Trump plays defense as Harris controls fiery debate

There was no reason to believe Vice President Kamala Harris or former president Donald Trump would do anything different than they’d done all night. As Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia concluded, when the candidates were instructed to offer closing statements, Harris painted a forward-looking vision of freedom and prosperity, highlighted by her background. “That’s the kind of president we need right now,” she said. “Someone who cares about you.”
The answer seemed to infuriate Trump. “So she started out by saying she’s going to do this, she’s going to do that, she’s going to do all these wonderful things” he said. “Why hasn’t she done it?” Harris has been, Trump said, the “worst vice president in the history of our country.”
It was an apt summation of the entire evening. Over and over, for much of the 90-minute debate, a similar interaction ensued: Harris’ positive generalities about her own positions were interspersed with targeted, pointed jabs at Trump. And Trump, unable to resist, ceded any opportunity to make the case for himself: he was often too engulfed in defensive responses to Harris’ prodding.
Even in the post-debate spin room, where surrogates come to cheer their candidate, Trump’s acolytes shrugged. Vivek Ramaswamy, usually an unabashed cheerleader, said Trump came out “no weaker, no stronger” from the debate. “What people expected going in, I think unfortunately, that’s what they got coming out,” he said.
In the days leading up to the debate, Trump’s advisers and allies instructed him to stay disciplined and calm. Making a clear case for the future, they reasoned, would help him win over undecided voters dissuaded by his brashness. It was Harris’ debate to lose: if Trump could stay out of his own way, he would win. Trump’s audience, Larry Elder told me on Monday, is the people “who think he’s erratic and chaotic.” “He needs to be calm and make his case,” he said.
Within the opening moments, it became clear that Trump had other plans. This time, there would be no President Joe Biden, incoherent and mumbling, to hand him a victory. Instead, Harris played the role of a former prosecutor, flipping between periods of aggressive attack and forceful defense. Harris’ strategy was apparent before the first question: as the two candidates took the stage, Harris crossed over to Trump’s podium to shake his hand, a gesture that seemed to take Trump by surprise. (Presidential candidates have not shaken hands prior to a debate since Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016.)
In his first answer, responding to a question about the economy, Trump riffed about illegal immigration and crime, before circling back to his plan to impose tariffs on China and other trading partners. The moderators challenged his assertion that the tariffs would only affect other countries, not U.S. consumers, but Trump doubled down. “(Americans) aren’t going to have higher prices,” he said. “Who’s going to have higher prices is China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years.”
It was an early display of the unevenness Trump’s allies accused the ABC moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, of having. Muir and Davis never asked about the attempted assassination on Trump, less than two months ago. They frequently fact-checked Trump in real time, asking clarifying questions after his answers. When Trump claimed some states are attempting to legalize the killing of babies after they are born, the moderators said that is legal nowhere; when Trump claimed that undocumented immigrants in Ohio are killing and eating dogs and cats, the moderators said there is no evidence of this. Meanwhile, the moderators did not challenge Harris’ statements, even when she used Trump’s past comments out of context, like his assertion that a “bloodbath” will follow if he does not win the election, or when she said she supported fracking in 2020.
“The moderators might as well be on the DNC payroll. This is ridiculous,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said on social media. “This is the worst moderated debate in history.”
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Harris ally, chuckled at the assertion. “That’s what losing campaigns say,” he said.
But it was Harris, not the moderators, that managed to pull the most passionate answers out of Trump. Harris was no better at answering the moderators’ questions, often diving into prepared remarks and pivoting from the substance of what was asked, but she pulled Trump away with her.
When moderators asked her about her flip-flopping on key policy positions, she spoke instead about her upbringing and contrasted it with Trump’s wealthy father. Trump, instead of pinning her on policy, dove into a defense of his “great father” who gave him a “tiny fraction” of his savings, which Trump grew into “many, many billions of dollars.” Later, when Harris was asked what she would do differently than Biden on immigration, she blasted Trump for killing the bipartisan border security bill, then challenged Americans to go to Trump rallies and see the people “leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
Trump, clearly incensed, launched into a diatribe against the crowd sizes at Harris’ rallies compared to his. “People don’t leave my rallies,” he said. “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
Those were unforced errors that have little to do with the moderators, Trump’s allies implied. ”I think that no moderators are fair in most of these debates,” Rep. Matt Gaetz said. “But President Trump, you know, he goes in and he attacks the question. He answers questions directly.”
When given the opportunity to signal what a second Trump term would look like, Trump repeatedly declined. He has pledged to repeal the Affordable Care Act, moderators prodded; what would his health care solution be? He only said he had “concepts of a plan,” but offered no further detail. When asked if he would sign a nationwide abortion ban into law, he first avoided the question by saying his running mate, JD Vance, had spoken out of turn when saying Trump would, then he launched into an attack on student debt relief. (Later, when Harris prodded, Trump said he would “not sign a ban.”) When moderators gave him multiple opportunities to state whether he wants Ukraine to win its war against Russia, he repeated that he wanted “this war to end.”
And when given the chance to quell voters’ widespread concerns that violence will follow the 2024 election, perhaps driven by Trump’s refusal to accept its results, Trump offered little consolation. He instead relitigated the 2020 race, claiming he won. He said he had “nothing to do” with the violent mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and he blamed then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not securing the Capitol. He called the police officer who killed a rioter, attempting to break into the Senate chamber, “out of control.” Over 140 law enforcement officials were injured that day.
Is that the America Trump wants to return to? Voters didn’t get a clear idea — because he never made a clear case for what he wants the future to be. Instead, he attacked Biden as a “weak, pathetic man” and Harris as a “Marxist.” His plan to end the war in Israel? “If I were president, it would have never started.” To end the Ukraine-Russia war? “It would have never happened.” On the border, on health care, on abortion, on the economy? Biden-Harris is what not to do, he’d say, and he could’ve prevented it all.
Trump’s allies saw nothing wrong with this strategy. “You don’t have to worry about what Donald Trump is going to do,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, said. “You know what he’s going to do. He did it for 4 years.”
Harris was able to deflect many of Trump’s direct attacks. In response to his accusation that she has changed her racial identity — that she was “not Black,” but now “she’s Black” — Harris said Trump used “race to divide the American people.”
But when pressed on her positions on key issues — her flip-flopping on fracking, or buyback programs for assault weapons, or decriminalizing border crossings — her answers were scant. Perhaps that was a debate strategy, to move quickly to her prepared riffs. Perhaps it is a larger campaign strategy. Either way, her allies seemed unperplexed. “Any good leader is willing to adjust their positions based on new evidence,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, said.