The much anticipated TV debate on Tuesday between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump may not have had quite the same drama as June’s encounter between Trump and Joe Biden, following which the sitting president withdrew from the race. But it was a significant moment nonetheless.
Democrats had been unsure about the untested Harris, but she showed that she had her rival’s measure, dealing a series of telling blows. She successfully needled a defensive Trump, provoking undignified rants, personal abuse, bizarre tangential riffs, and ever-more extravagant lies as he strayed from territory like the economy where, polls suggest, he might just have the upper hand.
The increasing evidence that the 78-year-old’s growing incoherence is also age-related was wisely left unstated by Harris. Trump attempted unsuccessfully to show political inconsistency in what he called a “Marxist” rival, but wandered from conspiracy theories about immigrants to jibes about crowd sizes, denials that he had inherited wealth, theories about pets being eaten, and false claims that a Democratic governor had condoned executing babies after birth.
After a nervous start when Harris rushed to set out her economic programme, emphasising tax support for small businesses, she moved confidently to the issue of abortion, one her campaign sees as a key vote winner after the 2022 US supreme court strike-down of Roe vs Wade. A defensive Trump struggled to claim that he was against a national ban, that all he was doing was handing back to states the power to legislate on the issue – a power many are taking with relish to enact local abortion bans.
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Trump returned repeatedly to claims that the country was awash with illegal immigrants, blaming them for “soaring” crime rates (in reality they are declining in many areas ) and preparing the ground for claims that the current election is about to be stolen by illegal voter registration. To the certain disappointment of campaign aides, he repeated unsubstantiated social media claims that Haitian migrants are stealing household pets in Ohio to eat them. Unwilling to use her debate time answering patent falsehoods, Harris laughed as the moderator rubbished the story.
And he evaded an effective Harris retort that he had blocked the passage of a bipartisan border control bill.
Europeans will scoff, while many fellow citizens will be bewildered, at his claim that Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán, “one of the most respected men”, had said the world needed Trump back as president. On Ukraine, asked if he wanted it to win the war, Trump conjured up the threat of a third world war.
That Harris ended the debate by calling for a rematch before the election spoke volumes. Unsurprisingly, Trump was non-committal.