How Harris Roped a Dope

Vice President Kamala Harris walked onto the ABC News debate stage with a mission: trigger a Trump meltdown.

She succeeded.

Former President Donald Trump had a mission, too: control yourself. He failed.

Trump lost his cool over and over. Goaded by predictable provocations, he succumbed again and again.

Trump was pushed into broken-sentence monologues—and even an all-out attack on the 2020 election outcome. He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, backward-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible.

Harris hit pain point upon pain point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who had served with him, the boredom and early exits of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Every hit was followed by an ouch. Trump’s counterpunches flailed and missed. Harris met them with smiling mockery and cool amusement. The debate was often a battle of eyelids: Harris’s opened wide; Trump’s squinting and tightening.

Harris’s debate prep seemed to have concentrated on psychology as much as policy. She drove him and trapped him and baited him—and it worked every time.

Trump exited the stage leaving uncertain voters still uncertain about whether or not he’d sign a national abortion ban. He left them certain that he did not want Ukraine to win its war of self-defense. He accused Harris of hating Israel, but then never bothered to say any words of his own in support of the Jewish state’s war of self-defense against Hamas terrorism. In his confusion and reactiveness, he seemed to have forgotten any debate strategy he might have had.

Something every woman watching the debate probably noticed: Trump could not bring himself to say the name of the serving vice president, his opponent for the presidency. For him, Harris was just a pronoun: a nameless, identity-less “she,” “her,” “you.” It’s said that narcissists cope with ego-injury by refusing to acknowledge the existence of the person who inflicted the hurt. If so, that might explain Trump’s behavior. Harris bruised his feelings and Trump reacted by shutting his eyes and pretending that Harris had no existence of her own independent of President Joe Biden, whose name Trump was somehow able to speak.

Hemmed, harried, humiliated, Trump lost his footing and lost his grip. He never got around to making an affirmative case for himself. If any viewer was nostalgic for the early Trump economy before the collapse of his final year in office, that viewer must have been disappointed. If a viewer wanted a conservative policy message, any conservative policy message, that viewer must have been disappointed. When asked at the end of the debate whether he had yet developed a healthcare plan after a decade in politics, Trump could reply only that he had “concepts of a plan.”

Almost from the start, Harris was in control. She had better moments and worse ones, but she was human when Trump was feral. She had warm words for political opponents like John McCain and Dick Cheney; Trump had warm words for nobody other than Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian strongman whom Trump praised for praising Trump. It was an all-points beatdown, and no less a beating because Trump inflicted so much of it on himself.

At a minimum, this display will put an end to the Trump claim that Harris is a witless nonentity unqualified to engage in debate. Harris met Trump face to face before tens of millions of witnesses. She dominated and crushed him, using as her principal tools her self-command and her shrewd insight into the ex-president’s psychic, moral, and intellectual weaknesses.

Will it matter that Harris so decisively won? How can it not? But it may matter more that Trump so abjectly lost to a competitor for whom he could not utter a syllable of respect.