U.S. Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a presidential debate with former President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pa. on Sept. 10.SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
Before the presidential debate hit halftime, you could see Donald Trump’s stuffing leaking from his seams and littering the stage floor in sullen, frantic little tufts.
What was remarkable was not just how thoroughly Democratic nominee Kamala Harris unravelled him, but how simple she made it look.
Mr. Trump has spent more than a decade functioning as more of a weather system than a political candidate. Each time he squashed another antagonist, it buttressed the sense that he was untouchable – maybe not a political genius, exactly, but such a kinetic wild card that the laws of physics did not apply.
But it turns out the answer was in plain sight the whole time: It was his ego, as huge and fragile and anachronistic as a dinosaur egg. And somehow, only Ms. Harris has ever shown up to debate him with that secret to Mr. Trump’s undoing in her pocket.
About 25 minutes into things in Philadelphia Tuesday night, she told the at-home audience that she was going to do something unusual and invite them to attend a Trump rally. “You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer,” she said archly. “And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
At this point, making a crack about crowd sizes being Mr. Trump’s sweaty security blanket is so hackneyed that it might get you booed off the stage at an amateur stand-up comedy night. It couldn’t possibly be that easy, could it?
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But Mr. Trump did not just take the bait. He leaped out of the water to snatch at it with such enthusiasm that he landed with a great belly flop right on the deck of the trawler, at Ms. Harris’s feet.
He sputtered that Ms. Harris buses people into her rallies, while he has “the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” She watched him with a beatific grin, her eyebrows raised incredulously. As he kept careening down the mental hill, she tucked one hand under her chin and leaned back slightly.
She might as well have nudged aside the lapels of her blazer to reveal a T-shirt that said, “BLESS HIS HEART” in light-up letters.
Eventually, within the same answer, Mr. Trump found his way to this ludicrous lie about migrants:
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” he said. “And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
Normally, Mr. Trump’s meandering rhetoric is a big part of his appeal to vast swathes of Americans because it’s a demonstration of how he will not be cowed by snooty judgments.
But because of how Ms. Harris unsettled him Tuesday, it all took on a different cast. It was wheedling rather than throwing punches; it was playing your greatest hits and waiting for applause to fill the hole in your chest. He looked old and addled and needy.
Ms. Harris gave that effect a mighty boost with her body language. Each time Mr. Trump spoke, she turned to watch him, so that on the split-screen, each of his answers was accompanied by a visual laugh track: Ms. Harris watching with a big grin as he wriggled on the end of her line.
“We’ll go back to windmills and we’ll go back to solar when they need a whole desert to get some energy to come out,” he said in one entirely incoherent foray into energy policy. “You ever see a solar plant? By the way, I’m a big fan of solar, but they take 400, 500 acres of desert soil.”
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Most people who have tried to dismantle Mr. Trump have done it on grounds like him being a threat to democracy or accusations that he’s racist or grabby or grifting.
But Mr. Trump sees the world only in a mirror, so everyone else and all of their annoying, prissy expectations are just a blurry backdrop to his powerful visage. In a debate, accusing Mr. Trump of doing terrible things to the world around him was never going to throw him off, because he quite literally doesn’t care.
Ms. Harris found a skeleton key where countless others have failed because she picked at the one thing that matters to Donald Trump: Donald Trump.
In talking about him as a foreign policy calamity, she cast him as the globe’s useful idiot.
“It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they’re so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favour,” Ms. Harris said, as Mr. Trump shook his head in disgust. “And that is why so many military leaders who you have worked with have told me you are a disgrace.”
Echoing a TV ad her campaign ran in Philadelphia and around Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida this week, Ms. Harris at another point listed off all the prominent Republicans and former high-level staffers in Mr. Trump’s own administration who have offered public warnings of what a disaster he is.
She said of the 2020 election, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so let’s be clear about that,” adding in a voice of mock gentleness, “Clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that.”
It all must have worked better than in even the most gleeful fantasies of Ms. Harris’s team during their debate preparations. Mr. Trump’s final answer before the moderators mercifully shut him down ahead of the closing statements was this:
“They get all this money from all of these different countries. And then you wonder: Why is he so loyal to this one, that one, Ukraine, China? Why is he?” Mr. Trump asked of Joe Biden. “Why did he get 3½ million dollars from the mayor of Moscow’s wife? Why did he get, why did she pay him 3½ million dollars? This is a crooked administration, and they’re selling our country down the tubes.”
Immediately after the debate ended, the Trump campaign sent out a flotilla of statements praising his “debate victory,” his “masterful performance” and the fact that he was “the clear winner.”
Bless his heart.