Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in Philadelphia in a debate on ABC: NAJ screen shot

By Glynn Wilson –

From the first moment when Vice President Kamala Harris walked on stage in Philadelphia, approached Donald Trump and extended her hand to shake his in their first face-to-face meeting, to the last when she talked about the Biden administration’s work to fight climate change and create millions of high paying jobs, she dominated the debate stage and commanded the empty room by plainly stating the facts, while Donald Trump did what he always does: He lied, he smirked and even claimed falsely that people in Ohio are eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats because of “violent” immigrants who are flooding into our country from all over the world and ruining it.

Expectations were high and millions of people of all stripes tuned in to watch to see how Harris would stand up to the biggest bully in American political history. And unlike the debate with President Joe Biden in June, things did not go Trump’s way as even the ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis caught some of Trump’s lies and fact-checked him in real time on abortion, migrants and the 2020 election in sharp contrast to the unchecked CNN debate in Atlanta moderated by anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

The mainstream media and the talking heads on cable TV news talk had built up the debate in advance to be about defining Kamala Harris. Instead, with tough words and body language, she turned it into a referendum on Donald Trump.

“She turned to him with an arched brow. A quiet sigh. A hand on her chin. A laugh. A pitiful glance. A dismissive shake of her head,” the New York Times led with in its deadline coverage.

“From the opening moments of her first debate against Donald J. Trump, Kamala Harris craftily exploited her opponent’s biggest weakness. Not his record. Not his divisive policies. Not his history of inflammatory statements,” Times reporters wrote. “Instead, she took aim at a far more primal part of him: his ego.”

“At his rallies, on his sycophantic social media network and surrounded by flatterers at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump is unquestioned, unchallenged and never ever mocked. That changed over the course of 90 minutes in Philadelphia on Tuesday, when the woman who had never before met him succeeded, bit by bit, in puncturing his comfortable cocoon and triggering his annoyance and anger.”

She questioned the size and loyalty of the crowds at his rallies. She said world leaders and his own generals laugh at him and call him a “disgrace.” She claimed his fortune was handed to him by his father, “recasting a business mogul who proudly boasts of being a self-made man as just another nepotism baby.”

Then she stood by and watched, as Trump “did himself a whole lot of damage.”

In answer after answer, the former president reminded Americans of his role in so much of what many would rather forget: the devastating, deadly Covid pandemic that dominated his time in the White House, his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, a bloody siege on the U.S. Capitol and the fall of Roe v. Wade by radically conservative Supreme Court justices he appointed.

He lingered on his criminal charges and claimed they were “fake” charges, and praised Viktor Orban, the strongman dictator of Hungary. He equivocated about own role in ending legal protections for abortion and his own position on it, claiming he supported exceptions to it and compared himself to Ronald Reagan, then tried to claim that Democrats were in favor of executing babies after they are born.

In such a fractured and polarized country, the Times said, it remains unclear how the lopsided debate may alter the 2024 presidential race.

“But the immediate reaction was telling: Mr. Trump led Republicans in attacking the moderators — the debate was ‘three-on-one,’ he complained — while Democrats notched perhaps the most important endorsement of the election cycle” in a move the so-called experts said would never happen: The billionaire pop singer Taylor Swift endorsed Harris on Instagram. It just might put her over the top.

Since her swift move to consolidate the Democratic Party from the day after Biden announced he was stepping aside and endorsing her, Harris has faced a campaign focused on her race, her record, history and shifts in policy positions.

“But from the moment she crossed the stage to shake Mr. Trump’s hand,” the Times said, “the Democratic presidential nominee made clear her intention to transform a night expected to be about her into a referendum on him. She displayed a composure and tactical restraint that was palpable through the television screen. Equally palpable was his fury, which at times seemed to make him unable to even look at his opponent.”

“She’s a Marxist — everybody knows she’s a Marxist,” Trump said when Harris accused him of coddling China during the coronavirus pandemic. “Her father is a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well.”

Harris looked at him with a condescending smile, performatively leaning in to hear more. He’s the former reality television star, but she clearly understood the power of the medium. Her expression was her rebuttal. And when her turn to speak came, she focused not on rebutting the attacks on her character and ideology, but on the far more politically potent issue of abortion rights.

Trump, she charged, would ban abortion nationwide and monitor women’s pregnancies to ensure they carried the baby to term, as outlined in Project 2025. Already, current restrictions in some states, she told viewers, make no exceptions for victims of rape or incest.

“That is immoral and one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” she said.

Instead of attacking Trump as an existential threat to democracy, as President Biden so often did, Harris invited voters to judge the former president for themselves by attending one of his campaign rallies, to hear his references to “fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter” and his claims that “windmills cause cancer” – and watch his followers leave early.

“People don’t leave my rallies,” Trump interrupted the moderators, insisting on responding. “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

The people who know laughed out loud.

Early on, Harris set the stage by looking into the camera and warning the television audience that Trump would lie like he always does.

“The one thing you will not hear him talk about is you,” she said into the camera. “You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your desires, and I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first, and I pledge to you that I will.”

