Debate Breakdown: Self-Assured Harris and ‘Easy to Trigger’ Trump

Happy Wednesday! Election Day is 55 days away. Since you count on us to bring you important news, we feel duty-bound to inform you that Taylor Swift has announced she will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris this fall.

Harris Exudes Confidence While Trump Self-Sabotages

PHILADELPHIA—The two major party nominees had never met before Tuesday evening. 

As ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis welcomed the candidates onstage at the National Constitution Center, the Democratic vice president approached the Republican former president, thrust out her hand, and introduced herself as “Kamala Harris.” Donald Trump looked momentarily dazed by the gesture. He did not reciprocate with his own name but took her hand in his to shake it.

“Let’s have a good debate,” Harris added before walking over to her own podium.

And it was a good debate—for her. But it was disastrous for Trump, quite the reversal from the June 27 debate hosted by CNN that ultimately forced President Joe Biden to drop his reelection and hand the reins to the vice president.

While Harris was vague and nonresponsive to specific questions related to issues on which she is vulnerable, the vice president confidently prosecuted her case against reelecting Trump. The Republican nominee, by contrast, was undisciplined and self-destructive. Trump ranted about immigrants eating pets and repeated his claims that the 2020 election was stolen. He jumped at the chance to defend himself against jabs from Harris on relatively trivial issues. More often than not he wasted opportunities to redirect the focus on his rival.

The vice president’s Democratic supporters were ecstatic about her performance. “She commanded the room from the second she walked up and shook his hand and said: ‘My name is Kamala Harris.’ And she had him on the defense from the second that debate opened up,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters afterwards. “Donald Trump has a real problem, and that is, he’s Donald Trump. He cannot change; he can’t help himself. And she proved that tonight. He’s so easy to trigger.”

The Trump campaign and Republicans seemed to know their nominee blew it. How do we know? Trump himself appeared in the “spin room” down the road at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, after the debate concluded. The spin room is where campaign surrogates talk up their candidate to reporters. But candidates themselves tend to show up only after underwhelming debate performances, in a bid to reset media coverage.

Trump arrived just before 11:30 p.m., less than an hour after the debate ended as reporters dropped what they were doing and sprinted across the room to ask the Republican nominee questions, like flies to honey. The gaggle of reporters was five or six layers deep, making it hard for Dispatch Politics to catch Trump’s comments. But we managed to make out a little of what he said, which echoed how many of Trump’s surrogates spun Tuesday night: He blamed the referees.

“The moderators were very unfair,” Trump said. “Basically, it was three on one. I thought they were very unfair. Everybody did.” He went on: “She wants a second debate, because she lost. They immediately called for a second debate because they lost. So, we’ll think about that.” (Indeed, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon proposed a second meeting almost immediately Tuesday evening.)

But more likely is that Harris succeeded in Philadelphia, where her top goal was to bait Trump into talking about anything but her own weaknesses. The Republican nominee obliged.

Illegal immigration, for instance, is a difficult subject for Harris and an issue around which Trump built his political career. Asked by Muir about her role in the Biden administration’s struggles to stem record-high illegal border crossings, Harris offered some platitudes before diverting into a monologue about Trump’s campaign rallies:

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. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about, “Windmills cause cancer.” And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams, and your desires. And I’ll tell you I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first, and I pledge to you that I will.

Muir attempted to move the discussion back to immigration. Yet Trump stopped him—preferring to relitigate Harris’ charge that voters who attend his campaign rallies leave early because they are bored with his schtick.

“First, let me respond as to the rallies,” he said. “She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there and then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

The answer was typical of the boastful, proud Trump that Americans have come to expect. But it did little to advance his argument that Harris cannot be trusted to secure the southern border. And when the former president did get back on topic, he failed to make a coherent case about the Biden administration’s dereliction of duty or Harris’ culpability. Instead, he brought up unverified and dubious viral claims that Haitian immigrants in a small town in Ohio were “eating the pets of people that live there.”

That pattern continued throughout the debate. 

Harris said that “world leaders are laughing” at Trump—and he responded by touting his support from Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. Harris argued Trump would “weaponize the Justice Department against his political enemies”—and Trump retorted Harris has been the one who “weaponized” justice against him.

When pressed about her responsibility for the bloody and chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Harris accused Trump of negotiating a “terrible deal” with the Taliban shortly before he left office. 

