How Harris Rattled Trump and Dominated the Debate
Vice President Kamala Harris soundly defeated former President Donald Trump in their first, and perhaps only, presidential debate.
With a calm, exacting performance, Harris turned the former president’s well-worn insult book against him, making Trump lose his temper — and then his moorings — as he descended into angry and fact-free rants about immigrants eating dogs and imaginary peace talks in Ukraine.
As the night wore on, and Trump’s upper lip began to sweat under the pressure, Harris spoke directly to the camera while making a case for her vision of America’s future, even as she painted Trump as a sorry artifact of the past. “We don’t have to go back,” Harris insisted, invoking the dark memory of Jan. 6, 2021. “It’s time to turn the page.”
The ABC debate, held in Philadelphia without an audience, opened with the candidates on relatively equal footing. Harris seemed to be fighting off some early jitters, while Trump appeared unusually crisp and on message in his first answers.
Harris attempted to rebrand Trump’s favored tariff policy — adding taxes to the cost of imported goods — as the “Trump sales tax.” The conversation then shifted into a discussion of abortion. This played out much differently than the Biden-Trump debate — this time with the Democrat actually prosecuting the case against Trump, deftly calling him out for stocking the Supreme Court with reactionary jurists who overturned Roe v. Wade, eroding decades of reproductive freedoms.
Trump again laid out his outlandish lie that Democrats seek to “execute” infants even after they’re delivered. He also celebrated the “genius” of his MAGA-fied high court for ending Roe, while asserting, counterfactually, that Americans were eager to abolish a 50-year federal guarantee of abortion care and to send the issue back to the states. “We’ve gotten what everybody wanted,” Trump claimed.
Where Biden had fumbled with an incoherent answer in the first debate, Harris counterpunched with a barrage of real-life harms created by what she called “Trump abortion bans” in states across the country. Harris described a pregnant woman suffering a miscarriage and “being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail” and “bleeding out in a car in the parking lot.” Harris looked Trump down. “She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that.” Harris also invoked cases of a “12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. “They don’t want that.”
The debate turned decisively when the questions turned to immigration — Trump’s wheelhouse issue, generally seen as a vulnerability for the Democrat. But Harris cleverly used the question to bait Trump.
Harris began the exchange, and opened by inveighing against Trump for killing a bipartisan immigration deal so he could preserve the issue to “run on.” But then Harris veered off topic. She curiously brought up Trump’s campaign events, inviting Americans “to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies, because it’s a really interesting thing to watch.” She chided Trump for his strange paeans to Hannibal Lecter and claims that windmills cause cancer. And then she took direct aim at Trump’s ego: “What you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
The effect was like a matador waving a flag in front of a bull. And Harris immediately had Trump seeing red. When it was his turn to address the immigration question, Trump detoured from his signature issue to address his hurt feelings. “First let me respond as to the rallies,” he said. “People don’t leave. My rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
Trump then jumped awkwardly into a racist, unfounded conspiracy theory about new immigrant arrivals in Ohio supposedly feeding on their neighbors’ pets: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country,” Trump insisted. He then pivoted back to a defense of his events: “As far as rallies are concerned. As far as the reason they go is, they like what I say.”
The entire debate dynamic shifted after that, creating a debacle for Trump. The former president fell into an angry, shouty mode of address — refusing to make eye contact with Harris or, largely, the camera. He directed his seething answers instead at ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis.
Harris, by contrast, settled into her groove. She delivered her criticisms of her Republican counterpart by staring straight at Trump, repeatedly putting him on the defensive. And then she would speak directly to the camera, creating a sense of intimacy with viewers that wholly eluded Trump, when making a call for American unity or presenting policy proposals she insisted would lift up the nation’s families.
Harris was perhaps at her best addressing a question about Trump having belittled her racial identity. Two weeks ago, asked about those attacks in a CNN interview, Harris had been dismissive, replying: “Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please.” On Tuesday, she skewered Trump, instead.
“I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has, consistently over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people.” She remarked on Trump’s past discrimination against Black renters, and his call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, who were later exonerated. “This is the same individual who spread birther lies about the first Black president of the United States. I think the American people want better than that. Want better than — this,” she said, addressing Trump with withering contempt.
In the debate spin room before the event, Trump campaign senior adviser Alina Habba signaled that Trump’s camp knew what was coming. Habba told Rolling Stone of Harris: “I think she will try to get under his skin.” But, she added, hilariously in retrospect, that her boss “doesn’t get easily rattled.”
The two candidates came into Tuesday’s debate neck and neck in polling — but seem to be campaigning in entirely different universes. Trump has been menacing America with threats of “bloody” mass removals of undocumented immigrants, pledges to jail his enemies, lies that public schools abscond kids to perform unauthorized gender reassignment surgeries, and demands for a government shutdown.
Harris has been basking in a Big Tent moment, with endorsements from conservative Republicans like Dick and Liz Cheney, as well as slates of former military officials. She recently debuted the policy agenda she’d pursue as president — including measures to cut middle-class taxes, implement a federal ban on price gouging for food and groceries, as well as “tackle the climate crisis.” (The vice president also visited a pretzel factory in New Hampshire vowing to take a big bag of Tasty Ranch Dill flavor home for second gentleman Doug Emhoff.)
Harris’ opportunity at the debate, beyond attacking Trump, was to fill in gaps for voters who find her candidacy appealing but seek more detail about how she might govern — a reasonable ask of the Democrat who unexpectedly became the party’s standard bearer only two months ago. On this front she was modestly successful, mixing her vivisection of the 45th president with descriptions of her plans to give a tax credit to new parents to support their infants, her plan to build affordable housing, and her eagerness to fund innovation though a $50,000 tax deduction for new small businesses.
For Trump, the tables were turned from the previous debate with Biden. His age and acuity are now under the microscope, contrasted to Harris, two decades his junior. And here Trump stumbled. He showcased not only his frequent incoherence — peppering an answer about climate change, for example, with nonsense allegations about Biden being bribed by the mayor of Moscow’s wife — but also a temperament that was shockingly unpresidential.
Trump’s key goal was to define Harris as a Biden clone, tying her down to defining unpopular perceptions of the current president. Here, Harris also got the better of Trump. “I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump,” she said. “What I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country, one who believes in what is possible, one who brings a sense of optimism about what we can do — instead of always disparaging the American people.”
More from Rolling Stone
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.