fuming from the top of the debate, went on the attack, correcting Harris’ characterization of the “Trump sales tax” as tariffs on other countries. He later countered Harris’ statement that Wharton School of Economics scholars poo-pooed his economic plan by claiming without evidence that professors at the elite Penn school, Trump’s alma mater, championed his plan for the economy.
Trump’s odd relationship with truthfulness and facts soon came up again when he claimed that Harris is a Marxist and dragged her father into the debate, shouting at one point, “Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics.” The former president also repeated the falsehood that Democrats wanted Roe v. Wade ended and then told a whopper, stating that some states allow for the killing of a baby after birth. In a rare moment of correction, Davis interjected to state that no states allow such a heinous crime.
The two candidates are locked in a neck-to-neck dead heat, according to the latest polling. As Harris’ honeymoon period begins to fade after the excitement around her entrance as the replacement at the top of the Democrats’ ticket, the vice president is looking to define her policies in front of the nation. Abortion has been a key area for Harris as vice president since the Supreme Court, tipped by three Trump appointees, struck down the Roe v. Wade decision.
Abortion rights and IVF soon took center stage as the debate spiraled into rapid back-and-forth accusations of lies. Harris says now that she would restore the rights of Roe v. Wade but dodged a question on her support of some bans on abortion care; Trump stumbled when asked if he would veto a national abortion ban then punted, stating it would never get through Congress; he then asked Harris to answer how late into a pregnancy should abortion be allowed, an issue on which Democrats haven’t come to a consensus.
A Harris campaign official told The Hollywood Reporter that at 9 p.m., 71 percent of their grassroots donors on Tuesday night were women.
Trump’s attack on Harris in bringing up her father seemed to be handed right back to him by his opponent when she offered to take viewers to a Trump rally, jabbing her opponent by saying that crowd sizes, a major point of pride for the former president, were dwindling as he speaks at length about odd topics.
“He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter,” Harris said. “He will talk about windmills causing cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
This certainly got to Trump, who could not help but ask for a rebuttal, to which he responded that “people don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go.” Soon after, he seemed to go off the rails when he began to speak about a bizarre online conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Harris laughed into her muted mic, saying, “What?” and when it was her turn to speak said, “Talk about extremes!”
For the second time, one of the ABC News moderators — Muir, this time — interjected with a live fact check, saying Springfield’s city manager told ABC News there was no credible allegation that any pets had been harmed in the city.
Harris seems to have successfully needled and goaded Trump in the first half of the debate, listing some of the longtime Republicans who have endorsed her over Trump, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and Congresswoman Liz Cheney; got him ranting about immigrants eating dogs; tying him to the controversial Project 2025 plan; and generally egging him into shouting his points rather than stating them clearly.
Ahead of the debate, controversy over the muting of Harris and Trump’s microphones as the opposing candidate is speaking grabbed plenty of headlines. Harris’ camp finally agreed to the muting of mics on Tuesday. But in a letter to ABC News, her campaign officials said that the inability to directly address each other would leave Harris “fundamentally disadvantaged” in the debate. Despite this, she seemed to silently convey her thoughts and feelings with body language and facial expressions; multiple times, she demurely placed her hand on her chin as Trump carried on with always loud and frequently questionable answers. Later in the debate, ABC News began turning their microphone back on in moments when a candidate formally asked for time to respond; crosstalk inevitably ensued and frankly, both speakers were inscrutable.
At nearly the halfway point of the debate, Trump was asked about the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and if there is anything he regrets about what he did on that day. Trump answered by stating again that “no one on the other side was killed” and claiming that those prosecuted for their role in the violent attack on our elected officials are being treated “so badly.” Trump also said that he asked the crowd at the rally he held that day to act “peacefully and patriotically.”
Muir also asked Trump if he now accepts the results of the 2020 election and the fact that he did lose to Joe Biden. Trump again denied his loss and in the process of answering, made an out-of-left-fiend claim that Biden has a negative view of Harris.
“And you know what? I’ll give you a little secret,” Trump said while speaking about the 2020 election results. “He hates her. He can’t stand her.”
While Trump invited his son, Eric Trump, and his daughter-in-law and Eric’s wife, Lara Trump, along with top brass of his re-election campaign team, Harris gave a clue to her debate tactic of getting under her opponent’s skin. The vice president decided to bring two former members of Trump’s administration with her to the city of brotherly love: former White House Director of Communications Anthony Scaramucci and former national security official Olivia Troye were there to be in Harris’ court as she took on the former president. Both Scaramucci and Troye have defected to the blue side of the aisle since leaving the Trump White House and are vocal opponents of their ex-boss.
An hour into the debate, the first break finally came. Before this, Harris was asked about the Israel-Hamas war and clarified her brief comments on the topic made in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention last month.
“Israel has a right to defend itself …” Harris said. “It is also true that far too many innocent Palestinians, children, mothers, what we know is that this war must end. We need a ceasefire deal, and we need the hostages out, and we must chart a course for a two-state solution, and in that, there be security in Israel and an equal measure for the Palestinians. But the one thing I will assure you always, I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself.”
In response, Trump claimed that Harris skipped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Congress to attend a “sorority party”; he then made the bold claim that Harris “hates Israel.”
Trump was then forced to answer for the controversial comments he made in July at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago regarding Harris’ race, claiming that she was once of Indian American descent then suddenly “turned Black.” At the time, Trump was sitting for a Q&A at the event and Harris had just launched her campaign, following Biden’s exit from the race; the event in Chicago was ended early by his handlers after Trump began to lose the crowd.
“I don’t care,” Trump said when asked by Muir to address the controversy. “I don’t care what she is. Whatever she wants to be is OK with me, but those were your words. So I don’t know … I mean, all I can say is, I read where she was not Black, that she put out, and then I read that she was Black, and that’s OK. That’s up to her.”
From the debate stage, Harris responded in the same manner as her campaign publicly replied at the time, saying she believed it was a tragedy to see that someone running to lead the nation would try to divide people along racial lines; she then launched into Trump’s documented history of racism throughout his career, including the legal woes he faced in the 1980s for refusing to rent to Black people and the ad he took out in newspapers calling for the execution of the later-exonerated “Central Park Five,” who are now dubbed “The Exonerated Five.”
“I think the American people want better than that, want better than this,” Harris said.
As the debate closed, the two sparred on foreign relations and climate change, with Trump falsely claiming of Harris that the Biden administration “sent her in to negotiate with [Volodymyr] Zelensky and [Vladimir] Putin, and she did, and the war started three days later.” Harris attended a conference in Munich in the days before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; while Ukrainian President Zelensky was present at the event, Putin was not. Trump also repeated a second conspiracy theory from the stage, this time swapping a lie about dog-eating immigrants for a falsehood regarding President Biden supposedly taking money from China and the “mayor of Moscow’s wife.”
The candidates’ official closing arguments essentially defined the campaigns that the two presidential hopefuls have been running. They began with Harris, who used the moment to be forward-looking and discuss America’s potential future. This notion was heard from Harris throughout the evening and has been the theme across her abbreviated campaign; “Aren’t you tired of this guy and his antics?” she is essentially saying. Trump’s closing remarks had him telling voters that he will “rebuild” the nation, as he did in the back half of the last decade. But he then went negative — both on Harris, as he did throughout the night, and then on the country that he is fighting hard to once again lead.
“We’re a failing nation,” Trump told the audience and the electorate. “We’re a nation in serious decline.”
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
Sign up for THR's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.