Instead of ignoring the shot and indicting the Biden administration for the botched exit, Trump delivered a lengthy defense of the agreement he reached with the Taliban and his management of Afghanistan generally. Only after Muir told the former president that the discussion would have to move on did Trump finally, briefly, get back on message: “And these people did the worst withdrawal and in my opinion the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country.”

Trump displayed some moments of discipline and skill, most notably when he turned some difficult questions about his position on abortion around on Harris. “Will she allow abortion in the eighth month, ninth month, seventh month?” Trump said, suggesting a question for Muir and Davis to ask the vice president. “Why don’t you answer that question?”

And there were occasional signs of Harris’ penchant for rambling sentences and vague soliloquies. “I believe very strongly that the American people want a president who understands the importance of bringing us together, knowing we have so much more in common than what separates us,” she said at one point.

But the Democratic nominee was clearly feeling good about her overall performance. While Trump was speaking to reporters in the spin room, Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, popped over to a campaign-sponsored party at Philadelphia’s Cherry Street Pier for brief remarks before adoring supporters.

“I think that we think today was a good day!” she said.

Thumbs on the Scale?

The post-debate spin from Team Trump was particularly heavy on criticism of debate host ABC News and its moderators, news anchors Muir and Davis.

“I thought ABC News was a disgrace,” David Bossie, an RNC committeeman and Trump surrogate, told reporters in the spin room. “The moderators showed their bias and it was [clear] and obvious.” Added Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas: “Where were the fact checks of Kamala Harris? Where were the calling out of Kamala Harris and all of her false statements tonight?” 

And despite the obvious need by Trump allies to spin away a bad performance, there were some notable moments that suggested the moderators were going relatively harder on Trump and easier on Harris. 

• Muir and Davis fact-checked Trump in real time frequently, but they rarely gave the same treatment to Harris. When Trump, discussing abortion, claimed that Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, wants “execution after birth,” Davis disputed the former president’s claim. “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Davis said. “Madam Vice President, I want to get your response to President Trump.” Harris then used the fact check to hit Trump. “ Well, as I said, you’re going to hear a bunch of lies. And that’s not actually a surprising fact,” she said.
• After Trump made his claim that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets, Muir quoted a statement from the town’s city manager. “I just want to clarify here, you bring up Springfield, Ohio. And ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” he said before Trump began arguing with him. Trump insisted that there were “people on television” making the claims. “I’m not taking this from television. I’m taking it from the city manager,” Muir replied. When Trump doubled down, he said, “Again, the Springfield city manager says there’s no evidence of that.”
• Neither of the moderators clarified Harris’ claim that Trump once said, “there will be a bloodbath if this and the outcome of this election is not to his liking”—an incorrect interpretation of a comment the former president made during an Ohio rally in March. The full context of that particular statement makes it clear Trump was referring to a “bloodbath” in the domestic automobile industry if Biden was reelected, not advocating for or suggesting a violent reaction.
• The two anchors also made comments to or about Trump that could be interpreted as snarky. At one point, Muir questioned Trump on his recent comments that he “lost by a whisker” and “didn’t quite make it” in the 2020 presidential election. Was the former president actually acknowledging, at long last, that he had lost the election? Trump said he made those remarks sarcastically. “I did watch all of these pieces of video,” Muir replied. “I didn’t detect the sarcasm.” At another point, Trump claimed that Harris “hates Israel.” But in giving the Democrat a chance to respond, Davis failed to ask a question and simply stated, “Vice President Harris, he says you hate Israel.”

But Trump wasn’t entirely blameless for drawing most of the interventions by the moderators. He made many false and misleading statements throughout the debate. He also interrupted the moderators multiple times just as they seemed poised to press Harris on certain issues. 

Davis asked Harris whether she would support “any restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion.” Harris did not answer the question directly, saying that under “Donald Trump’s abortion bans,” couples were being denied in vitro fertilization treatments. Davis was about to speak to Harris again, when Trump stepped in to emphasize his support for IVF. Later, Muir attempted to move on to Afghanistan, a possible vulnerability for Harris, but Trump interrupted to make a point about NATO.

Notable and Quotable

“I have concepts of a plan.”

—Former President Donald Trump after moderators pressed him on whether he had a plan for health care during the ABC News debate, September 10, 2024