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Former President Donald Trump's advisors and allies scripted his playbook to attack Vice President Kamala Harris during the debate. It didn't take long for him to rip up their plans.
Going into the debate, polls showed that voters trusted Trump more on immigration and the economy. They advised focusing on those issues and voters' anger over high prices. Instead, he reminded many Americans of why they turned against him in the first place.
At times, it was hard to separate his responses from the bizarre, angry musings that he posts on Truth Social, his social media platform. At one point, Trump even brought up a debunked racist conspiracy theory that Haitian migrants are eating people's pets — a claim so online that it's likely few Americans even knew they had a dog in the fight.
"First, let me respond as to the rallies, she said, people start leaving, people don't go to her rallies, there's no reason to go," Trump said before adding, "We have the biggest rallies in the history of politics."
The topic at hand was immigration.
Neither candidate could afford to flub this moment. Harris built a small national lead over the summer, but her momentum appears to have stalled. Polls are even closer in the smaller number of swing states that will decide the election, including in Pennsylvania, where the debate was held.
Harris baited Trump, starting by distracting Trump from talking about his favorite issue of immigration by getting him stewing about crowd size.
By the end of the night, a furious Trump had quadrupled down on the false claim he won the 2020 election, spouted the bizarre conspiracy that migrants are eating cats in Ohio, and complained about his own former administration officials who have written tell-all books.
"When somebody does a bad job, I fire them, you take a guy like Esper, he was no good I fired him, so he writes a book," Trump said of one of his defense secretaries Mark Esper. "Another one writes a book, because with me they can write a book with nobody else can they."
The vice president's trolling tactics were not subtle. Harris talked about how the Wharton School of Finance, Trump's beloved alma mater, has published research questioning his economic plans. She combined a big tent appeal to Republicans by bringing up that Dick and Liz Cheney have endorsed her, the latter long an object of Trump's ire.
"Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people," Harris said, connecting the line that made Trump a reality TV star to the 2020 election results. "Let's be clear about that and clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that."
Harris wasn't the only one who got Trump going. He clearly seemed annoyed at the ABC News debate moderators who repeatedly interrupted the debate to fact-check his false claims. At one point, Trump interrupted moderator David Muir when he correctly pointed out that judges rejected over 60 cases that brought various claims about fraud in the 2020 election. Trump even dismissed Muir's fact checking of the claim migrants are eating pets.
"Well, I've seen people on television," Trump responded. "People on television say my dog was taken and used for food."
Trump's team echoed those claims online, arguing that the former president had to take on Harris, Muir, and co-moderator Linsey Davis.
"3 on 1, just as expected," Jason Miller, a Trump advisor, wrote on X.
Both candidates have pushed for another debate, but thus far, they have yet to agree on one. If Harris and Trump meet again, it will be after Americans begin voting. Absentee ballots will soon be sent out in North Carolina while Pennsylvania will kick off early voting on September 16.
