PHILADELPHIA — Former President Donald Trump found out Tuesday night that he’s got a much tougher rival on his hands now.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who took the Democratic presidential nomination when President Joe Biden stepped aside after a catastrophic debate performance in June, delivered aggressive attacks and coherent rebuttals. And she baited Trump, who, in one particularly agitated moment, bristled at her attempt to interrupt him — with some allies saying after the debate that he had lost control at a key moment.
“Wait a minute,” he scolded, his annoyance clear in his tone and expression. “I’m talking now. You don’t mind? … Does that sound familiar?”
On Fox News, Laura Ingraham said Harris “moved the points a little bit on betting markets.” Three Republican sources — a political operative, a Trump ally and a donor — described Trump as coming off as “angry” as Harris pushed his buttons and got him going off on tangents after questions about some of his key policy areas.
Another Trump fundraiser said Trump’s frustration hurt his ability to execute on his own plans and the points he wanted to make — but hoped that voters would feel similar rage.
“Trump is so angry he can’t clearly get his message across,” the Trump fundraiser said. “She’s cool, calm and able to provoke him. I was stressing hearing it.” But, the fundraiser noted, American voters “are stressed and angry. Maybe they very well identify with Trump’s anger.”
Trump has made his supporters white-knuckle through bad debate nights before, when he narrowly won the 2016 election and when he narrowly lost the 2020 election. But Trump, who was heartened in the past week by some more favorable public polling than he has seen recently, missed an opportunity to lock in his good personal vibes.
After Tuesday’s matchup, he approached reporters to criticize the ABC News moderators and call the night a win. He declined to answer questions about committing to a second debate, which Harris’ campaign challenged him to do in a statement earlier in the night.
“The polls are very good. I felt very good about it,” he said.
In a debate that featured serious clashes over the economy, abortion and immigration — as well as a rare Harris discourse on racism and Trump’s repeating an unfounded meme claiming that immigrants are eating pets in Ohio — Trump tried to re-create the conditions of June’s matchup with Biden.
He spoke about Biden almost as frequently as he addressed Harris, pursuing a strategy that his campaign previewed before Tuesday’s clash: an effort to prevent Harris from getting separation from the administration she has served in and from voters’ unhappiness with the direction of the country.
“We’re playing with World War III and we have a president that we don’t even know if he is — where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s a president. They threw him out of a campaign like a dog,” Trump said. “We have a president who doesn’t even know he’s alive.”
Harris, eager to portray herself as different from both Trump and Biden, reminded him that Biden won’t be on the ballot.
“You’re not running against Joe Biden. You’re running against me,” Harris said early on. “Clearly I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump,” she said later. “What I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country.”
Harris pledged to ease pocketbook concerns for middle-class voters, touting plans to expand subsidies for first-time homebuyers, parents and small businesses. But she dodged a question right off the bat about whether the nation is better off economically than it was when Biden won the 2020 election.
Trump said Harris has had 3½ years to make the changes she promises to make and argued the Biden-Harris administration squandered progress Trump gave them.
“Everybody knows what I’m going to do, cut taxes very substantially and create a great economy,” he said, touting his economic record before the global pandemic.
“We handed them over a country where the economy and where the stock market was higher than it was before the pandemic came in.”
He was at his most confident pointing to issues on which Harris has changed her position over the years, including whether to ban fracking, the ecologically controversial method of extracting oil and natural gas.
“She has no policy. Everything that she believed three years ago and four years ago is out the window,” he said. “She’s going to my philosophy. … I was going to send her a MAGA hat.”
Harris tried to counter those criticisms by stressing that she no longer supports banning fracking and reminding voters that she and her running mate own guns.
“Tim Walz and I are both gun owners,” Harris said. “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away.”
Harris found her comfort zone in blasting Trump for his positions on abortion. His Supreme Court appointees helped overturn federal protections for the procedure, and he has applauded states for using their newfound power to limit abortion. He said Tuesday that his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, did not consult him before he vowed that Trump would veto a national abortion ban if Congress passed one.
Trump dodged on whether he would actually veto a national abortion ban and repeated his claim that legal scholars wanted Roe v. Wade overturned.
“You want to talk about this is what people wanted?” Harris responded. “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”
Trump and Harris also clashed over the 2020 election, with Trump again falsely claiming that he won.
“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” Harris countered. “So let’s be clear about that, and clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that.”
Harris managed to get under Trump’s skin repeatedly — once by zeroing in on the crowds who show up at his rallies. Crowd size is a fixation for Trump, who prides himself on drawing thousands of people to hear his speeches. Harris cast his rallies as dull, confounding events in which Trump spends time talking about the movie character Hannibal Lecter. Bored audiences leave his rallies early, she said.
That raised Trump’s ire — and sent him off spending valuable debate time on an issue that doesn’t register with the electorate.
“People don’t leave my rallies,” he said. “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
Though supporters have packed arenas to hear Harris speak, Trump said, “People don’t go to her rallies.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who ran against Trump in the Republican primaries in 2016 and again this year, said Trump “chased every rabbit down every hole” and that he should fire his debate-prep team. Christie, now an avowed critic of the former president, also helped Trump prep for debates in 2020.
Throughout the debate, Harris needled Trump in ways that undermined his self-image as a popular, strong leader whom American’s adversaries fear.
A frequent Trump talking point is that other countries are laughing at America’s current Democratic leaders. Harris turned the argument back on him, saying world leaders “are laughing at Donald Trump.”
She said foreign leaders believe Trump is a “disgrace.”
In his defense, Trump cited praise he has gotten from Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister and a figure who has moved his country in an illiberal direction.
“Let me just tell you about world leaders. Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men — they call him a strongman. He’s a tough person. Smart. Prime minister of Hungary,” Trump said. He added, “He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump.”
