by Kamala Harris laid the bait for Donald Trump by attacking what he values most in the world – his rallies.
“He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about how windmills cause cancer. What you will also notice is that people start leaving their rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. The one thing you won’t hear him talk about is you,” she said, in a moment that had probably been rehearsed for days.
Trump’s eyes widened and his face fell. He could no longer hear the moderators over the ringing in his ears.
“Let me respond directly to the rallies,” he said, ignoring a question about the border. “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics,” he continued.
The man who has spent every debate of his life burying himself under the skin of his opponent is finally his.
From that moment on, his voice rarely dropped below a shout. His sentences were suspended. His proportions were confused. His face was red. His brow was furrowed. He leaned forward towards the empty space in front of him.
The worst was yet to come.
In perhaps the most dramatic moment of the debate, or of any presidential debate in US history, Trump veered from defending his rallies to sharing an online conspiracy theory about Haitian immigrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs — the people who came in — they’re eating the cats. They’re eating … they’re eating the pets of the people who live there,” he said.
When the moderator, ABC’s David Muir, said there were no credible reports that pets had been harmed, the former president responded with an answer that might have prompted a wellness check if he had been saying it instead. only at the debate stage: “The people on TV say my dog was taken and used for food.”
The split screen was not kind to Trump. As he summoned images of dead cats from his imagination, Harris’s faces told their own story. She laughed and winced through his answers.
This was not the serious Trump who thwarted Hillary Clinton in 2016. Or the restrained Trump who spoke quietly while Joe Biden was falling two and a half months ago.
Trump once had a debating style in comparison to “malfunctioning device.” On stage this evening, it was like a whistling kettle roaring on a stove. He never got his medal.
Harris repeatedly criticized him, attacking his attitude, calling him weak and “disgraceful”. She looked directly at Trump as she told him that world leaders were “laughing at Donald Trump,” and called him “confused about the fact.”
Trump set his gaze square to the front. His anger only grew at an invisible mark in front of his lecture.
“Let me just tell you about world leaders. Viktor Orban, one of the most respected men – they call him a strong man. He is a tough person. Clever. Prime Minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it was not. Why is it blowing up? He said because you want Trump back as president,” he said, before listing more dictators who thought he was a good guy.
Harris made her biggest points against Trump on abortion and race.
In what was probably her most viral moment, she was able to deliver a powerful rebuttal to Trump’s dismantling of Roe v Wade.
“Trump’s ban on abortion makes no exception even for rape and genital mutilation. Understand what that means. A survivor of a crime, a violation of their body, does not have the right to decide what happens next to their body. That is immoral,” she said.
“And they don’t have to abandon their faith or their deeply held beliefs to unite the government, and Donald Trump certainly shouldn’t be telling a woman what to do with her body,” she said.
Meanwhile, Trump changed his position on a national ban on abortion and made the absurd claim that Harris’s colleague, Tim Walz, supports “execution after birth.”
That prompted a sullen moderator, Linsey Davis, to remind the former president: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born.”
Trump hoped to use the debate to tie Harris to all of Biden’s failures. Eventually, Harris had more success prosecuting the case against Trump.
In his closing remarks, Harris spoke of the candidates’ “two very different visions for our country”.
“One is focused on the future and the other is focused on the past. And try to bring us back. But we are not going back. And I believe that the American people know that we all have much more in common than what separates us and that we can chart a new path forward,” she said.
Trump ended with a question for Harris.
“So she started saying she’s going to do this, she’s going to do that, she’s going to do all these great things. Why hasn’t she done it?” he asked.
“We are a failing nation. We are a nation in deep decline. We laugh all over the world. In the world, they laughed, I know the leaders very well. They are coming to see me. They call me. We laugh all over the world. They do not understand what has happened to us as a nation. We are not a leader. We have no idea what’s going on,” he said.
As he walked out on stage, Donald Trump must have wanted to go easier on Joe Biden.
