Only one person seemed presidential on that debate stage and it wasn’t Donald Trump.
Yes: Kamala Harris, she of the cackly word salad, wiped the floor with the former president. She has moved with the times, going from ‘brat’ to ‘demure’ with ease.
She glowed. Her hair was glossy, her make-up perfection, her suiting impeccable.
Trump, by contrast, glowered. He made Harris cross the stage to shake his hand, then pouted from behind his podium, eyebrows low and heavy, posture slumped.
Trump, suddenly, has become Joe Biden. Gone was the warrior of the assassination attempt, fist in the air, blood on his face, shouting, ‘Fight, fight, fight!’
Only one person seemed presidential on that debate stage and it wasn’t Donald Trump.
Yes: Kamala Harris, she of the cackly word salad, wiped the floor with the former president. She has moved with the times, going from ‘brat’ to ‘demure’ with ease.
His fight, it seems, is long gone. Trump is now the old, out-of-touch guy who can’t get it together, who couldn’t formulate a cogent thought, whose every utterance was suffused with anger and grievance.
He looked angry. He barely acknowledged Harris as he ranted wild claims about ‘migrants eating pets’ and abortion providers killing live babies.
This is how bad the debate was: Kamala Harris offered no real specifics, save a few bullet points from her ostensible ‘opportunity economy’, yet won handily.
Indeed, Trump had competition for the biggest loser on Tuesday — him or the United States.
For now, Harris is on a glide path to the presidency, without telling anyone what she plans to do with it.
Her abject inability to articulate a solution for Israel was, perhaps, most telling.
She began her answer with one of her go-to time delays, eating up precious seconds with gratuitous verbiage.
‘Let’s understand how we got here’, she said, pedantically reminding us that ‘a terrorist organization’ known as Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
‘Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters’, she said.
Her plan for peace?
‘This war must end and the way it will end is we need a cease-fire deal and the hostages out’.
Okay, then. Simple as that. Oh — and Harris then said she’d work out a two-state solution, which finer minds than hers have tried and failed to effectuate for decades.
Harris was not pressed for specifics, here or otherwise, by ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, who otherwise fact-checked Donald Trump in real time. Nor was ‘full disclosure’ offered regarding Kamala’s best friend Dana Walden, a top Disney exec who oversees ABC News.
How is this fair to the electorate?
She glowed. Her hair was glossy, her make-up perfection, her suiting impeccable.
Harris was not pressed for specifics, here or otherwise, by ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, who otherwise fact-checked Donald Trump in real time.
Trump, meanwhile, was pure grievance and all id. Harris was thoroughly prepared for whatever came her way, and her response as Trump slammed her and her father as Marxists — hand on her chin, eyes lighting up, a bemused smile — suggests she got great training in stagecraft from a Hollywood A-team.
Her bar was admittedly low. All Harris had to do was sound serious, speak cogently — actual content a far distant second — and keep her cool. It was Kennedy v. Nixon for the internet age, and Harris was Kennedy: comparatively youthful, hopeful, and forward-looking.
Trump was about the past: The people he fired in the White House, the election he still claims he won, the turncoats who wrote tell-all books about him, the credit he still doesn’t get for handling the pandemic, his economy, his foreign policy.
‘Move forward’, Harris said. ‘Turn the page on the same old tired rhetoric. The American people are exhausted’.
She has a point. And in the only metric that may truly matter (I’m kidding, sort of), Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala less than one hour after the debate ended.
‘Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight’, Swift wrote on Instagram. ‘I’m voting for @kamalaharris . . . I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos’.
Her sign-off: ‘Childless Cat Lady’. Meow!
But that is, in fact, what viewers saw: a composed, serious Harris versus a crazy-sounding Trump. And for the record, neither Trump nor Harris had specifics.
Harris: ‘Let’s talk about our plans. Let’s compare plans. I have a plan’.
That plan remains unknown.
Trump, when asked if he had a plan to replace Obamacare: ‘I have concepts of a plan’.
Pathetic, both of them. But Harris at least prepped hard for this debate. Trump rolled in clearly unprepared, as if he had this election in the bag, calling her (and Biden) ‘weak and stupid’.
Not a good look in a post-Roe election cycle, female voters activated as never before.
In another blow for Trump, Melania didn’t even show – while Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff was there to greet Harris at a post-debate watch party.
In another blow for Trump, Melania didn’t even show – while Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff was there to greet Harris at a post-debate watch party.
In the only metric that may truly matter (I’m kidding, sort of) , Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala less than one hour after the debate ended.
Women often decide elections. According to the Center for American Women and Politics, in every presidential race since 1996, most women have voted Democrat. Kamala Harris just gave them confidence that she can do this job — optically, cosmetically, in tone and tenor if not substance.
But that’s the state of our politics, and we have only ourselves to blame.
This debate begs one existential question: Does Trump even want to win? His listless, agitated performance suggests not.
Perhaps he is defeated by the lawfare, by his looming post-election sentencing in New York, by the media bias on display at this very debate, and by the assassination attempt that came very close to killing him.
‘We’re a fading nation . . . in serious decline’, he ranted. ‘We’re laughed at all over the world. We’re not a leader . . . We’re going to end up in a third world war’.
Harris, by contrast, focused on futurism in her closing remarks. ‘What I do offer’, she said, ‘is a new generation of leadership’ — a refreshing idea in our current gerontocracy.
America, she said, is ‘a leader’ that ‘shows strength’, and she posited herself as a candidate ‘who believes in optimism’.
And after this debate, Harris was feeling extremely optimistic. Rather than take the win and go back to the metaphorical basement, her team quickly issued a challenge to Trump.
‘Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate’, her campaign chair said in a statement. ‘Is Donald Trump?’
Harris indisputably had a great night. America did not.
