Kamala Harris’s Secret Weapon

The definitive image from last night’s debate is a very specific split-screen view of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. In the left frame, Trump is mid-monologue, lips pursed and gesticulating. Harris occupies the right box, clearly watching her opponent. She’s leaning back ever so slightly, her hand on her chin. On her face is something halfway between a grimace and an incredulous smile—a facial expression that many Harris supporters likely recognize as a universal, exasperated response to a Trump rant.

It was a good look. While Trump seethed, Harris seemed amused. She offered righteous indignation while attacking Trump’s position on abortion, his love for authoritarian strongmen, and his bald-faced lies about immigrant crime. She effectively baited Trump numerous times—most memorably about crowd sizes at his rallies. All of this was rhetorically significant on its own, and yet, somehow, Harris seemed most withering and effective in the moments when Trump was speaking—the moments when she was able to look across the stage and act almost as an audience barometer for Trump’s answers. Crucially, Harris didn’t come off as furious or offended as she listened to Trump’s lies. Instead, she looked at ABC’s cameras the way you might look at your spouse in the presence of an overserved relative who doesn’t realize he’s making a scene at Thanksgiving dinner.

[David Frum: How Harris roped a dope]

“I have traveled the world as vice president of the United States, and world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump,” Harris said at one point. “I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you, and they say you’re a disgrace.” In another moment, she referenced his repeated election denial and suggested that perhaps Trump was confused and lacked the temperament to hold the presidency. “The American people deserve better,” she said.

What Harris’s body language and forceful rhetoric have in common is that they diminish Trump, and do so in a manner that succeeds where other Trump opponents have failed. Harris is the first candidate in a primary or general election to embody what feels like a “post-Trump” ethos. In other words, she’s the first person to run against the former president who does not treat him as the center of the U.S. political solar system. Rather than cave to his gravitational, attentional pull, Harris offers a different version of Trump: He’s not the sun; he’s the guy who has overstayed his welcome at a party.

In particular, Harris succeeds where her predecessor failed. Joe Biden’s early campaign quite accurately positioned Trump as a grave threat to democracy and the political order. But doing so made the election exclusively about Trump and backed Democrats into a corner where their messaging and identity were focused on what they opposed, rather than what they stood for. Although Biden is no longer the nominee, his well-delivered speech at the Democratic National Convention embodied this grim ethos: Even while making the case for his successful presidency, the speech was firmly situated in the context of the existential threat of Trumpism. This, to some degree, is the strategy that every one of Trump’s opponents has adopted, and for good reason: Trump is a lying, ranting, twice-impeached convicted felon who has repeatedly refused to accept the results of the 2020 election. He has promised that a second presidential term would be a “bloody story,” referring to mass deportations. There is every reason to take Trump’s reelection bid with the utmost seriousness.

Harris was able to reckon with the darker elements of a Trump presidency while also seizing on the fundamental absurdity of Trump as a candidate—usually with her expressions and body language. Instead of getting baited into Trump tangents—childishly arguing over golf prowess, for example, as Biden did—she treated his digressions as unserious or unworthy. Harris’s facial expressions last night made for easy memes and screenshots, but they’re also of a piece with Democrats’ most salient line of attack—that Republicans are “weird” and enmeshed in an extremely online far-right universe of alternative facts. The weird critique has stuck for Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, precisely because it is dismissive of Republican talking points. Instead of pearl-clutching, it presents the MAGA arm of the party as lost and out of touch. Harris’s incredulous split-screen looks during last night’s debate were, essentially, the visual embodiment of that critique. Her constant baiting throughout the night—calling Trump a disgrace and needling him about the size of his rallies—successfully lured Trump into long tangents that are legible only to those steeped in an extended universe of right-wing viral grievance.

For instance: Harris’s comment about crowd size sent Trump on an 89-second rant about migrants stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio—a reference to a debunked, racist meme spread by the MAGA faithful online and across conservative cable-news channels. As Trump delivered his deranged monologue, Harris laughed on the other side of the screen. When Trump finished, one of ABC’s moderators, David Muir, noted that there had been no “credible reports” of immigrants harming pets in Springfield. Caught flat-footed, Trump offered a feeble rebuttal: “I’ve seen people on television!”

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It’s unclear just how much presidential debates matter, even in close elections, though some evidence suggests that they don’t change many voters’ minds. Regardless, Harris’s performance managed to cast Trump as a dusty old artifact—a massive paradigm shift, as Trump has so thoroughly saturated our collective attention that he can feel like an immovable object. Trumpism’s shock-and-awe approach—the trolling, dog whistling, and constant memes and tweets—has been absurd and threatening since the real-estate mogul rode down his golden escalator in 2015. But it has also often felt ascendant—the early stages of a cynical, frequently cruel, often internet-powered faux-populist political project. What Harris’s campaign and debate style propose, however, is a different view of Trump, not as the central figure in American politics but as a vestigial element of a movement that’s so curdled by grievance and enmeshed in an alternate reality that it is becoming not just culturally irrelevant, but something far worse: pitiable.