"She whupped him": Kamala Harris won the debate by turning a potential disaster into a laugh-in

Armchair quarterbacks typically weigh in the morning after a game’s been lost. Regarding the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president and current felon Donald Trump, the advice deluge happened beforehand.

Headlines promising the secret sauce on how Harris could win or should comport herself were plentiful. “Time for Kamala Harris to face some real scrutiny,” intoned The Telegraph. Hillary Clinton, Julian Castro and Chris Christie shared their advice, based on experience.

Based on her performance in Tuesday’s ABC-sponsored debate, Harris didn’t need anybody’s two cents. She had to cogently make a case for her presidency while baiting traps Trump's ego couldn’t resist. But I doubt even her team could have predicted how fun it would be to watch.

Harris and Trump’s first and possibly only debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia was billed as the vice president’s biggest – and, again, possibly only — shot to give undecided voters a clearer sense of who she is.

The most effective and, dare I say, presidential strengths she put on display were her confidence, her comic timing, her relative sanity and her media savvy. She took what could have been a terrifying, pointless exercise and pulled out 90-plus minutes of delicious TV.

ABC's David Muir and Linsey Davis served as moderators. Aside from the two journalists, the candidates and the production crew, the hall was empty — a sanity-preserving decision. The spectators that mattered most were watching from the (dis)comfort of their homes, where the dissimilarity between the two could not be plainer to see. Through the magic of the split screen, Harris smiled brightly, laughed or visibly held back her giggles when she wasn’t shaking her head at the extremeness of her opponent’s lies.

Trump glowered, rolled his eyes, and clenched his mug into a clownish grin whenever Harris succeeded in getting under his skin, the thrust of her debate strategy.

“In Springfield, 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,” Trump madly spewed in a wild impersonation of Grandpa Simpson, boosting a racist lie about Haitian immigrants in the process. “This is what's happening in our country.”

Narrator’s voiceover: This is not what’s happening in our country. In reality, what we’ve been subjected to are Trump's increasingly unhinged bigoted, sexist posts on his social media platform Truth Social.

That’s one of the reasons I was dreading this debate. Past square-offs between him and President Joe Biden achieved little aside from traumatizing the audience.

Among the many ways the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign has upended the horserace-as-usual nature of campaign spectacle, though, is by understanding our collective exhaustion with Trump's "America: The Disaster Movie" pitch. Comedy is a great remedy for that.

From the moment the candidates stepped onstage, she made a power move. Trump ambled straight to the podium, but Harris crossed in front of them, as if expecting to meet him in the middle, something he has never done. So she walked over to him and extended her hand in introduction. “Kamala Harris. Let's have a good debate.”

The gesture was the first to throw him off. “Nice to see you,” he responded, adding, “Have fun.”

Oh, she did. 

The debate’s rules forbade prewritten notes, although every presidential candidate works out scripted responses before these events. Harris’ were simply more original. Trump lamely attempted to channel Ronald Reagan with a “There you go again” shoved into one rebuttal, and co-opting Harris’ signature “I’m speaking,” altering it to “I’m talking now. If you don't mind, please,” adding, “Does that sound familiar?”

By that point, however, Harris had moved into his brain and drawn a relaxing bubble bath. Her shaky start didn’t make it seem like it would happen, as she offered a weaving economic pitch that didn’t quite answer Muir’s simple question. At least she offered a few numbers, along with a counterproposal.

“Donald Trump has no plan for you,” she said, looking straight into the camera.

That’s when the needling kicked into a higher gear. Harris namedropped the Wharton School, which Trump attended with his father’s help, as one of the places that graded his economic proposals poorly. She poked him over his inept response to COVID, and on cue, he started babbling about a former West Virginia governor wanting to “execute the baby,” mixing up a lie about former Virginia Governor Ralph Northam.

