She had him at the handshake. Kamala Harris bounded across the stage at Tuesday’s debate with Donald Trump like a head of state greeting her subject. It set the tone for the night and, by the end of it, for people who’d forgotten how angry, hyperbolic, prevaricating, and racist (I read “she’s not black,” and then I read “she was black”) Trump is, with no agenda other than world domination. She established, for people who didn’t know, just who their vice president is, where she came from, what she’s made of, and where she wants to go. Taylor Swift agrees.
There were moments you just couldn’t believe. Trump wouldn’t say that he supports Ukraine in the war with Russia and is deluded that Vladimir Putin is his friend and “a dictator who would eat you for lunch,” Harris warned. Trump cited Victor Orban, the authoritarian Hungarian, as a model of good governance. He went down the Pacific Coast Highway on energy pipelines and was factually wrong; he never said a nice thing about an ally. The Republican nominee blamed the Democrat for the bullet that injured his ear. The convicted felon accused her of weaponizing the Justice Department. (It was Biden who stole documents!) He vowed to take the FBI out of DOJ, making it easier to sic them on his enemies.
His abortion distortions provoked a rare interjection by ABC News’s Linsey Davis, who said no states allow the post-birth killing of newborns. “She hates Israel,” Trump barked at the woman married to a Jewish man whose children call her “Mamala.” Trump reversed his admission from a few days ago that he’d lost the election by a whisker to insist he won it after all. He had nothing to do with January 6 except a teeny, tiny speech on the White House lawn before it started. Nancy Pelosi was responsible for the violence by not calling in the National Guard! Like a frustrated child up past his bedtime, apropos of nothing, he shrieked, “He (Biden) hates you. He can’t stand you,” entirely at odds with his goal of tying her tightly to the current resident he calls so feeble he can’t lift a beach chair. Guess who’s the old one now?
It was such a train wreck that you might say that Harris didn’t win the night and that Trump lost it, except she won almost every head-to-head exchange. Nothing upset Trump more than when she questioned crowd size at his rallies, a more direct aim at what matters to him than Mario Rubio’s attack on the size of his “hands” before he dropped out of the 2020 primary. Harris invited anyone watching to go to one of his rallies to hear him talk about Hannibal Lecter, blame windmills for causing cancer, and watch people dribble out as they got bored. Since there’s a tape of half-empty bleachers to back it up, hyperbole is all Trump had to fall back on: “My rallies are the biggest in the history of politics.”
Trump never bounced back from that Sunset Boulevard moment. His eyes disappeared in a squint, his jaw locked, his mouth turned down like the sad side of a Raggedy Andy doll, raving and ranting the way his staff begged him not to.
The 78-year-old got stuck on the grievances in his rearview window and never looked through the windshield to the future. Instead of offering any solutions or plans, he had tariffs, a miracle like Ozempic that would shape up the economy while continuing to lie about what a tariff is. It’s a tax on foreign products paid by American consumers, not a levy on China paid by Beijing.
He yelled at her for things where the opposite was true: crime isn’t rampant. It’s sharply down. We build computer chips and will do much more now that the CHIPS bill has been signed.
Trump’s always got an excuse. This was particularly baroque: Harris doesn’t fire people when she should. He does, and that’s why so many of his former handpicked appointees have pronounced him a danger. (When the list includes two national security advisers, a secretary of state, and a vice president who was not fired but fled a Trump-incited mob, that’s something else entirely.) Harris deftly slipped in, for those who only watch Fox, that Trump didn’t fire Dick and Liz Cheney, but they did endorse her along with a couple of hundred Republicans who worked for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney..
Harris could have faced up to her youthful indiscretions like cutting ICE, banning fracking, and decriminalizing being in the country illegally. But compared to Trump, she’s a Chat GPT of plans to help the working class, small businesses, and striving young families who could qualify for a $25,000 loan to buy their first house. Trump, who couldn’t articulate even one proposal to replace Obamacare, which he had nine years to work on, said he had a “concept” of a plan.
One of the few opportunities Harris missed was Trump’s blasphemous visit to Arlington National Cemetery to make a political ad. But she made up for it by pointing out that he negotiated the terms of the Afghan withdrawal solely with the terrorist Taliban, who killed the American soldiers, and noted that Trump wanted to honor them with a Camp David meeting on the anniversary of 9/11. She eviscerated him such that all that was left was the chalk outline of his body.
Of course, nothing Trump says loses him the support of his base. But it has to appall those on the fence, as instant polls indicate. Voters in the middle who didn’t know Harris met someone informed, in control of her emotions, speaks in complete sentences, if not paragraphs, and likes to go high but, when the situation calls for it, hits low. She is not afflicted with what television producers call a “resting bitch face,” a visage that collapses when someone is not speaking but is still on camera. Harris had a glimmer of a smile as she delivered a gut punch, exposing that Trump created a monster when he packed the Supreme Court with the three judges based entirely on their willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade. Unlike Trump, she doesn’t have to brag she’s the best, smartest, and strongest. Trump desperately needs to be loved, which is why the Taliban, China, North Korea, and Russia manipulate him. Like most of us, she seems satisfied being loved by loved ones.
In the end, she said that in her years as district attorney and attorney general, she never asked if anyone seeking help was a Democrat or a Republican. Harris only asked, “Are you okay?” Look, Mother Teresa, Harris is not. She’s an ambitious politician, but she’s a lot closer to saintliness than Trump. We live by contrasts, and we saw a glaring one last night. I’ll take the one on the right, please.