She closed the deal with voters with a line that has come to define her campaign.

“Let’s not go back. We’re not going back,” she said.

“It’s time to turn the page. Let’s turn the page,” she said, turning to face Trump. “Turn the page on this same, old, tired rhetoric.”

By the end of the show – it’s debatable that it was a debate – Harris turned one of the worst moments of the Biden presidency when the United States withdrew from Afghanistan into an attack on Trump, saying he “negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine” with the Taliban and even invited its leaders to Camp David.

It’s true. I covered that myself from the same mountain woods by Camp David then, as I told my Facebook friends, fans and followers while live blogging the event on my personal FB page.

Trump Claims to Call Off Peace Negotiations With Taliban at Camp David

Harris also scored points by reiterating Trump’s position to cancel the Affordable Care Act and health care for millions of Americans if he is elected again, a policy position that is also included in Project 2025. She mentioned the late Senator John McCain showing up in the Capitol after flying back after surgery from Arizona to cast the deciding vote to save what people called Obamacare, by showing a definitive thumbs down.

As I pointed out to my followers, I was in the Senate and House galleries in the Capitol that day and it was the day I met Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen on the Capitol grounds and convinced him to go to bat to help fund and elect Doug Jones of Alabama to the U.S. Senate, and I covered the story.

Senate Democrats Join Protesters in Rally to Save American Health Care

In reacting to the event, even some of Trump’s allies grudgingly admitted the Harris strategy of knocking Trump off-balance was effective. Aside from immigration, Trump failed to effectively attack her on the high costs of living, although he did blame her and Biden for inflation even though much of it was caused by the pandemic and government spending that even he supported to rescue the failing economy at the time. His attempts to paint her as a flip-flopper on energy policy and other key issues, and as too liberal for voters in swing states, “largely failed to gain traction amid his focus on re-litigating old grievances.”

Instead, Harris used the opportunity to explicitly appeal to the moderate voters and anti-Trump Republicans who helped deliver the White House to Biden in 2020. It’s a group Harris has struggled to win by the same margin and one that could, once again, play a decisive role in November.

Reaction

Reacting on ABC after it was over, Vice Presidential nominee Tim Walz said Trump’s performance demonstrated why Trump should never be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office in the White House ever again.

For his part, former Senator Doug Jones of Alabama reacted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“Folks, let’s be honest,” he said. “After this debate – if you can even call it that — this election shouldn’t be close and it’s embarrassing for the Republican Party that he is their nominee. Once again, this time for all America to see, Donald Trump was both incoherent and incapable of telling the truth about pretty much anything. That is simply who he is,” Jones said.

“If there has ever been an instance when a candidate proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he is unfit to be President of the United States, just as his Vice President and former members of his cabinet and inner circle have said, Trump nailed it tonight. On the other hand, Kamala demonstrated strength, knowledge, poise, leadership and more patience than anyone should have to endure for having listen to listen to that guy ramble and lie as much as he did.”

Rodney Govens, a Democrat running for Congress in Eastern Arkansas, said he loved thought she won when she said, “‘Just to remind you, you’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.”

And he loved it when she said, “81 million Americans fired you in 2020, and you just seem to have a hard time processing that.”

“It was a great choice of words, and very good way of saying ‘bless your heart,’ Govens said. “She showed the middle-of-the-road voters that she’s the best alternative to Trump’s chaos, his bigotry, hatred, all that. He was unhinged and couldn’t even finish a thought, interrupting his own sentences and skipping topics — which isn’t off-brand for him.

“She handled herself with class. She solidified her stances on a lot of things, and she showed herself to be empathetic, prepared, and sharp,” he added. “I was impressed with how she handled herself.”

Personal Reaction

After about 50 minutes into it, when Trump went off like a flame thrower about people eating their cats and dogs and claimed, darkly, that America is a “failing country,” I reached for the locally produced and handcrafted Scotty’s vodka in the freezer and took a couple of shots, chasing it with a dark Irish Ale. When it was finally over, I could not bring myself to write the story last night, and had to take a break and wind down in the fresh mountain air and talk to a couple of friends on the iPhone.

Long-leaf pine expert and author Mark Hainds in Andalusia, Alabama just north of Pensacola, Florida, answered immediately when I called before the first ring was done. We both expressed relief and joy that it was over, and that Kamala pulled it off, making Trump look on national television like the fool he is.

“Glynn, my brother man, she did it,” he said. “I can’t believe it but I’m so relieved.”

We talked for 30 minutes about a renewed hope for American democracy after we both were worried about what would happen with the Biden-Trump rematch.

My initial thought was: Kamala Harris was tough and made points with the facts, like the prosecutor and Senator she was. Donald Trump was, well, DJT. He couldn’t find the truth if it fell from the sky on his head like a failing Elon Musk Starlink satellite.

Watch the video:

___
If you support truth in reporting with no paywall, and fearless writing with no popup ads or sponsored content, consider making a contribution today with GoFundMe or Patreon or PayPal.