On Tuesday night, ABC hosted in Philadelphia the second (and possibly last) presidential debate of the 2024 election, and it went a little differently than the first one. That first debate was such an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats that, after weeks of party infighting, President Joe Biden eventually dropped his bid for re-election. But the first showdown between Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris went a whole lot smoother for the Dems… and not so great for Trump, who spent more than 90 minutes leaning into his worst impulses.
It’s hard to know whether this debate will move the needle on what is shaping up to be an incredibly tight election, but it was another piece of evidence that Trump can’t keep it together on a national stage — especially when you put him next to a politician who is firing on all cylinders.
The debate was a key moment for Harris, who, despite a honeymoon surge in support after Biden stepped down and endorsed her, has seen a flurry of high-quality polls showing a statistical dead heat between the candidates. Elections can’t — and shouldn’t be — won on vibes alone, and Harris, who has mostly shied away from interviews and only just published a policy platform this week, hasn’t necessarily done a great job of re-introducing herself to the American people. In a New York Times/Siena poll, published on September 8, that showed Trump up 1% nationally, for instance, some respondents said that they didn’t know enough about Harris’s policy plans to commit to voting for her.
The debate presented an opportunity for her to showcase her platform on a national stage, and she did bring up some key policy positions, sharing her plan to expand the child tax credit by providing $6,000 to the parents of newborns, and touching on the high cost and shortage of housing, which she plans to address with a new housing plan. Crucially, she also vowed to support the right to have an abortion, the Democrats’ key issue — no weird Biden-style pivot to immigration here — and directly took on Trump for installing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, calling his comments on abortion “insulting to the women of America.”
Most importantly, Harris did what Biden couldn’t do. She baited Trump, and boy did it work. All it took was one dig at Trump’s rallies — “What you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” she said — and any semblance of his debate prep went right out the window.
“First, let me respond as to the rallies,” Trump said when moderator David Muir asked him about the border. It was all downhill for Trump from there.
Trump also lied and rambled his way through the June 27 debate against Biden, but his performance was overshadowed by Biden’s unintelligible comments, and he came out the winner just by virtue of being able to finish a sentence. With no fact-checking from CNN moderators Jake Tapper and Dana Bash and an opponent unable to coherently call him out on his falsehoods, he went largely unchallenged. This was not the case on Tuesday night, which featured some of the wildest Trump lines in recent memory.
For instance, he claimed that vice presidential candidate Tim Walz supported “execution after birth,” which warranted a fact-check from moderator Linsey Davis. He exaggerated his record on the economy and jobs. He invoked the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, as a leader who respects him. For the folks playing drinking games at home, he claimed Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”
He repeated his usual anti-immigration diatribe, insisting “millions and millions of people,” many of whom he claims “are criminals,” cross the border illegally per month. But this time he added a twist, repeating a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory spread by his VP pick J.D. Vance about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating people’s pets, saying, on national television, “In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in. They're eating the cats.”
Trump offered no vision for the country beyond alleging that a Harris presidency would destroy it. He was the worst version of himself, and — as he did during his own convention speech — he sounded like an inebriated family member you might try to avoid at a holiday gathering. So far, he and his supporters have largely blamed ABC’s moderators for his performance, and Trump even proposed that Disney’s FCC licenses be revoked in retaliation, because, when cornered, he will always turn to threats.
An election this tight in a nation this polarized cannot just be a referendum on Trump. Americans know who he is by now, and many of them plan to vote for him anyway. Harris must continue to find ways to get people to vote for her, not just against Trump. Touting endorsements from the likes of Dick Cheney isn’t going to win over the young voters and voters of color she needs to win this election. She should instead tout policy issues like bringing down the cost of childcare, raising the minimum wage, and expanding access to home-health care for seniors and people with disabilities. She must break with the Biden administration’s disastrous support of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Despite polling that shows the majority of Americans and many swing state voters back an arms embargo on Israel, she has focused only on the fact that the administration is working toward a ceasefire, a weak talking point she reiterated on Tuesday night.
But the debate was a great reminder that we simply can’t let a man as easily rattled, baited, and incompetent as Trump have control over our lives again. We need him to get off the debate stage — and the national stage — for good.
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