Donald Trump was upset. He was supposed to be talking about immigration, the subject he’d been trying to bring up for the entire first half-hour of the debate. But his opponent, Kamala Harris, had just savaged his bizarre rants about Hannibal Lecter and brought up the fact that more of his followers seem to be leaving rallies early. “Let me respond about the rallies,” he told David Muir and Linsey Davis, who very capably co-moderated the debate.
“We have the biggest rallies,” he insisted, his voice getting louder, his speech getting quicker, breaking from the comparatively subdued tone he had tried to strike for the first stretch of the proceeding. When he finally wended his way back to immigration, it was to amplify an extraordinarily racist, baseless, and conspiratorial meme about Haitian immigrants, which his Ohio running mate, JD Vance, had promoted earlier: “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there!” he yelled.
When Muir pointed out that the lie had been debunked, Trump responded, breathlessly, that he heard it from “the people on television.” He sounded pathetic. Harris—who’d been squinting at him in disbelief, as she had much of the evening—just laughed. She’d brought out the real Donald Trump.
The debate Tuesday was a lot different than the one in June: Trump had lied and obfuscated his way through that one, too, but all that was overshadowed by President Joe Biden’s awful performance. It was perhaps the most consequential debate in modern history, effectively ending Biden’s reelection bid. Will ABC News’ debate in Philadelphia have such an impact? Likely not—mostly because the people who already buy Trump’s bullshit are too far gone, and it remains to be seen how many swing voters will make their decisions based on a single debate.
But still, what a change.
Where Biden struggled to counter Trump’s familiar fare three months ago, Harris got the former president on his heels about a quarter of the way in—repeatedly flustering him and baiting him into spewing some of the strange, grotesque invective he normally reserves for a warmer audience. “They’ve destroyed the fabric of our country,” he insisted of Biden and Harris, before once again relitigating his 2020 election loss. Asked whether he acknowledged his defeat, Trump responded, “I don’t acknowledge it at all.”
More importantly, Harris made a compelling case to the electorate for herself as the next president of the United States—showing poise, distinguishing her command of actual policy from her opponent’s vacuous improvisations, and speaking to the issues facing actual Americans. “You will not hear him talk about you,” Harris said, speaking directly to the camera. “It is important that we move forward, that we turn the page on this same old tired rhetoric.”
That rhetoric, from Trump, was outrageous even by his standard. Yes, there was his oft-repeated lie about Democrats supporting abortion after nine months—which is actually already prohibited by an obscure legal statute called “murder”—during an exchange on reproductive rights that will require very little editing for the Harris advertising team. And he repeated a bigoted barb questioning Harris’s racial background, which was as appalling on Tuesday night as it was when he debuted it at a conference of Black journalists in Chicago in July. But his failed attempts to steer the conversation to immigration were especially egregious: “They’re eating the dogs,” he said of Haitian immigrants. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats.” It was outright fascist—a point underscored by Trump using his podium time to once praise strongman Viktor Orban of Hungary and to tout his relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, the dictator he bragged about knowing “very well.”
He tried to look tough, to fearmonger. But as he spent the night hunched over his podium—his beady eyes glowering, talking loudly about something he saw on TV—he just looked desperate. “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” Harris said at one point. “He’s obviously having trouble processing that.” Trump, of course, had little meaningful to say on policy; at one point, talking about healthcare, the best he could offer was a promise to later reveal “concepts of a plan.” In essence, he just didn’t have anything to offer to an America that is already painfully familiar with his “American carnage” narrative: “We’re a failing nation,” he whined at one point.
Hasn’t it all just become so tired by now, after eight years under the shadow of Trump? “Let’s turn the page,” Harris said in the debate, “and move forward.”