The Trump-Harris debate was the most unsurprising thing that ever happened, except maybe for the part when, unlike previous debates, the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, pressed Trump to actually answer the question or noted that what he said was extremely not true at all.
The former prosecutor and current vice-president Kamala Harris got on stage and spoke in lucid paragraphs that were clearly the result of careful preparation. She shared the stage with the adjudicated rapist who spoke in loose phrases that flapped and looped and circled around and usually reverted to some version of “millions of immigrants who are criminals and terrorists are why this country is in terrible shape worse than anyone thought possible and we are going to have world war three”, a litany of fear and rage and vagueness we’ve heard for eight years.
Harris is widely said to have won the debate, by being herself, and being herself included a recurring facial expression of amused incredulity as the convicted felon on stage with her said yet another thing that was extravagantly untrue. One notable aspect of her rhetoric is how centrist it sounds – a bland but presumably strategic affirmation of support for a strong military, more healthcare, the usual Democratic party shout-outs to the middle class and support for Israel but also a two-state solution. She also expertly riled up Trump and let him go, and he went raging and free-associating throughout the 90 minutes. He is said to have lost the debate, also by being himself.
His face crumpled into a resentful sulk when his mouth was closed, and it was more than closed at those times – it was clamped shut. But when he opened it, lurid, loopy stuff came out. He actually repeated onstage the grotesquely fearmongering racist untruth that JD Vance and Ted Cruz and other far-right Republicans had been spreading online, declaring: “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.” It’s an internet rumor as preposterous as offensive as untrue – one of the moderators actually interjected that it was untrue – but it was also classic Maga stuff, an incendiary distraction from actual policy and anything else that matters.
Trump wasn’t quite as incoherent as in some of his recent public soliloquies, but he did say some very odd stuff, such as when he declared of Biden: “We have a president who doesn’t know he’s alive.” His most interesting slip-up came when the moderators asked him if there was anything he regretted about the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress he instigated. He inveighed and he waffled and he wove around and denied responsibility and tried to shift the conversation to Black Lives Matter protests and came back to blame Nancy Pelosi for what happened. But in one telling moment he said “we” of the insurrectionists and then shifted to say: “this group of people that has been treated so bad”.
In other words, Trump was Trump and Harris was Harris, but the debate moderators were far, far better than Dana Bash and Jake Tapper of CNN during the disastrous 27 June debate. They and Harris went after Trump when he said, as he’s been saying since at least 2019 in defense of the anti-abortion position, that mothers and doctors are killing babies at or after birth – in other words that abortion rights are the same thing as infanticide (which, yes, is extremely illegal). “They have abortion in the ninth month,” he claimed. “The baby will be born and we will decide what to do with it, in other words they will execute the baby.” It’s the first time to my knowledge that he’s been told to his face that that’s extremely untrue.
But still the questions came from within the bubble of assumptions and priorities that drive mainstream American media right now and drive media critics crazy. For example, a question about Harris’s position on fracking was an attempt to have a gotcha moment and portray her as a flip-flopper, and it came long before the final question, which was an afterthought of a throwaway question about climate.
Harris’s answer was disappointingly all over the place – “I am proud that as vice-president over the last four years, we have invested $1tn in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” Trump didn’t answer the climate question at all, and that was that. The fate of the earth for the next 10,000 years or so was brushed aside, but on the other hand the world’s biggest pop star did choose this evening to endorse Harris, signing herself off as “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady”.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
