Five key takeaways from Tuesday’s U.S. presidential debate

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Kamala Harris and Donald Trump strode onto a Pennsylvania debate stage, shook hands and exchanged pleasantries. “Let’s have a good debate,” Ms. Harris said. “Nice to see you,” Mr. Trump responded. “Have fun.”

It marked the first time they had met in person. But the amity lasted only as long as the handshake, as the two people seeking the U.S. presidency sought to use each of the ensuing minutes to pummel, mock and insult each other and question their opponent’s honesty and strength.

In June, the first presidential debate this year set in motion the withdrawal from the race of President Joe Biden, whose faltering performance raised acute questions about his capacity to serve another four years in office.

Harris, Trump trade blows in heated U.S. presidential debate

ABC News, which hosted this debate, the second (and likely final) one of the election cycle, dubbed it “the most consequential moment of this campaign,” a moment for Mr. Trump to confront a new opponent – and for Ms. Harris to demonstrate that she merits the faith of an electorate still trying to understand who she is.

Here are five take-aways.

Confronting facts

Mr. Trump’s uneven relationship with the truth has long been scrutinized by fact-checkers. But rarely has he been so directly confronted with the veracity of his rhetoric, both by moderators and Ms. Harris. The debate offered a glimpse into how the former president justifies his thinking.

Have migrants eaten pets in Ohio, as some Republicans have claimed? A city manager in the state says no records of such behaviour exist. Mr. Trump’s response: “Well, I’ve seen people on the television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’”

Has violent crime increased? The FBI says no, it is waning. Mr. Trump’s response: That data “was a fraud.”

Did Mr. Trump provoke the violent riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021? He was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives for “incitement of insurrection.” Mr. Trump’s response: “It wasn’t done by me, it was done by others.” And, he added, any fault belongs elsewhere. “It would have never happened if Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington did their jobs.”

Does Ms. Harris want to halt the boom in natural gas exploration or take Americans’ firearms away? Mr. Trump said “she has a plan to confiscate everybody’s gun. She has a plan to not allow fracking in Pennsylvania or anywhere else.” Ms. Harris offered evidence to the contrary. Not only did she cast the tiebreaking vote on an act that opened new leases for gas fracking, but she and her running mate, Tim Walz, are both gun owners.

“We’re not taking anybody’s guns away. So stop with the continuous lying about this stuff,” she said.

Did Mr. Trump recently acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election? “I said that sarcastically,” he said.

For Ms. Harris, her opponent’s relationship with the truth provided an opening. Such talk, she said, “leads one to believe that perhaps we do not have, in the candidate to my right, the temperament or the ability to not be confused about fact. That’s deeply troubling.”

The U.S. presidential debate was a gabfest that disintegrated into a gong show

Trump: They’re ‘taunting’ us

Would Mr. Trump veto a national ban on abortion? He refused to say. (Ms. Harris, too, refused to answer when pressed about what limits to abortion she would support.)

Mr. Trump, however, sought to make a bigger point. Ms. Harris has promised to sign any congressional bill reinstating abortion rights. But in a deeply divided Congress, such a bill is unlikely to be forthcoming. “She can’t get the vote. She won’t even come close to it. So it’s just talk,” he said.

Her promise is reminiscent, Mr. Trump said, of the Biden administration’s promises to forgive student debt, which have been largely blocked by courts. “So all these students got taunted with this whole thing about – this whole idea,” he said.

It was a prelude to his closing indictment of Ms. Harris, who appeared determined to respond to criticism that she has not enunciated a detailed plan for her presidency. She has offered more tangible ideas to support home buyers and cut taxes for families.

But Mr. Trump questioned whether any of that is believable, coming from a sitting vice-president.

“She’s going to do this, she’s going to do that. She’s going to do all these wonderful things,” he said. “Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for 3½ years.”

Who is the weakest of them all?

It was an insult aimed at the heart of what Ms. Harris believes is a fragile ego: Mr. Trump, she said again and again, is “weak.”

“It is very well known that Donald Trump is weak and wrong on national security and foreign policy,” she said. “It is well known that he admires dictators.” Then she turned and faced Mr. Trump: “It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again. It’s so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favours.” She called the former president’s negotiations in Afghanistan “one of the weakest deals you can imagine.”

Mr. Trump’s response: fling back the same. He pointed to European leaders. “They don’t like me as much as they like weak people,” he said.

To bolster his own credentials, he turned to Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister, who has overseen the erosion of democratic freedoms in that country. “They call him a strongman. He’s a tough person. Smart,” Mr. Trump said. And Mr. Orbán, he added, has said the world is breaking out in conflict “because you need Trump back as president.”

The ghost of Joe Biden

Mr. Biden withdrew from his re-election campaign a month and a half ago, after a devastating debate performance. But Mr. Trump tried repeatedly to conjure the President’s presence on a stage now occupied by someone else. “She is Biden,” he said repeatedly of Ms. Harris.

America’s foreign adversaries, he said, “respect me. They don’t respect Biden.” He accused Ms. Harris of running for president without her own ideas. “She doesn’t have a plan. She copied Biden’s plan. And it’s like four sentences, like ‘Run, Spot, run.’”

Opinion: Kamala Harris was on trial in the debate, not Donald Trump, and she delivered her best performance

He mocked Mr. Biden as a “weak, pathetic man” who “spends all his time on the beach.” To solve problems at the border, Mr. Trump suggested, “you’ll get him out of bed. You’ll wake him up at four in the afternoon. You’ll say, ‘Come on. Come on down to the office. Let’s sign a bill.’”

Ms. Harris offered a cutting riposte.

“It’s important to remind the former president you’re not running against Joe Biden,” she said. “You’re running against me.”

Harris: Let’s all attend a Trump rally

It was, Ms. Harris allowed, an odd thing to say. “I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies,” she said. Doing so, she said, offers a front-row seat to the things Mr. Trump sometimes talks about: Hannibal Lecter. Windmills causing cancer.

People, she said, leave early out of boredom.

Her goading of Mr. Trump built on a new Democratic strategy to use the former president’s own language against him. At the Democratic National Convention last month, Barack Obama even employed a crude hand gesture to mock Mr. Trump’s obsession with crowd sizes.

On Tuesday, Ms. Harris sought to draw a more serious argument from the insults.

At a Trump rally, “I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you,” she said. “You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your, your desires. And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first.”

Mr. Trump, in turn, accused Ms. Harris – without evidence – of busing in supporters to her own rallies “and paying them to be there.”

But he also sought to fault Democrats for their rhetoric.

“I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he said. “They talk about democracy. ‘I’m a threat to democracy.’ They’re the threat to democracy.”