Kamala Harris ruined Donald Trump

Last night in Philadelphia, Kamala Harris did to Donald Trump what Donald Trump did to Joe Biden: She defeated her opponent on the debate stage.

I've been following presidential debates since 1976, even attending some of them from the sidelines, and I've never seen a candidate execute a debate strategy as well as Harris.

For Harris' supporters, the evening went better than even the most optimistic among them had hoped. For Trump's supporters, it was not just a defeat but a public humiliation, the devastating comeuppance they had probably secretly feared but had never really come.

Harris seemed to understand better than anyone who has debated Trump that the key to defeating him is to provoke him psychologically. She did this by repeatedly calling him “weak,” mocking him, appearing confused by him, and literally laughing at him. Losing control of events, Trump became enraged, his voice bellowing into an empty room, his face not just orange but almost fluorescent. Trump realized that his opponent—and not just any opponent, but a woman of color– dominated him. And even as Trump exploded, he shrank before our eyes like a dying supernova.

Even a devoted bootlicker like Senator Lindsey Graham called the debate a “disaster” for the former president.

Trump needed to portray himself as an agent of change, to fuse Harris with Biden and get the vice president to defend her most extreme statements from the past. Instead, Harris forced Trump onto the defensive and thus entered the worst possible terrain for him.

During the debate, Trump defended the violent mob that attacked the Capitol. He insisted that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He rehashed his Central Park Five slander. He defended his decision to invite the Taliban to Camp David and called Hungary's authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán as a character witness. Even under pressure, he could not bring himself to say that he hoped Ukraine would win its war against Russia. And he spent valuable time insisting that the numerous charges against him were “false cases.”

But that's not all. Trump attacked people he had appointed to his administration who have since turned away from him. He repeated his claim that Harris is not black. And then there was the pièce de résistance: Trump spread the conspiracy theory, strange even by his standards, that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are kidnapping and devouring their neighbors' pets. “They're eating the dogs!” he yelled. “The people who came here – they're eating the cats!” And he Despite it couldn't help it. When one of the moderators, ABC's David Muir, refuted Trump's claim, the former president said, “I've seen people on TV! People on TV say, 'My dog ​​was kidnapped and used for food!'”

By the end of the debate, it was easy to forget that Trump had gotten off to a relatively good start – he was fairly controlled and focused by his standards – and Harris was nervous. It looked like the debate might end in a tie.

But about 15 minutes into the debate, things began to change. Harris mocked Trump for his rallies: “What you'll also notice is that people are starting to leave his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” Trump couldn't hold back; he stood up to take the bait. “People are not leaving my rallies,” he insisted. “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

Harris found her rhythm and launched a series of scathing attacks, and Trump began to crumble. His expression darkened and his voice rose. He became less coherent and more abusive. His rhetoric became more extreme and at times fled from reality. He spoke in sentences that became choppy and at times barely understandable. After half an hour of the debate, Harris not only had everything under control, she also seemed to be enjoying herself. Trump seemed desperate and angry. Harris made him see “matador red,” in the words of The New York Times“Matt Flegenheimer. Trump never touched her.

Donald Trump is so wild and narcissisticso unrestrained and so far outside the norm of American politics that it is difficult to argue with him. It is confusing. Very few people could stand up to him without being dragged through the mud. In the past, he dominated his opponents even when he lost debates on points.

But on a Tuesday night in Philadelphia, Kamala Harris cracked the code. She took Trump apart without losing her composure. She tried to hedge against accusations that she was a left-wing radical and even reminded voters that she is a gun owner. Harris managed to portray herself, a sitting vice president in an unpopular administration, as an agent of change. She appealed for unity, urging Americans to “turn over a new leaf” and forget a man who has degraded the country and sought to keep it in a constant state of unrest and chaos. And she kept coming back to the argument that Trump only cares about himself, when throughout her entire career she has had only one client: the people.

“As a prosecutor, I never asked a victim or a witness, 'Are you Republican or Democrat?'” Harris said in her closing argument. “The only thing I ever asked them was, 'Are you OK?' And that's exactly the kind of president we need right now. Someone who cares about you and doesn't put himself first.”

Two minutes later, after a closing speech in which Trump called America “a failing nation,” he left the stage and disappeared into the darkness – a broken man at the helm of a failed campaign.