Kamala Harris, unlike Donald Trump, was well prepared for this debate – and won | Rebecca Solnit

TThe Trump-Harris debate was the least surprising event ever – except perhaps for the part when moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, unlike in previous debates, pushed Trump to actually answer the question or pointed out that what he had said was absolutely not true.

Former prosecutor and current Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage and spoke in crisp paragraphs that were obviously the result of careful preparation. She shared the stage with the convicted rapist, who spoke in loose sentences that shimmied and circled and mostly came back to some version of “millions of immigrants who are criminals and terrorists are the reason this country is in a worse state than anyone thought possible and that we're going to have World War III” — a litany of fear and anger and vagueness that we've been hearing 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 disbelief when the convicted felon onstage with her said yet another thing that was extravagantly untrue. One notable aspect of her rhetoric is how centrist she sounds — a vacuous but presumably strategic affirmation of support for a strong military, more health care, the usual Democratic Party appeals to the middle class, and support for Israel, but also for a two-state solution. She also skillfully incited Trump and let him go, and he ranted and raved for the entire 90 minutes. He is said to have lost the debate, also by being himself.

His face would twist into an angry pout when his mouth was closed, and in those moments it was more than just closed—it was clenched shut. But when he opened it, bright, crazy stuff came out. He actually repeated onstage the grotesquely fear-mongering racist falsehoods that JD Vance and Ted Cruz and other far-right Republicans had been spreading online, declaring, “In Springfield, they eat the dogs, the people who came here, they eat the cats, they eat the pets of the people who live there.” It's an internet rumor that's as absurd as it is offensive and untrue—one of the moderators even interjected that it was untrue—but it was also classic MAGA stuff, an inflammatory distraction from real politics and everything else that matters.

While Trump wasn't quite as incoherent as he has been in some of his recent public monologues, he did say some very odd things, like 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 he regretted anything about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress that he incited. He ranted and raved, denying responsibility, trying to steer the conversation toward the Black Lives Matter protests, then later blaming Nancy Pelosi for what happened. But in one telling moment, he said “we” of the insurrectionists, then switched to “that group of people who were treated so poorly.”

In other words, Trump was Trump and Harris was Harris, but the debate moderators were much, much better than CNN's Dana Bash and Jake Tapper during the disastrous June 27 debate. They and Harris attacked Trump when he said, as he has been saying in defense of anti-abortionists since at least 2019, that mothers and doctors kill babies at or after birth — in other words, that abortion rights are the same as infanticide (which, yes, is extremely illegal). “They abort 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.” To my knowledge, this is the first time he has been told to his face that this is absolutely untrue.

But the questions still came from the bubble of assumptions and priorities that currently dominate mainstream American media and drive media critics mad. A question about Harris's stance on fracking, for example, was an attempt to provoke a deception and paint her as fickle. It came long before the final question, which was an afterthought to a casual question about climate.

Harris' response was disappointingly mixed: “I'm proud that as Vice President, we invested a trillion dollars in the last four years in a clean energy economy while increasing 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 then again, the biggest pop star in the world chose to endorse Harris that night, signing off as “Taylor Swift, childless cat lady.”