We have now seen how Vice President Kamala Harris fares in a debate against the former president Donald Trump.
It was a spectacular affair, as presidential debates usually are. Trump stuck to his typical pattern of describing everything in superlatives—“best economy,” “worst inflation,” “most embarrassing moment in the history of our country” and so on—while Harris seized the low-hanging fruit of calling Trump a threat to democracy in between rather dull descriptions of her policy proposals.
Frankly, I was unimpressed. I have paid too much attention to this race thus far for anything in this debate to be new information for me, but I suppose people who are not political nerds like I am might have gotten more insight into at least one of these candidates from watching them trade barbs.
As for who won the debate, the answer is mostly subjective. Everyone will have their own opinion influenced by their existing biases.
By my reckoning, Harris did not display remarkable rhetorical skill or offer any groundbreaking policy proposals. Having watched her speech at the Democratic National Convention and parts of her interview with CNN, I took notice of how her talking points—passing a bipartisan border bill, making the military the most lethal in the world and tax breaks for small businesses, for example—were almost repeated verbatim from when she spoke on those two occasions, and I did not personally like them any better hearing them again.
Clearly, she has calculated and rehearsed a strategy for all her public speaking engagements from which she does not wish to stray, which might be because she has had embarrassing gaffes in the past while trying to speak off the cuff. I am hardly in a position to critique someone’s public speaking ability, but it is not a good look for Harris that she has to stick so closely to a script.
On the matter of her policies, I continue to be frustrated by the direction she is taking. She offers economic policies that seem mostly intended to sound effective to voters while not sounding threatening to anyone with wealth. She is taking aggressive stances on foreign policy, immigration and the military that her party base is certain to hate, but which is apparently intended to appeal to centrist independents and moderate Republicans (a strategy that has famously never failed Democrats).
And of course, she spent a great deal of her time hammering Trump. She brought up the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court, to which he appointed three conservative justices who joined the decision, and the suffering of women in states that have banned abortion since then. She also brought up the Heritage Foundation’s political manifesto, Project 2025, which Trump has been publicly disavowing for months even as its proponents insist that his election will enable its implementation.
I would not say that it was an effective use of her time to spend so much energy on these lines of attack. Trump has been around for three presidential election cycles now, and it is not a stretch to say that just about every likely voter knows who he is and has made up their mind about how they feel about him.
A competent opponent would have steamrolled Harris in that debate for her vague proposals, inconsistent stances and awkward presentation. But she was not up against a competent opponent that night.
I think it is a fair assessment to call Trump’s debate performance the worst in his political career. His energy compared to his previous appearances on the debate stage was noticeably diminished and dripping with bitterness at its high points, and his messaging veered into bizarre and shockingly tactless territory, even for him.
Trump mentioned two conspiracy theories that have proliferated on X, formerly known as Twitter, and other right-wing sites, one about a Venezuelan gang taking over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado and another endorsed by his running mate JD Vance about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio killing and eating ducks, geese and cats. Both of these stories are unfounded, to say nothing of how overtly racist they come across.
For anyone who has not sunk inescapably deep into internet rabbit holes, these anecdotes would have surely been at best confusing and at worst horrifyingly revealing of what Trump has previously been smart enough to use dog whistles to express.
He had more tales to tell beyond these though. He claimed that Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, believes it should be legal to execute infants after they are born, something he has never indicated, and insisted that Harris had been enabling criminals to enter the country illegally and receive “transgender operations” while in prison, which could only seem reasonable to someone buying into two or three moral panics at once.
Some might find it troubling that Harris did not forcefully push back against claims such as these and more that I have not described, and I do think some of them warranted more of a response. Yet, baiting Trump and allowing him to dig his own grave was not a bad strategy for Harris, and if the results of surveys from news media shortly after the debate were any indication, it was successful for her.
Neither candidate seemed to respond directly or effectively to the moderators’ questions or present their platforms clearly and compellingly, but that is what I have come to expect from these debates. I find each of these candidates unappealing for different reasons as well as for some that apply to both of them. But the outcome of this debate is crystal clear to me.
Harris was mediocre, at best. Trump was so catastrophically bad, especially considering that he handily won the previous debate against Joe Biden, that she wins by default. Add to this the impeccably timed (and delightfully shady) endorsement of Harris by pop music megastar Taylor Swift, shortly after the debate, and one has to wonder if Trump has any chance of turning this around.
We are still several weeks away from the general election. Polls have been wrong before, and debate victories are not good predictors of electoral outcomes.
But Trump let Harris mop the floor with him on that stage and more than once said the quiet part out loud. Hopefully this country is not too far gone to see him for what he truly is come November.
