In the most crucial test of last night’s US presidential debate in Philadelphia – which candidate best reached out beyond their base to the general public – Kamala Harris won by a landslide. Donald Trump was too busy stupidly taking her well-crafted bait to do the same.
She didn’t show him any rabbit holes that he wouldn’t run down. Harris is a mediocre candidate, but she has a formidable ally in Trump.
His campaign team had warned him in advance not to fall into the trap, but he couldn’t help himself. Every time she provoked him, he would rant and rave incoherently as if he were at one of her rallies.
Even his staunchest supporters are starting to tire of this speech. In front of a massive prime-time audience, the speech fell flat like a lead balloon.
Especially, it seems, with Taylor Swift, who endorsed Harris within minutes of the debate ending, though that was no doubt choreographed well in advance with Harris’s team.
In the most crucial test of last night’s US presidential debate in Philadelphia, Kamala Harris won hands down.
Harris didn’t show him any rabbit holes he wouldn’t have missed. She’s a mediocre candidate, but she has a formidable ally in Trump.
I’m not sure celebrity endorsements are as important as politicians think, but in the case of the most important artist of our era, I suppose it’s better to have it than not to have it.
Harris is convinced she emerged victorious from last night. Her campaign has already called for a second debate next month. It is hard to imagine how Trump could refuse. Although, unless he learns the lessons of Philadelphia, he will most likely get another drubbing.
Granted, Harris had help from ABC News moderators, who were far more willing to hold Trump accountable than she was, but a skilled speaker would have used a three-on-one situation to her advantage. Trump simply sounded petulant.
ABC didn’t cover itself in glory last night, but a serious autopsy by the Trump team will have to do more than simply blame the network, whose bias was already well known.
The moderators and, more importantly, Trump left Harris with nothing to wish for. She was never held accountable for her ambiguous stance on fracking (we know she dropped her opposition to it only because she needs to win Pennsylvania). Her utter failure to stem the tide of illegal immigration at the southern border was never properly exposed.
He was allowed to avoid the most crucial economic question of all for voters: Are you better off than you were four years ago?
It is true that Harris received help from ABC News moderators, who were far more willing to hold Trump accountable than her.
In all of the above, the moderators clearly didn’t do their jobs. But so did Trump. He was too busy bragging about the size of his rallies (enraged by Harris’s accurate claims that people are now walking away from them early). Too intent on shrugging off responsibility for the shameful events of January 6, 2021, by recycling lies about how he had offered to make 10,000 National Guardsmen available. Too fixated on continuing to claim he had won in 2020 when all available evidence shows he lost.
These arguments from Trump may still resonate in the core of society, but they only serve to remind disengaged voters watching television why they didn’t vote for him four years ago.
Harris was shallow, inconsistent, vague, insincere, full of meaningless cinematic propaganda, and sometimes even oblivious to the truth. But alongside Trump she showed herself to be a woman of substance. She called the shots at every turn. At no point did Trump take the initiative, not even on issues like the economy, immigration and crime, where voters consider her weak.
That’s the true measure of how poor Trump’s performance was. One senior Republican, who is not hostile to Trump, confided to me that it was the “worst debate performance” he had seen in a long time.
Harris repeatedly returned to her costly housing policies, child tax credits and aid to small businesses. A conventional conservative would have reasonably pointed out that all of these meant more government spending at a time when this year’s federal deficit was poised to top $2 trillion. But Trump is also a big spender. So instead she dove headlong into baseless social media nonsense about illegal immigrants eating their family pets.
It made him look unhinged and unworthy of the Oval Office.
As for abortion, it was all over the place, although it was entirely predictable that Harris (and ABC) would make it one of the topics of the night.
Trump delivered his usual litany of lies about everything from Ukraine to the military to NATO to the economy. But Harris also had familiar lies to tell, from falsehoods about what Trump had said about Charlottesville to Project 2025 (Trump’s “manifesto” that never materialized) to IVF treatments (she’s not against it) to her alleged calls for bloodshed. She now poses (though she once considered mandatory confiscation) as a proud gun owner!
Unsurprisingly, ABC was less enthusiastic about denouncing these claims than Trump.
Trump clearly yearns for Joe Biden to return as his opponent. At one point, Harris had to remind him that he was up against her. Biden’s only relevance in this debate should have been to smear Harris with all of his administration’s failures and to underscore how Harris vouched for Biden’s mental acuity when he was clearly in severe cognitive decline. He misled the American people.
His campaign team had warned him in advance not to fall into the trap, but he was powerless to avoid it.
But Trump did none of that. He was too busy talking nonsense about Haitians eating pets, drone on about how great Hungary’s prime minister thought he was (a rather unpleasant “strongman” that 99 percent of Americans have never heard of), and predicting that we were on the brink of World War III. It wasn’t exactly Ronald Reagan’s “morning again in America.”
The debate was not the transformative event of the Biden-Trump showdown in late June, but it was highly significant. In a tight race, the momentum is again on Harris’ side, and after last night’s events, the Trump campaign could easily descend into factionalism and acrimony.
In a campaign full of ups and downs in which each side has its moments of glory, Harris must once again be considered the favorite. For now. November 5 is still a long way off and many things could change, especially if there is a second debate.
I don’t like a Harris presidency, but it would have two advantages over a Trump one.
A second Trump defeat would surely mean the end of his malign tutelage over the Republican Party, allowing it to rediscover its roots and traditional values that have served it so well in the past.
And, at a time when a revanchist Russia is on the march (supported by the world’s leading autocrats) and Europe is in peril, it is clear that NATO would be safe in his hands, while it is equally clear – especially from the debate – that Trump’s idea of peace in Ukraine is for the country to surrender to President Putin, which would be a disaster for NATO.
The catastrophic consequences this will have for the United States and its allies are evident to everyone except, on last night’s broadcast, Donald Trump.