Two lines come to mind right away, moments after watching Harris and Trump walk off the stage from tonight’s debate. The first is, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit”. The second, which is much more salient to tonight’s event, is “You can fool some people sometimes, but you can’t fool all the people all the time”.
Oddly enough, both lines apply to Trump, who spat and blustered his way through tonight’s debate, and who constantly pivoted back to the same few points – seemingly the only ones that he has, and which are not worth repeating here – no matter how many times Harris called them all lies and proved it.
I’ll hand it to Trump on one score: he was disciplined, alright. Harris repeatedly called him a ‘disgrace’ (one of Trump’s favorite words in the past), told Trump he was a laughingstock to world leaders, called him a liar, and even at one point visibly held back from calling him something stronger (“this…[strained look]..former president”). He smiled and grimaced, sure, but then went right back to his increasingly screechy points at every opportunity, totally ignoring the insults.
On the other hand, this discipline did not prevent him from interrupting, literally after every one of Harris’ statements, and eating up a good deal of free time to repeat himself yet again – to the growing irritation of the moderators, and eventually of Harris, who finally did the same thing once before the moderator shut them both down.
I’ve watched plenty of these debates in my lifetime. Sometimes a candidate dominates another with a zinger (think Reagan’s “there you go again” – which Trump tried himself tonight – he also sneeringly used Harris’ own line “I’m talking” on her), but I’m not sure this was that kind of debate. Even under withering fire Trump has no capacity to be humiliated. But just the same, he sure as heck was ridiculed and belittled at times tonight.
More importantly, however, my main impression is that any doubts that Kamala Harris is incredibly smart and skilled just got laid definitively to waste. So much for the conservative pundits who crowed in the past few days about how they were sure, in the words of one, that “she isn’t capable of rational thought”.
Uh, no. DA’s usually have pretty encyclopedic minds for this kind of information. So, Trump’s smear that Harris is ignorant or dumb just isn’t going to wash anymore. It’s the opposite of the last debate, where we found out that what Trump had been saying about Biden was at least somewhat demonstrably true.
In this case it’s totally false, and you have to be a diehard, rigid ideologue not to admit that after watchin Harris’ commanding performance this evening.
In point of fact, she showed herself capable of assaulting Trump with a deep reservoir of quotes and citations from other people condemning him, as well as statistics and facts. Over and over again she turned an issue on Trump with this simple formula: “let’s understand how we got here”, followed by a cogent precis of the history of Trump’s actual actions, words and decisions on the subject at hand. Remember that there were no notes. She unloaded a barrage of well thought out verbiage on Trump that left him visibly fuming and sputtering on about our failed country and the “millions of criminals coming in and destroying the country”.
She dazzled him with brilliance, while telling him to his face that she and a lot of other people who worked directly with him are baffled by his bullshit.
Speaking of which, even I was surprised when Trump, with a straight face, invoked the clearly fictional story being circulated by his vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are stealing and eating peoples’ pets – and he even got that wrong, first saying ‘dogs’, when the rumor itself concerns cats. When the moderator protested that they had spoken to the County Supervisor in the area concerned and been assured that the story wasn’t true, Trump objected that he had “seen it on TV”.
I wasn’t the only one who was surprised – Harris, who allowed her face to register a kind of bemused/disgusted disbelief when listening to Trump speak (not to mention a look of utter contempt when speaking to him) – seized on the moment, after laughing at him, to point out that this kind of talk is exactly why so many Republicans are lining up against him as a danger to national security, and why people are sick of him and his rhetoric.
Along these lines, Harris not only successfully planted plenty of repeated statements describing her plans, values and policies throughout her responses, but also made excellent use of many rhetorical devices like “I believe”, “I have a plan” “We have to turn the page”, “We won’t go back”, etc. that worked to tie together her statements in the best musical style of speech, using repetition and rhythm to keep our attention.
There was one line in particular that Harris repeated many times tonight, a simple formulation that stands against everything Trump represents, and she may have said it more than any other line: “We all have so much more in common than what separates us”.
I sure hope she’s right.
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