PHILADELPHIA — Former President Donald Trump discovered Tuesday night that he now has a much stronger rival on his hands.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who became the Democratic presidential nominee when President Joe Biden stepped down after a disastrous June debate, delivered aggressive attacks and coherent rebuttals. And she provoked Trump, who at one particularly heated moment became angry at her attempt to interrupt him — with some allies saying after the debate that he had lost control at a crucial moment.
“Wait a minute,” he scolded, his annoyance clear in his tone and facial expression. “I’m talking now. Do you mind? … Sound familiar?”
Laura Ingraham said on Fox News that Harris had “moved the betting markets a little bit.” Three Republican sources — a political operative, a Trump ally and a donor — described Trump as “angry” when Harris pushed his buttons and sidetracked him after questions about some of his key policies.
Another Trump fundraiser said Trump’s frustration was hampering his ability to carry out his own plans and the points he wanted to make, but he hoped voters would feel similar anger.
“Trump is so angry that he can’t get his message across clearly,” the Trump fundraiser said. “She’s cool, calm, and can provoke him. I was tense when I heard it.” But, the fundraiser noted, American voters “are stressed and angry. Maybe they can relate very well to Trump’s anger.”
Trump has had supporters on the edge of their seats during bad debate nights before, when he narrowly won the 2016 election and narrowly lost the 2020 election. But Trump, heartened this past week by somewhat more favorable public polling than he’s seen in recent memory, missed an opportunity to capitalize on his good personal vibes.
After Tuesday’s game, he approached reporters to criticize ABC News moderators and declare the night a win. He declined to answer questions about committing to a second debate, which Harris’ campaign challenged him to do in a statement earlier in the evening.
“The polls are very good. I had a good feeling about it,” he said.
In a debate that featured heated clashes over the economy, abortion and immigration, and in which Harris made a rare statement on racism and Trump repeated a baseless meme claiming immigrants in Ohio eat pets, Trump sought to recreate the circumstances of his June confrontation with Biden.
He spoke about Biden almost as often as he spoke about Harris, pursuing a strategy he had announced before Tuesday’s showdown: an attempt to prevent Harris from breaking away from the administration she served in and from voter dissatisfaction with the direction of the country.
“We’re playing World War III and we have a president that we don’t even know exists — where is our president? We don’t even know he’s a president. They threw him out of a campaign like a dog,” Trump said. “We have a president that doesn’t even know he’s alive.”
Harris, eager to position herself differently from Trump and Biden, reminded him that Biden will not be on the ballot.
“You’re not running against Joe Biden. You’re running against me,” Harris said early on. “I’m clearly not Joe Biden, and I’m certainly not Donald Trump,” she said later. “What I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country.”
Harris promised to ease the concerns of middle-class voters by announcing plans to expand subsidies for first-time homebuyers, parents and small businesses. But she immediately dodged the question of whether the country is in a better economic position than it was when Biden won the 2020 election.
Trump said Harris had 3½ years to make the changes she promised and argued that the Biden-Harris administration had squandered the progress Trump had given them.
“Everybody knows what I’m going to do: cut taxes big time and create a great economy,” he said, referring to his economic performance before the global pandemic.
“We gave them a country where the economy and stock markets were higher than before the pandemic.”
He was most confident when pointing to issues on which Harris had changed her position over the years, including whether to ban fracking, the environmentally controversial method of extracting oil and natural gas.
“She has no policies. Everything she believed three years ago, four years ago, has been thrown out the window,” he said. “She’s going to follow my philosophy. … I would send her a MAGA hat.”
Harris attempted to counter this criticism by emphasizing that she no longer supports a ban on fracking, and reminded voters that she and her running mate own guns.
“Tim Walz and I are both gun owners,” Harris said. “We’re not taking anyone’s guns away.”
Harris found her comfort zone in criticizing Trump for his abortion positions. His Supreme Court nominations helped overturn federal protections for the procedure, and he has praised states for using their newfound power to restrict abortion. He said Tuesday that his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, had not consulted him before vowing that Trump would veto a national abortion ban if Congress passed one..
Trump dodged questions about whether he would actually veto a nationwide abortion ban, repeating his claim that legal scholars wanted Roe v. Wade overturned.
“You want to talk about this, is this what people wanted?” Harris responded. “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, who have a miscarriage, who can’t get emergency room care because the providers are afraid they’re going to jail, and she’s bleeding to death in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or 13-year-old incest survivor who’s forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”
Trump and Harris also clashed over the 2020 election, with Trump again falsely claiming he had won.
“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” Harris countered. “So let’s be clear about that, and it’s clear he’s having a very hard time processing that.”
Harris repeatedly struck a chord with Trump, including by targeting the crowds that come to his rallies. The crowds are an obsession for Trump, who prides himself on drawing thousands to his speeches. Harris has portrayed his rallies as dull, confusing events in which Trump spends time talking about the movie character Hannibal Lecter. Bored audiences leave his rallies early, she said.
That angered Trump and prevented him from spending his valuable debate time on a topic that was not of interest to voters.
“People don’t leave my rallies,” he said. “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
Although supporters turned out in droves to hear Harris, Trump said, “People don’t go to her rallies.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who ran against Trump in the 2016 and this year’s Republican primaries, said Trump “chased every rabbit down every hole” and that he should fire his debate prep team. Christie, now an outspoken critic of the former president, also helped Trump prepare for debates in 2020.
During the debate, Harris teased Trump in ways that undermined his self-image as the popular, strong leader that Americans’ opponents fear.
A common Trump point is that other countries laugh at America’s current Democratic leaders. Harris turned the argument against him, saying that world leaders “laugh at Donald Trump.”
She said foreign leaders consider Trump a “disgrace.”
In his defense, Trump cited the praise he received from Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister and a figure who has steered his country in an illiberal direction.
“Let me tell you about world leaders. Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men — they call him a strong man. He’s a tough man. Smart. Prime Minister of Hungary,” Trump said. He added: “He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
