For the first 10 minutes or so of Tuesday night’s debate, it looked like a tempered version of Donald Trump might appear in Philadelphia, having learned his lesson from his failure to control his impulses in the 2020 debates with Joe Biden. He remained silent while Kamala Harris tore apart his economic plan, which he correctly noted was based on tax cuts for the wealthy and a sales tax on all imported goods. When it was his turn to respond, he accurately pointed out that the Biden administration has made no effort to end the tariffs it has imposed on China.
But it didn’t last, and no one watching Trump over the last decade thought it could. Within minutes, he descended from a discussion of tariffs into a narrative of immigrants—which he returned to repeatedly throughout the evening—in what can only be described as a form of nativist hysteria.
“They are taking over the towns,” he said. “They are occupying buildings. They are going violently. These are the people she and Biden let into our country. And they are ruining our country. They are dangerous. They are at the height of crime, and we have to get them out. We have to get them out quickly.
This was the level of disillusionment that Harris and his campaign clearly hoped Trump would demonstrate to voters, and it only got worse from there. “They’re eating dogs,” he said, referring to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, a particularly vile slur that began on social media and was spread by his running mate JD Vance. “People who came in, they are eating cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of people who live there.” When moderator David Muir pointed out that local officials had seen nothing of the sort, Trump said he had heard about it on television.
Throughout the evening, in moments like these, Harris was able to do something that Biden failed to do when he was campaigning for re-election: push Trump in a way that exposed his sprinkling of lies and wild imaginations.
This was also true of the horrific attempt on Trump’s life. There’s no evidence he was politically motivated, but that didn’t stop Trump from claiming he was. “I probably shot myself in the head because of what they were saying about me,” he said, referring to his false claim that the charges against him were evidence to “weaponize” the justice system.
And when asked about his role in undermining the democratic process, he said it was actually Harris who did so by usurping Biden’s role at the top of the ticket. “You talk about a threat to democracy – he got 14 million votes and they threw him out of office. And you know what? I’ll let you in on a little secret. He hates her. He can’t stand her. But he got 14 million votes. They threw him out. She got zero votes.
The debate was an unqualified success for Harris, not just because she was able to define herself and her plans, but because she was able to push a few buttons and let Trump show his truest self.
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