Kamala Harris broke Donald Trump

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

I have been following presidential debates since 1976 and even been involved in them on the sidelines. And I have never seen a candidate execute a debate strategy as well as Harris.

For Harris supporters, the night went better than even the most optimistic among them could have hoped. For Trump supporters, it was not just defeat but public humiliation, the crushing retribution they probably secretly feared would come one day but which, until now, has never quite arrived.

What Harris seemed to understand better than anyone who has debated Trump is that the key to defeating him is to trigger him psychologically. She did this by repeatedly calling him “weak,” mocking him, acting bewildered, and literally laughing at him. When he lost control of events, Trump flew into a rage, his voice roaring in an empty room, his face not just orange but almost fluorescent. Trump realized that his opponent — and not just any opponent, but a colored woman— dominated him. And even as Trump exploded, he was, like a dying supernova, shrinking before our eyes.

Even a devoted sycophant like Senator Lindsey Graham called the debate a “disaster” for the ex-president.

Trump needed to portray himself as the agent of change, to fuse Harris with Biden and have the vice president defend her most extreme past statements. Instead, Harris forced Trump onto the defensive, and put him in the worst possible position for him.

During the debate, Trump defended the violent mob that attacked the Capitol. He insisted the 2020 election had been stolen from him. He renewed his smear campaign against the Central Park Five. He defended his decision to invite the Taliban to Camp David and called Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orbán, as a witness. He couldn’t bring himself to say that he hoped Ukraine would win its war against Russia, even when pressed. And he spent valuable time emphatically insisting that the multiple charges against him were “bogus.”

But that’s not all. Trump attacked people he had appointed to his administration who have since broken with him. He repeated his claim that Harris was not black. And then came the pièce de résistance: Trump spread the conspiracy theory, strange even by his standards, that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian migrants are kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ pets. “They’re eating the dogs!” he bellowed. “The people who came in — they’re eating the cats!” And he still couldn’t stop himself. When one of the moderators, ABC’s David Muir, refuted Trump’s claim, the former president said, “I’ve seen people on television! People on television say, ‘My dog ​​was taken and used for food!'”

By the end of the debate, it was easy to forget that Trump had started out pretty well — he was, by his standards, reasonably controlled and focused — and Harris was nervous. It looked like it was going to end in a tie.

But about 15 minutes into the debate, things began to change. Harris teased Trump about his rallies: “What you’ll also find is that people leave his rallies early out of fatigue and boredom.” Trump couldn’t stop himself; he took the bait. “People don’t leave my rallies,” he insisted. “We have the largest rallies, the most incredible rallies, in the history of politics.”

Harris began to find her rhythm, launching into a series of blistering attacks, and Trump began to unravel. His face darkened and his voice rose in volume. He became less coherent and more insulting. His rhetoric became more extreme, sometimes fleeing reality. He spoke in sentences that were clipped and sometimes barely audible. Half an hour into the debate, Harris was not only in control; she seemed to be enjoying it. Trump looked forlorn and enraged. Harris was showing him “matador red,” in the words of The New York Times‘ Matt Flegenheimer. Trump never laid a glove on her.

Donald Trump is so wild and narcissisticso uninhibited and so outside the norm of American politics that it’s hard to debate him. It’s disorienting. Very few people have been able to go up against him without getting dragged into the mud. In the past, even when he’s lost debates on points, he’s dominated his opponents.

But on a Tuesday night in Philadelphia, Kamala Harris cracked the code. She took Trump apart without losing her cool. She tried to insulate herself from accusations of being a leftist radical, even reminding voters that she is a gun owner. Harris managed to present herself, a sitting vice president in an unpopular administration, as the change agent. She appealed for unity, inviting Americans to “turn the page” on a man who disparages the country and wants to keep it in a constant state of agitation and chaos. And she returned again and again to the argument that Trump only cares about himself, while she has had only one client throughout her career: the people.

“As a prosecutor, I never asked a victim or a witness, ‘Are you Republican or Democrat?’” Harris said in her closing statement. “All I ever asked them was, ‘Are you OK?’ And that’s 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 statement in which Trump described America as “a failed nation,” he left the stage and disappeared into the shadows, a broken man leading a broken campaign.