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Debating Donald Trump is the most difficult equation in modern politics. Many of America’s best political minds have pulled out their calculators and protractors in an attempt to best him, and virtually all have failed.
That’s because Trump is held to a different standard from any other politician in American history. You could be a governor, senator or president, and if you react to his outrageous meanderings, he looks to the American people like he’s the one in charge. And the bar is far lower for Trump than his opponents—those debating him need to seem calm, in control and empathetic to score points against him. But usually, if Trump manages to avoid pouring a plate of potatoes au gratin down his pants, then he is typically seen as having a successful night.
But on Tuesday night in Philadelphia, Vice President Kamala Harris appears to have picked the Trump lock. Her strategy of baiting the former president into talking about embarrassing issues appeared nakedly evident to everyone watching at home; but Trump remained oblivious.
Early in the night, Harris needled Trump by saying the college he attended, the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, disapproved of his economic plans. Then she dropped a bread crumb trail for him by saying people routinely left his rallies out of boredom. At one point, she taunted him by bringing up former Sen. John McCain’s vote to kill his repeal of the Affordable Care Act; Trump responded by admitting he didn’t have a plan to replace the ACA, he merely had [ [link removed] ]“concepts of a plan.”
Naturally, given that he has the message discipline of a wolverine on fentanyl, Trump took the bait over and over. He responded to Harris’ provocations by playing many of the greatest hits from his social media feed, praising Hungary’s strongman prime minister, Viktor Orbán, denying he lost the 2020 presidential race and relaying a debunked story that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing people’s pets and eating them. (Even after moderators told him that that story was false, he stuck with it.)
At one point, Trump said the assassination attempt against him in July was the result of Harris’ “divisive” rhetoric against him—a preposterous charge, given that police have found no political motive [ [link removed] ] by the deceased 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks.
But this is how Trump’s mind works, flippantly firing off untruths that appeal only to his ardent supporters. Most of the conspiracy theories he touted on Tuesday night boil up from the depths of his MAGA followers on the internet, then find their way to his social media feeds before he speaks them on the debate stage. The average viewer at home likely has no idea why he is name-checking an autocrat like Orbán or talking about immigrants eating dogs, but his biggest fans hear him discuss these issues all the time.
Harris wasn’t perfect, fully dodging questions about her recent flip-flops on issues like fracking and ending private healthcare. She also refused to answer a question about whether she supported any limits at all on a woman’s right to get an abortion.
But for the most part, she gave calm, reasoned answers, refusing to let Trump get under her skin. (In one notable moment, when Trump accused Harris’ father of being a “Marxist” college professor, Harris perched her hand under her chin to signal bemusement rather than anger.) Occasionally, she seasoned an answer with some verbal cayenne pepper (for instance, once calling Trump a “disgrace”), but most of the time she was content winding Trump up and letting him vent.
Throughout the debate, Trump’s supporters online bleated about the ABC moderators fact-checking the former president more than they did Harris. It is true, they jumped in to clarify or correct things he said on multiple occasions, never doing so for Harris when she told untruths. But it’s a longstanding rule that if your supporters are complaining about the referees, your team is losing badly. It wasn’t the moderators, for instance, that tricked Trump into talking about immigrants eating pets; the former president did that all on his own.
But for Harris, perhaps the strongest part of the debate was near the end, when she scolded Trump for his lack of support for Ukraine in their fight against Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion. It isn’t often that a Democrat can make a Republican look like a weakling on foreign policy, but Harris did just that, noting Trump’s predilection for cozying up to dictators.
In fact, whether intentional or not, Harris’ entire debate performance was a prelude to this attack. By demonstrating that Trump can be easily thrown off message by referencing his crowd size or the criminal charges against him, she deftly demonstrated how easily he can be tricked and manipulated by foreign adversaries.
In retrospect, Harris’ decision to largely avoid talking to the media for the last month seems to have paid off. Many of the attacks she used on Trump seemed fresh because since her ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket, she hasn’t been asked direct questions about many of the topics covered on Tuesday.
Conversely, Trump’s supporters no doubt liked what they saw from him in the debate. But if Americans actually think Harris won the night, Trump won’t just need the “concepts of a plan” to win this election, he will need an actual one. And fast.
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