Kamala Harris won the debate. If he’s tough, Donald Trump will debate her again. | Opinion
Tuesday night’s debate was a real chance for the presidential candidates to discuss the actual issues and move past the memes about things like crowd size, couches, childless cat ladies and, new this week, cats being eaten by Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio.
ABC and CBS called that last item “baseless,” by the way, while other outlets called it “false” — after Donald Trump raised it as a concern in a 90-minute debate with Kamala Harris that covered a number of issues. When ABC moderator David Muir said the Springfield city manager actually found “no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community,” Trump replied, “We’ll find out.”
It’s the kind of thing that turns many voters off about Trump — amplifying untruths in casually dismissive and cruelly dehumanizing ways — and it’s the kind of thing that could cost him an election only eight weeks away that current polling suggests is a toss-up.
That falsehood wasn’t the only one Trump fixated on Tuesday. He once again discussed the 2020 election (which he lost, legitimately) by insisting it was stolen in Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania (it wasn’t, Trump’s team lost more than 60 legal challenges nationwide.)
Harris countered Trump’s big lie on Tuesday night by using one of the TV showman’s old “The Apprentice” catchphrases against him: “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so let’s be clear about that, and clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that.”
Going into what was billed as the “most consequential moment of this campaign,” the two candidates’ camps sought to set low bars for their leaders to clear: Harris had to elaborate on the issues, and Trump had to stick to them.
Ask anyone but the most partisan Trump supporters, they’ll probably say Harris won the debate. She didn’t do so without some missteps of her own. She didn’t directly answer some questions, including the first — are Americans better off than they were four years ago when President Joe Biden and Vice President Harris were elected?
If her answers were light on specifics, they were light years better than Biden’s in the disastrous June debate with Trump that sped up concerns about his health and led him to exit the race 24 days later.
As he did in the June debate, Trump made more than 30 false claims on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Harris not only had a greater command of the issues, she was commanding on the stage, especially on foreign affairs she would address as the first female commander-in-chief. Her answers on Ukraine and Russia and Israel and Hamas had nuance and depth whereas Trump’s approaches to both complex wars amounted to “Trust me. I’m tough.”
Harris said she had met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy five times and would stand by him. Trump wouldn’t say if he wanted Ukraine to win its war with Russia.
Harris said a Trump White House would leave Russian President Vladimir Putin “sitting in Kiev (the capital of Ukraine) with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.” She added, “And why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”
Eat you for lunch. Trump repeatedly said he was tough, but it was Harris who showed she was Tuesday.
The truth in this truncated race is that most onlookers have already picked a side. They love or like or loathe or will ultimately stomach one candidate more than the other. That means it will either be turnout or the typically disengaged that determine this race.
For Trump to win, he’ll have to focus more on his own economic proposals than on crowd size and cats in Ohio. For Harris to win, she’ll have to offer more specifics on her policies and her policy changes. Memes are certainly easier to digest than complex domestic or foreign policies, but let’s hope the election hinges more on the meaningful stuff.
And let’s hope there’s another debate to dig more deeply into these issues. After their first debate, Harris said she’s ready for a second. If Trump is truly tough, he’ll accept.