Kamala Harris commanded the first debate against Donald J. Trump, flashing her prosecutorial skills to leverage every chance to get under the former president’s skin in a 90-minute clash of visions and style.
They disagreed fiercely on abortion and the economy, immigration and the war in Ukraine. But throughout the night, Mr. Trump found himself in a defensive crouch, relitigating his record rather than picking apart hers.
The contrast was apparent even on mute. She smiled. He glowered. He spoke more, but she dictated the terms of the evening.
Here are six takeaways from a debate that was a remarkable reversal from June, when Democrats were so despondent they changed candidates afterward:
Harris set traps. Trump leaped into them.
Ms. Harris strode across the room to deliver the first handshake in a presidential debate since 2016. It was the first time she had met Mr. Trump in person, and she was intent on introducing herself: “Kamala Harris,” she said, as he took her hand. “Have fun,” he instructed her.
She sure appeared to. He did not.
Ms. Harris dominated the proceedings from nearly the start. She laid bait. He took it. It began with her needling Mr. Trump that his bored supporters had been leaving his rallies. It continued with her comment that he had inherited riches from his father. And on it went as she invoked his Republican critics, including those who served in his administration.
On the back foot, Mr. Trump repeatedly spun down rhetorical cul-de-sacs.
At one point, Ms. Harris invited viewers to watch a Trump rally for a more unfiltered view of the former president. “You will not hear him talk about your needs,” she said.
He responded not by talking about voter needs but about crowd numbers.
“People don’t leave my rallies,” he pushed back.
He went on to invoke debunked claims on the right that immigrants are eating pets in an Ohio city, which led to fact-checking pushback from David Muir, one of the ABC News moderators.
“Talk about extreme,” Ms. Harris laughed her rival off.
Trump played defense on his record.
Within the first five minutes, Ms. Harris looked into the camera and told viewers what to expect from Mr. Trump: “the same old, tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling.”
He indeed talked less about what he would do in a second term and spent more time trying to clarify his record. He defended his handling of the pandemic, his decision to fire his top military advisers, and even his seven-year-old response to the deadly far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va.
Mr. Trump fumbled a moment where he had hoped to go on offense: the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal. Instead, he found himself defending his decision to invite the Taliban to Camp David in 2019.
Ms. Harris forced Mr. Trump to defend his closeness to authoritarians like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and his past courtship of Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, “a dictator who would eat you for lunch,” she said. She even goaded him by turning an epithet he calls her — “weak” — toward him on national security.
He called her “weak” back.
Ms. Harris looked straight into the camera as she pitched herself as the candidate of the future and forced him to defend the violence on Jan. 6, 2021. “We don’t have to go back,” she said. “Let’s not go back.”
Harris seized the advantage on abortion.
Abortion was one of the biggest missed opportunities for President Biden in his first debate. It was one of Ms. Harris’s strongest moments in hers.
Mr. Trump is keenly aware of his vulnerability on abortion, having appointed the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Yet on Tuesday he danced around the issue of potentially vetoing a national ban.
“As far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor of abortion ban,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”
He even rebutted his own vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, who has previously expressed openness to a national ban. “I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness,” Mr. Trump said.
Ms. Harris laced into Mr. Trump. She called it “insulting to the women of America” and said she had met women across the country whose health and lives had been endangered by abortion restrictions.
A Harris campaign official said the exchange on abortion, delivered in the first half-hour with viewership at its highest, was one of the night’s best in her team’s testing of voters in swing states.
Trump didn’t hide his disdain of Harris.
For much of the debate, Ms. Harris expressed her feelings about Mr. Trump by letting her body language do the talking: putting her hand on her chin, laughing and pursing her lips with a puzzled look.
Mr. Trump expressed his feelings by yelling into the microphone.
Ms. Harris warned that world leaders were “laughing at Donald Trump” and saw him as a “disgrace.” And when she referred to his 2020 election loss as the moment he was “fired by 81 million people,” he grew visibly angry.
When Ms. Harris brought up his criminal convictions, Mr. Trump accused Democrats — and, by extension, Ms. Harris — of turning the judicial system against him: “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he said.
At one point, when Ms. Harris tried to interject over a muted mic, Mr. Trump, well versed in extemporaneous insults, used one of her memorable lines from the 2020 vice-presidential debate against her.
“I’m talking now, if you don’t mind, please,” a visibly annoyed Mr. Trump said. “Does that sound familiar?”
Harris missed some opportunities.
One of Mr. Trump’s few memorable lines, even if it came off a bit canned, was when he mocked Ms. Harris for the lack of detail in her agenda.
“She copied Biden’s plan. And it’s like, four sentences,” he said, “Like, ‘Run, Spot, Run.’”
In her response, Ms. Harris bored into Mr. Trump’s agenda rather than her own. It was typical of a debate in which she appeared most at ease talking about Mr. Trump rather than fleshing out her own plans for the presidency.
When asked by the moderators to explain a list of her policy reversals, including her early support for banning fracking and decriminalizing border crossings, Ms. Harris addressed only the first one after promising to discuss them all: “I will not ban fracking,” she said, before turning quickly to Mr. Trump’s upbringing as the son of a real estate developer.
In fact, the only moment Ms. Harris showed any nerves was in the very first answer, when she tried to pack many of her economic plans — a child tax credit, a small-business tax deduction — into a single response.
Trump missed Biden.
One of Mr. Trump’s goals had been to tie Ms. Harris to Mr. Biden’s most unpopular policies, particularly on the economy and immigration, accusing the Biden-Harris administration of allowing “millions” of migrants across the southwestern border.
He failed to do so for most of the night. Instead, he mocked a man he seemed to miss running against. “You’ll wake him up at 4 in the afternoon,” Mr. Trump said at one point of Mr. Biden.
Ms. Harris pressed her rival on his fixation. “It’s important to remind the former president,” she said, “You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.”
The Trump campaign has cast Ms. Harris in ads as “dangerously liberal.” But on Tuesday he veered within a minute from saying she was mimicking him so much he was considering sending her “a MAGA hat” to calling her a “Marxist.”
It wasn’t until his closing statement that Mr. Trump truly appeared to find his rhythm linking her to Mr. Biden. “She’s going to do all these wonderful things,” he said of her various promises. “Why hasn’t she done it?”
She didn’t have to answer, because the debate was over.
But Mr. Trump wasn’t done. Ever the salesman, he went to the spin room to review his own performance.
“It was the best debate I’ve ever had,” he said.
The post Harris Dominates as Trump Gets Defensive: 6 Takeaways From the Debate appeared first on New York Times.
