Now that the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is over, let’s resist asking whether it’s going to have any impact. I think it will, but I also think asking about its immediate electoral consequences cheapens what happened. No one has done what Harris has done.
His ego is glass.
She shattered it.
Remember the former president’s self-worth is based on his ability to dominate and control, and to create a spectacle in the process. Take those away, and what does he have? Nothing. That’s what happened.
Trump faded and withered so rapidly that you might not have seen him become everything he himself despises. He probably woke up this morning hating his opponent almost as much as he hates himself.
She controlled the man who is said to be uncontrollable. She tamed him. She neutered him. They say he’s a bull in a china shop? Well, last night was nutting season. And she did all this by telling the truth, addressing the American people directly with appeals to democracy, decency and the rule of law, and using his own insults against him.
She called him confused and boring.
She suggested he was old.
Most painful of all, for Trump, she seemed to pity him.
If this debate were a title match, and if Trump were the undisputed heavyweight champion of American politics, Harris was the challenger who saw weakness in him that no one has yet been able to exploit.
She delivered a knockout punch.
The vice president may still lose in the end, but I don’t think there’s any going back. A man like Trump cannot recover from a humiliation this great, just as some prizefighters never recover from defeat. For him, everything depends on his strongman image, and I don’t just mean his campaign. I mean the very meaning of Donald Trump.
Because the stakes are for Trump psychological as much as they are political, Harris was able to say things that literally wounded him. You could see the pain on his face. No one has ever talked to him that way on national television – no woman. No woman of color. And the inevitable result of repeated humiliations was nonstop raging.
And the peak of that raging, during an absolutely deranged moment in which he was reaching for something, anything to stop this woman from pushing him against the ropes and punishing him, was this:
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Harris may have been the first one to exploit Trump’s glass ego, but she wasn’t the first to see it. Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who served on the House committee investigating the J6 insurrection, captured the idea at the Democratic National Convention.
“Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong,” Kinzinger said. “He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim.”
But the award for prescience goes to California Governor Gavin Newsom.
“He’s thin-skinned,” he told MSNBC’s Alex Wagner before the debate. “He’s weakness masquerading as strength. This is a fragile guy. He’s a broken person. He really is, and as a consequence of that, he’s incredibly vulnerable to reverting to who he really is, which is someone who doesn’t necessarily feel worthy, and is trying to overcompensate. I think that’s easily exploited, easily manipulated. He’s easy and prone to get off message. That’s why I think [Harris] has the opportunity to be particularly effective tonight. I don’t think she’s going to be timid. I don’t think she’s going to overdo it, but I think she will take that prosecutorial mindset.”
Did she ever.
Of the many, many moments to highlight, one stands out for me. It was a question about democracy, the 2020 election and Trump’s attempted paramilitary takeover of the United States government. In just a few minutes, she was able to hurt Trump, and I mean hurt him, while making critical points about the temperament needed to be a democratic leader.
“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” she said. “He’s clearly having a hard time processing that. We cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters and a free and fair election.” Harris went on to say:
“I have traveled the world as vice president … and world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump. I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you, and they say you’re a disgrace. When you talk this way in a presidential debate and deny what over and over again are court cases you have lost, because you did in fact lose that election, it leads one to believe that perhaps we do not have in the candidate to my right the temperament or the ability not to be confused by facts.”
Hillary Clinton is famous for saying that Trump can be easily baited with a tweet. While she was talking about foreign enemies, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, she could just as easily have been talking about Kamala Harris.
She baited him so masterfully that by the time Trump was done raging against the dying of the light, she seemed to express pity – as if the old man had finally fallen off his rocker and needed a snack and a nap.
It will be a few days before last night’s knockout is reflected in the polls. But before we ask whether it will have any impact on the presidential election, let’s pause to appreciate what the vice president has done.
She has done the impossible by shaming a man who’s beyond shame.
And she’s only getting started.
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