By Shane Goldmacher and Katie Rogers
Kamala Harris commanded the first debate against Donald Trump, flashing her prosecutorial skills to leverage every chance to get under the former president’s skin in a 90-minute clash of visions and style.
They disagreed fiercely on abortion and the economy, immigration and the war in Ukraine. But throughout the night, Trump found himself in a defensive crouch, relitigating his record rather than picking apart hers.
The contrast was apparent even on mute. She smiled. He glowered. He spoke more, but she dictated the terms of the evening.
Here are six takeaways from a debate that was a remarkable reversal from June, when Democrats were so despondent they changed candidates afterward:
Harris set traps. Trump leaped into them.
Harris strode across the room to deliver the first handshake in a presidential debate since 2016. It was the first time she had met Trump in person, and she was intent on introducing herself: “Kamala Harris,” she said, as he took her hand. “Have fun,” he instructed her.
She sure appeared to. He did not.
Harris dominated the proceedings from nearly the start. She laid bait. He took it. It began with her needling Trump that his bored supporters had been leaving his rallies. It continued with her comment that he had inherited riches from his father. And on it went as she invoked his Republican critics, including those who served in his administration.
On the back foot, Trump repeatedly spun down rhetorical cul-de-sacs.
At one point, Harris invited viewers to watch a Trump rally for a more unfiltered view of the former president. “You will not hear him talk about your needs,” she said.
He responded not by talking about voter needs but about crowd numbers.
“People don’t leave my rallies,” he pushed back.
Trump played defense on his record.
Within the first five minutes, Harris looked into the camera and told viewers what to expect from Trump: “the same old, tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling.”
He indeed talked less about what he would do in a second term and spent more time trying to clarify his record. He defended his handling of the pandemic, his decision to fire his top military advisers, and even his seven-year-old response to the deadly far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Trump fumbled a moment where he had hoped to go on offense: the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal. Instead, he found himself defending his decision to invite the Taliban to Camp David in 2019.
Harris forced Trump to defend his closeness to authoritarians like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and his past courtship of Vladimir Putin of Russia, “a dictator who would eat you for lunch,” she said. She even goaded him by turning an epithet he calls her — “weak” — toward him on national security.
He called her “weak” back.
Harris seized the advantage on abortion.
Abortion was one of the biggest missed opportunities for President Joe Biden in his first debate. It was one of Harris’ strongest moments in hers.
Trump is keenly aware of his vulnerability on abortion, having appointed the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Yet on Tuesday he danced around the issue of potentially vetoing a national ban.
“As far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor of abortion ban,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”
He even rebutted his own vice-presidential pick, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who has previously expressed openness to a national ban. “I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness,” Trump said.
Harris laced into Trump. She called it “insulting to the women of America” and said she had met women across the country whose health and lives had been endangered by abortion restrictions.
Trump didn’t hide his disdain of Harris.
For much of the debate, Harris expressed her feelings about Trump by letting her body language do the talking: putting her hand on her chin, laughing and pursing her lips with a puzzled look.
Trump expressed his feelings by yelling into the microphone.
Harris warned that world leaders were “laughing at Donald Trump” and saw him as a “disgrace.” And when she referred to his 2020 election loss as the moment he was “fired by 81 million people,” he grew visibly angry.
When Harris brought up his criminal convictions, Trump accused Democrats — and, by extension, Harris — of turning the judicial system against him: “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he said.
At one point, when Harris tried to interject over a muted mic, Trump, well versed in extemporaneous insults, used one of her memorable lines from the 2020 vice-presidential debate against her.
“I’m talking now, if you don’t mind, please,” a visibly annoyed Trump said. “Does that sound familiar?”
Harris missed some opportunities.
One of Trump’s few memorable lines, even if it came off a bit canned, was when he mocked Harris for the lack of detail in her agenda.
“She copied Biden’s plan. And it’s like, four sentences,” he said, “Like, ‘Run, Spot, Run.’”
In her response, Harris bored into Trump’s agenda rather than her own. It was typical of a debate in which she appeared most at ease talking about Trump rather than fleshing out her own plans for the presidency.
When asked by the moderators to explain a list of her policy reversals, including her early support for banning fracking and decriminalizing border crossings, Harris addressed only the first one after promising to discuss them all: “I will not ban fracking,” she said, before turning quickly to Trump’s upbringing as the son of a real estate developer.
Trump missed Biden.
One of Trump’s goals had been to tie Harris to Biden’s most unpopular policies, particularly on the economy and immigration, accusing the Biden-Harris administration of allowing “millions” of migrants across the southwestern border.
He failed to do so for most of the night. Instead, he mocked a man he seemed to miss running against. “You’ll wake him up at 4 in the afternoon,” Trump said at one point of Biden.
Harris pressed her rival on his fixation. “It’s important to remind the former president,” she said, “You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.”
The Trump campaign has cast Harris in ads as “dangerously liberal.” But on Tuesday he veered within a minute from saying she was mimicking him so much he was considering sending her “a MAGA hat” to calling her a “Marxist.”
It wasn’t until his closing statement that Trump truly appeared to find his rhythm linking her to Biden. “She’s going to do all these wonderful things,” he said of her various promises. “Why hasn’t she done it?”
She didn’t have to answer, because the debate was over.
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