Anyone who has followed former President Donald Trump in public life over the past decade seems to agree: He is his own worst enemy, and anyone who wants to defeat him need only encourage his worst instincts.
When Trump talks about the 2020 election, makes outlandish claims or airs personal grievances, he doesn’t focus on issues like the economy and immigration, where voters sometimes give him an edge.
In an apparent attempt to get Trump to go off script in front of a national audience, Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign tried to get him to agree to turn on his microphone during the two candidates’ ABC News debate on Tuesday — a change from Trump’s debate with President Joe Biden on June 27.
Harris failed to do that — each candidate’s microphone remained muted while the other spoke — but she did find plenty of other ways to trigger Trump’s bad habits. On this and several other points, the debate was an undeniable success for Harris, who at times had doubts about her improvisational speaking skills.
A turning point came almost half an hour in, when Harris laid a trap for Trump that he walked right into, predicting that he would bring up immigration unprompted during the debate and ridiculing him for holding rallies where he discussed fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. She even said that people leave her rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”
“The one thing you won’t hear him talk about is you,” she said, addressing the audience. “You won’t hear him talk about your dreams, your needs, your desires. And let me tell you, I believe you deserve a president who truly puts you first.”
Trump couldn’t resist the opportunity to defend the size of crowds at his rallies, a topic he often harps on.
“People don’t go to her rallies, there’s no reason to go. And the people who do go, she comes and gets them on the bus and pays for them,” he said, without foundation. “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
He also brought up the strangest immigration topic of the night: a completely unsubstantiated, racist rumor about Haitian migrants eating pets in Ohio, thus proving her point about his outbursts about immigration.
The exchange set the tone for the rest of the debate. Harris’ overarching theme was that she wouldn’t be distracted from helping working families, and that Trump couldn’t be trusted to do the same. Trump never regained his balance and made a fool of himself by continuing to take her bait.
Harris hits Trump where Biden couldn’t: on abortion.
Harris scored a notable victory early in the evening when the moderators brought up an issue she saw as one of her strengths: abortion rights.
“Let’s look at how we got here. Donald Trump personally selected three members of the Supreme Court with the intention of overturning the protections of Roe v. Wade. And they did exactly what he intended,” she said.
The vice president referred to the abortion bans and severe restrictions in many states as “Trump abortion bans” — blaming him for the stories of medical horror and trauma that have emerged since the national right to abortion was repealed in 2022.
Harris criticized abortion bans without exceptions for rape or incest, which were passed after Roe was overturned. “Understand what that means — a survivor of a crime, a violation of their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens next with their body,” she said. “That is immoral.”
“I think the American people believe that certain freedoms, particularly the freedom to talk about your own body, should not be created by the government,” she continued.
Harris’ response, which was both passionate and detailed, stood in stark contrast to the way President Joe Biden, during his one debate against Trump before withdrawing, raised the issue with the Republican nominee.
When asked about abortion — believed to be the issue where the Democratic Party has the biggest advantage going into the upcoming election — Biden confusingly changed his answer to immigration, an area where Republicans appear to be stronger.
“Look, there are so many young women who have been, including a young woman who was just murdered, and he went to the funeral. And the idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in, to talk about that. But here’s the deal. There are many young women who are being raped by their in-laws, by their, by their husbands. Brothers and sisters, by — it’s just ridiculous,” Biden said at the time.
Harris spokesman Ian Sams said after the debate that the abortion exchange was well-received by voters in key states that participated in dial tests. Voters judge candidates’ performance in real time by dialing up or down depending on how they feel about what the candidate is saying.
“Her responses in the abortion exchange were very high-pitched,” Sams said. The only more testing moment, he said, was when Harris responded to Trump’s question about her racial identity by reiterating that she wants to bring Americans together.
Trump occasionally — very occasionally — hits his target
At both the beginning and end of the debate, Trump was able to focus on the economy and immigration to attack Harris. Given that both campaigns are primarily trying to define the new-to-the-campaign Democrat rather than redefine Trump, the former president’s advantages on these issues have helped him stay neck-and-neck with Harris in the polls.
“She’s been there for three and a half years. They’ve had three and a half years to close the border, they’ve had three and a half years to create jobs,” Trump said in his closing statement. “Why haven’t they done it?”
On the economy, Harris pivoted, arguing that her plans for the future — including increased child benefits and expanded housing — were stronger than Trump’s tariff plans, which she sought to frame primarily as an effective tax increase on American families. On immigration, she attempted to use her own version of her boss’s famous line about Rudy Giuliani.
“He’s going to talk a lot about immigration tonight, even though that’s not the topic that’s being discussed,” Harris said.
Neither response is likely to be effective enough to erase Trump’s advantages, but it could close the gap.
Trump pretends to distance himself from the right-wing psychosphere – but does it in a bad way
During the debate, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from his right-wing allies, including those behind plans for a possible second Trump administration ― and even from his own vice presidential nominee.
When Harris brought up the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, a concept drawn up by conservative policymakers, including many of Trump’s closest advisers, as an outline for a second Trump term, the former president pretended to know nothing about it.
“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said. “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it. I’m not going to read it.”
(At least 140 former Trump aides worked on the Project 2025 agenda, according to CNN.)
In a discussion about abortion, Trump refused to answer whether he would veto federal legislation banning abortion nationwide. ABC host Linsey Davis pointed out that his own vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance said Trump would veto it. Trump then threw Vance under the bus.
“I honestly haven’t talked to JD about it,” Trump said.
But despite his best efforts to distance himself from his conservative allies, Trump has shown time and again that he is swimming in the deep end of the right-wing swamp.
He claimed that Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity “debunked” the fact that he said there were “very fine people on both sides” after a white supremacist killed a counter-protester with his car in Charlottesville, Virginia. (They have not debunked this.)
When Trump was looking for a world leader to support him, he pointed to Hungarian Viktor Orban, a favored autocrat of the far right.
The one sentence that sums up Trump’s absurdity
If there was one moment that best captured how frustrated and deranged Trump seemed throughout much of the debate, it was when Trump repeated the unfounded and racist rumor that Haitian migrants were in Springfield, Ohio, eat cats and dogs. (The debate moderators have debunked this claim.)
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people are eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people who live there. This is what’s happening in our country,” Trump said, repeating the wild smear campaign that helped popularize his running mate.
That wasn’t all: “Now she wants to perform transgender surgeries on illegal aliens who are in prison,” Trump said of Harris, mixing several forms of GOP fear-mongering into one absurd sentence.
Trump was clearly in fine form on Tuesday, exposing himself to embarrassing moments and crude statements that Harris can use to discredit herself in campaign ads and future debates.
The 45th president has a history of unbridled debate moments during his three presidential campaigns — and they are hard to forget. But the contrast Tuesday was made even starker by Harris’s steadfastness and her ability to stay on message.
The moderators have finally struck back
The debate moderators, Davis and David Muir, calmly fact-checked Trump during the debate, debunking his lies about abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy and other false statements.
It was a reversal from the first debate hosted by CNN, where moderators did not conduct live fact-checking.
Trump was not happy.
“I thought the moderators were very unfair. It was basically three against one,” Trump told reporters in the spin room after the debate.
