WASHINGTON — A scowling former President Donald Trump came out of the riveting Tuesday debate with Vice President Kamala Harris showing who he really is — an election denier who believes he won the 2020 vote, a candidate who lies, rants, rambles on incoherently, can’t answer a question straight, is defensive and incapable of containing his anger.
“I’m going to tell you on this debate tonight, you’re going to hear from the same old, tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling,” Harris said. Her prediction proved true.
Harris won. Trump lost.
Trump had only low points during this showdown — from his lie that Harris and Democrats are “executing” babies, to bragging about how he did not get enough credit for how he handled the COVID-19 pandemic, to the totally baseless assertion that President Joe Biden “hates her, he can’t stand her.”
And if Trump thought people would not notice that he refused to give a yes or no answer to whether he would sign a national abortion ban — whoa, that’s a miscalculation. And his going on about how people practically begged him to end abortion rights — via his Supreme Court justices just so the question could go to the states.
Give me a break.
Harris hardly had to use her prosecutorial skills. The split screen showed her bemused as Trump kept shooting himself in the foot with his tangled mess of word salads and insane riffs. That he had coherent moments is not the story. It's when he did not.
And with that, in their first and likely only debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, moderated by ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis, more observations:
In the face of facts, Trump did not back down. Davis told Trump — fact-checking in real time — “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born.” Harris called him out for not answering the question.
"They have no idea what a good economy is, their oil policies, every single policy, and remember this, she is Biden, you know she’s trying to get away from Biden, I don’t know the gentleman she says, she is Biden."
This has become a big thing on right-wing social media, that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are killing pets for food. If you did not know the back story to this — well, what’s a voter to think when Trump started going on about eating cats and dogs. Muir in real time told Trump the city manager said this was not true. But Trump, true to form, didn’t react when confronted with the truth.
Harris deftly kept at it, drilling down into the Trump psyche. He’s never been pummeled like this. Said Harris, Trump “was fired by 81 million people and is clearly having a hard time processing it.”
He accused migrants of taking the jobs of “50, 60, 70, 80 millions of people — African Americans and Hispanics.” That’s just making up numbers.
From the start of the debate, Harris found her stride. She briskly walked past her podium and introduced herself to Trump, who couldn’t seem to figure out what to do. “Kamala Harris,” she said brightly.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a Harris campaign co-chair, sprinted to Philadelphia after Senate votes finished in order to be one of the Harris campaign surrogates working the press in the post-debate spin room. Duckworth’s portfolio on Tuesday — as it was at the Democratic convention — was, among other things, to draw the contrast between Trump and Harris when it comes to availability of IVF — in-vitro fertilization — and reproductive rights in general.
The campaigns in the next few hours will circulate press releases touting favorable debate coverage their side got from media pundits and influencers. Those favorable reviews are really just campaign sugar highs and material for fundraising appeals, which have been nonstop during the day from both camps via texts and emails.
Harris and Trump headed into the debate deadlocked in national polls. Neither has a decisive big lead in any of the swing states. We’ll only know the debate impact when the next round of battleground state polls come out — with the most important swing state heading into the final weeks being Pennsylvania.
In the 2024 contest, the seven battleground states — with only three-point wins in 2020 — are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Nevada.
A new national survey from the Pew Research Center conducted between Aug. 26 and Sept. 7 revealed one big advantage Trump lost after President Joe Biden dropped out on July 21 and Harris nailed the Democratic nomination that same day.
When Biden was in the race, 58% of the voters said Trump was “mentally sharp” compared to only 24% for Biden. The tables turned. Some 61% of voters told Pew Harris was “mentally sharp” compared to 52% for Trump.
Among other key findings from the poll: Trump does better than Harris with white voters, 56% to 42% while Harris has a big lead among Black voters, 84% to 13%; Asian voters,61% to 37% and Latino voters, 57% to 39%.
