Kamala Harris made Trump look like a loser

In their first and only debate, she kept her composure and he lost control.

Thirty minutes into last night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump yelled: “THEY ARE EATING THE DOGS.” This was the moment when he lost the night. Until that point, Kamala Harris was fumbling through her answers, tripping over her words. The debate format – two minutes to speak on each topic and muted microphones when the other candidate was speaking – meant that Harris spoke too quickly and ran out of things to say. Trump sat back, with a reptilian composure.

But then he started to lose control. His problems began when Harris said people leave his rallies out of boredom. It seemed to trigger his basest instincts. Trump’s pride could not take such an affront. He forgot what the moderator’s question was about and launched into a numerical defence of his crowds. He did not care that few voters in Pennsylvania and Michigan would make a decision on 5 November based on how many people attended his rallies. This became the pattern for the night: Harris would provoke him and Trump would oblige.

Before the debate, the punditry class said both candidates would fight to define Harris’s reputation. Voters, the argument went, already know what they think of Trump, whereas Harris is an unknown quantity.

In fact, it was Harris who defined Trump. He was like a cat being driven around the room by a laser point. He pounced on each piece of bait that Harris dangled: John McCain, the size of his rallies, the 2017 Charlottesville riot, his felonies. He boasted that his former staffers could write best-selling books. He kept attacking Joe Biden, even though the current president has become a political spectre. Minute by minute, Trump lost his capacity to speak in sentences or with focus. Take his response when asked about why he had previously questioned whether Harris was black: “All I can say is I read where she was not black, that she put out, and I’ll say that, and then I read that she was black, and that’s OK”. Or when asked about his plans for healthcare: “I have concepts of a plan.”

Harris was able to sit back herself and observe her strategy’s effects. The Democrats knew riling Trump up was key to winning, in part because his aggressive style in the 2020 debate against Biden cost him votes. This year, the Democrats took out TV adverts in the area around Mar-a-Lago with a video of Barack Obama mocking Trump’s penis size. The bully was being outclassed at his own game. There was no audience for Trump to excite with racy and demotic outbursts that embarrass his opponent. Instead, the taunter had become the tauntee.

The power of the internet meant that both campaigns wanted “zingers” which could then be pumped into social media troughs for voters to feed on. Harris had plenty. “He got fired by 81 million people… and clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that,” was her response to Trump’s claim he won in 2020, a perfect inversion of his Apprentice catchphrase. She belittled him. “World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump”; so many people “you’ve worked with have told me you are a disgrace”. She called him “confused” and a “tragedy”. She later said, looking Trump up and down, that “the American people want better than that, better than this”.

His team’s reported efforts to get him to talk about policy appeared to be in vain. Trump’s failure to put forward a plan on the economy beyond higher tariffs meant he ignored the most important issue in this election. He refused to reassure voters over what Harris called “Trump abortion bans” by equivocating over whether he would prevent a federal abortion ban. He did not tell a story about America. Instead, he got lost in the technical details of his numerous court cases. Perhaps more revealingly, the references he made – such as to “J6” aka the 6 January attack on the US Capitol – showed how preoccupied he is with the online right.

Which is where the dogs come in. An unverified theory pushed by right-wing accounts has been circulating online that migrants are stealing pets in the Midwest. Hence Trump said: “A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Cue his advisers screaming at the TV, pleading with him to talk about last year’s two million unauthorised border crossings.

By the end, Harris was able to ram the contrast between the two candidates home. Invidious chaos with Trump, or reassuring composure with her. She’s betting that voters’ weariness with the decade-long Trump political arc is greater than their anger at stagnant wages and surging illegal immigration. Her closing statement was a pitch for unity, a promise to govern for all Americans.

The latest polling has Trump and Harris effectively drawing in most swing states. Last night’s debate might not dent Trump’s popularity with his base but it was essential for Harris to parry any attempt to attack her unscrutinised and ambiguous policy platform. That Trump was so distractible meant that Harris could get away with spending only one minute, 12 seconds talking about immigration. Nothing she said will challenge Trump’s polling lead on the immigration or the economy. Her campaign’s weaknesses haven’t been addressed. Nonetheless, she made Trump look like the loser.