This was all the wind-up to the “Boop!” that sent Trump over the edge. “I'm going to actually do something really unusual and I'm going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump's rallies because it's a really interesting thing to watch,” she said, going on to conclude, “What you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

That’s when the “eating the dogs” fantasia took flight, and Laughing Kamala began having a marvelous night.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to say, after surviving the PTSD of the last presidential debate, how unbelievably refreshing it is to go back to the same old ‘nobody's gonna answer any [bleepin’] questions!’” Jon Stewart said in his live breakdown of the debate on Tuesday’s episode of “The Daily Show.”

He’s right. There’s a sort of relief in, as Stewart put it, returning to the cliches, the standards of American political theater: the quotable soundbites, the moments that say more than any well-positioned breakdown of domestic growth.

This is not to say that Harris’ vigorous preparation in the days leading up to her first in-person meeting with Trump was entirely for naught. Her diligence paid off in the way she outlined her positions, as well as one can lay out in two-minute soundbites, especially her stance on restoring reproductive rights and her rundown of her experience with international diplomacy, particularly related to Ukraine.

Trump, meanwhile, clung to his insistence that he won the election and was swiftly disarmed by Harris saying, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people . . . And clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that.”

Harris used the phrase “I have a plan” five times. The line that came to define Trump’s meandering was, “I have concepts of a plan.”

The great part is that Harris took what many expected to be an event to watch through the gaps between our fingers — as we covered our eyes in terror — and comforted us by making the exercise into a comedy. Harris knew the meme makers were ready and waiting, and fed them generously.

Early in the debate, she rested her chin against her hand, an indication Black and brown folks recognize as something our elders do to signal they're barely tolerating you.

When recounting the time Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David, “a place of storied significance for us as Americans . . . where we invite and receive respected world leaders, this –” she paused, nodding theatrically as if to stop herself from using bad if accurate language, before landing, with force, on the term “former president …as president invited them to Camp David because he does not again appreciate the role and responsibility of the President of the United States to be commander in chief with a level of respect.”

In other words, the facial expressions that conservative pundits vociferously tsked-tsked in 2020 are, in 2024, virtues. Seeds for virality. An even simpler choice made her look more human than Trump, which is that she looked at him and addressed him directly when she took her jabs. Trump could barely cut his eyes in her direction.

Muir and Davis did not fact-check most of the debate, save for the most farfetched and egregious of Trump’s lies. “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it's born,” Davis said after Trump ridiculously suggested that Democrats were fine with “execution after birth.”

As for the pet munching allegations, Muir said ABC News reached out to Springfield’s city manager, who said there have been “no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

To which Trump nuttily replied, “Well, I've seen people on television . . . The people on television say 'my dog was taken and used for food' . . .  But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.”

Such a good time! Less so was the producers’ aggravating habit of turning on Trump’s mic pretty much whenever he asked so he could vomit baseless nonsense. Trump spent more than 43 minutes of the debate speaking to Harris’ 37 minutes and 41 seconds, according to the New York Times' tally. How much of that time difference is attributable to producers bending to his demands to get the last word?

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

In her post-debate reaction, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow repeated the wisdom many TV experts have shared about debates, which is that you can ascertain all you need to know with the sound off.

Maddow pointed to the split screen contrast between a light-on-her-feet Harris and a squinting, hunching Trump: “I never saw the whites of his eyes the entire debate — shouting, constantly interrupting himself, not just going down tangents, but being unable to finish a thought, seeming very frustrated, very angry, very negative and very tired,” she said.

Van Jones on CNN was more concise. “She whupped him,” he said.

Even Fox’s Brit Hume couldn't sugarcoat it. “Now look, make no mistake about it: Trump, had a bad night,” he admitted. “. . . My sense is that she came out of this in pretty good shape. How long this will last is anybody's guess, but for tonight, at least, this was pretty much her night.”

For that, we can breathe a sigh of relief, if only to know that everyone who had something to say on what she should or couldn’t do has been silenced by witnessing what she did.

“People have wanted to see somebody put this bully in his place,” Jones said. “ . . . She got up there and she put him in his place. She baited him, and then she spanked him . . . and not only did she pass the commander in chief test, he failed it.” That, my friends, was must-see TV.