The bar was set low for him, but Donald Trump still didn’t manage to clear it. The former president has faced growing concerns from within his party that he no longer has the stamina, stylistic novelty or mental acuity to defeat Kamala Harris, even as polls narrow in the final weeks before November’s election. He did little to dissuade those fears on Tuesday, when he delivered a rambling, incoherent, lie-filled exposition of his own grievances in his first debate matchup against the US vice-president – a crucial moment in the presidential contest that proved to be a disastrous humiliation for him.
Harris, after a beat or two of appearing nervous as the debate began, set about a methodical attack on Trump that repeatedly named him selfish, dishonest and weak. She goaded him with attacks on his ego and his potency – including a transparent but wildly effective remark about people leaving his rallies early from exhaustion – that caused him to explode into paroxysms of nonsensical woundedness. Trump, who initially had tried to land attacks on inflation, was soon reduced to racist ramblings, tangential defenses of his past remarks and records, attacks on Joe Biden, who is not running against him, and old lies about infanticide, fantasies about “world war three”, weird comparisons of the United States to Venezuela, a morbidly racist fantasy about immigrants killing and eating white people’s household pets, “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prisons”, and his false claims to have won the 2020 election.
