In what was maybe the most memorable moment of Tuesday night’s debate, Vice President Kamala Harris goaded Donald Trump out of his best attempt at performing restraint by saying that people leave his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. ABC News moderator David Muir asked Trump to speak to the border security bill he helped kill, but Trump couldn’t let the rally comment go.
What came next was a classic Trump rant that started with the size of his rallies (“We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics”) moved onto a mention of World War 3, skirted past a false claim that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Ohio, and ended with “If she becomes president, this country doesn't have a chance of success. Not only success. We'll end up being Venezuela on steroids.”
Maybe the best that could be said was that it was a considerably less painful debate to watch than Trump versus President Joe Biden. Debates are supposed to be a chance for voters to gain new knowledge on the candidates, but after last night it would be hard to say if anyone learned anything they didn't already know about the two people running for president.
Harris was combative and sharp, but behind that facade, she was vague in her positions and proudly planted in the middle. Trump’s rhetoric was a bigoted brain fog of the same old shit recycled from watching Fox News on a loop. Yes, Harris landed hits on him, but this debate proved that when you step into a ring with Trump, no one wins, especially the American people.
Over the course of the evening, Trump said he should send Harris a MAGA hat but also called her a Marxist. This perhaps crystallizes the biggest remaining issue with Harris. Because of her arc, late entry from a political party on verge of a panic to aspirational meme worthy campaign, and her opponent, a manic septuagenarian who loves crimes, there isn't a mandate for her to clearly articulate her positions. So she doesn’t. Instead, she capitalizes on the same primary narrative that won Biden the presidency four years ago: She’s the candidate who isn’t Trump, so you should vote for her.
Harris’s job last night was to introduce herself to the American public while conveying confidence, competency, and power against Trump. Harris’s campaign has been criticized for being vague on policy and capitalizing instead on the narrative of her as a savior for the Democratic party, stepping in at the last minute so Pop Pop Joe can go enjoy his ice cream in peace.
In her candidacy, Harris walks a political tightrope. Her slightly more progressive stances from her 2020 presidential run come into conflict with the more moderate Biden administration she has represented for the last four years. The Trump campaign accuses her of being a Marxist, while the progressive community to the left of her calls her a cop. The truth is arguably somewhere between those two poles, but a debate with Trump makes it impossible to know.
If Trump had been capable of restraint for more than one minute, he might have landed some legitimate blows on Harris. In his closing statement, he asks the strongest question that should have been raised earlier in the evening: “So, she just started by saying she's going to do this, she's going to do that, she's going to do all these wonderful things. Why hasn't she done it?” He could have pressed her on her shifting stances on immigration, tax cuts, and brokering a ceasefire in Gaza. Instead he kept talking about an American apocalypse. He kept ranting about dangerous immigrants at every turn, about babies being killed after birth, that he was gonna make America rich off tariffs, and in a moment that will haunt us all, he claimed to be “a leader on fertilization.”
When Trump accused her of radical policy positions, Harris responded by not only refuting them, but also conceding to a rhetorically moderate middle ground to prove the point. Gone was the candidate who said she would decriminalize illegal border crossings in 2019; now the emphasis was on the bipartisan immigration deal she tried to pass this year and Biden’s executive order this summer, which barred undocumented immigrants from seeking asylum at the border. Less than a week after yet another school shooting, this time in Winder, Ga., the only mention of gun control from Harris was a vehement denial of any plans to take guns away and a reminder that both she and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz are gun-owners. She refused to answer whether she would support late-term abortion as president, only going so far as to express support for reinstating Roe v. Wade protections under federal law.
The candidates managed to cover whether immigrants were eating people's pets, whether Harris was Black or Asian, and whether people are bored at Trump’s rallies before tackling a single question on health care, which according to Pew is the second-most important topic to voters in this election, after the economy.
Since his emergence as a political figure nearly a decade ago, Trump has been a black hole in any room he walks into, pulling his opponents, the media, and the American public into his swirling vortex of nothingness. If one of the goals for last night was to figure out which one of the candidates would be the “change” candidate, mission not accomplished.
Our elections are always a game of image and narrative, but it seems especially true in the last three cycles. Clinton’s campaign was an assault of white pantsuits and “Fight Song” on an endless loop. Biden’s run was a desperate coalition of voters trying to get Trump out of office. There’s this idea floating around that Harris’s campaign is more substantive than simply narrative; she didn’t wear white to accept the nomination! She doesn’t talk about the historic nature of her candidacy! She’s serious and she won’t be distracted by these silly, surface-level concerns.
Last night, Harris did what she had to do in this election, but her performance reflects our lowered expectations for political substance in the Trump era. In the last election we were voting not to die; this time we’re voting just on vibes.
But hey, at least it was enough to get Taylor Swift to endorse her.
