Harris Put Trump on Defense Over Abortion — and Kept Him There

Debating Hillary Clinton in 2016, former President Donald Trump said that if he were elected president, he would appoint two or three anti-abortion Supreme Court justices who would “automatically” overturn Roe v. Wade.

On Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris pressed him to answer for it.

“They did exactly as he intended,” she said, referring to the justices, before laying out the consequences of the post-Roe rollback of abortion rights in searing and painful detail.

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“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree, the government and Donald Trump, certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” Harris said.

It was the first big confrontation of their first and only scheduled debate, which unfolded on a small stage in Philadelphia where Trump seemed to do his best to avoid so much as looking at his opponent.

And it set the tone for a night in which Harris repeatedly pushed Trump onto turf where he was deeply uncomfortable, leaving him defensive as she pressed her case.

As Harris drew on emotion by talking about women suffering miscarriages or young incest victims being denied care, Trump grew emotional — although it was anger that seemed, for him, to be the feeling of the night.

After Harris said Trump would be willing to sign a national abortion ban, something he has previously indicated a willingness to support, he accused her of lying. He tried to change the subject to student loans, before changing it back to abortion. He claimed he had been a leader on “fertilization” and IVF. He forced Harris to deflect when he sought to pin her down on whether she would limit abortion in the seventh or eighth months of pregnancy, but she soon turned the issue back on him and pressed him to say whether he would veto a national ban.

Harris kept Trump on defense for much of the rest of the evening, on everything from his criminal cases to the size of the crowds at his rallies. In what was her one chance to define herself, she flipped the scrutiny back to Trump with a barrage of prepared attacks. Each time, she stuck close to the same theme, casting herself as an agent of progress and Trump as a figure of the past who could do real damage to people’s lives.

Trump made his key argument against Harris, too.

“She’s going to do all these wonderful things,” Trump said. “Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for 3 1/2 years.”

The problem for him was that he did not do so until his closing statement, in the final moments of the debate.

Look what they made her do

In the moments after the debate wrapped, a childless cat lady endorsed Harris. Yes, Taylor Swift weighed in on the 2024 election, doing so in a caption on an Instagram photo of the musician and Benjamin Button, who is one of her cats.

The debate, by the numbers

My colleagues carefully tracked speaking time during the debate. Here is some of what they found:

— Trump spoke more than Harris — 43:03, to her 37:31 — but Harris spent more time on the attack.

— Harris spent 17:25 minutes attacking Trump, while Trump spent 12:54 minutes attacking Harris.

— The economy was discussed onstage more than any other issue, at more than 10 minutes. Abortion was next, at 7:48

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