Harris Had the Force of a President, Goading the Worst Out of Trump

In any presidential campaign where Donald Trump is a candidate, anger is going to have a central place at the table. Trump’s anger can take many forms, from snarky bullying to raging-bull frothing. In the three debates he had with Hillary Clinton in 2016, she had no idea how to deal with him. She tried rising above his anger, dancing around it. She looked weak as a result, as though she wasn’t willing to confront it. And in the first presidential debate of 2024, Joe Biden was revealed to be such a broken branch of a candidate, weakened by age, that Trump, in his canniness, was smart enough to hold his anger (mostly) in check. He stood back because he knew that Biden was destroying himself.

But in tonight’s debate with Kamala Harris, the anger equation became a whole new thing. Trump was angry right out of the gate — angry at migrants, angry at the Democrats, even as he tried to offset his wrath with his peculiar theory of tariffs, which he seems to regard as financial windfalls handed out by Santa Claus. Yet there was a factor in the debate that Trump wasn’t counting on. And that was the anger of Kamala Harris. To put it in Trumpian terms: It was a beautiful thing.

Harris started out a bit shaky, launching into the same talking points (the $6,000 child tax credit, etc.) that she had used to anchor her CNN interview. She has a wonkish side, and my fear, in the opening minutes, was that she was going to come off as rather bureaucratic and neutral — as, indeed, she did on CNN, and as too many Democratic presidential candidates of the last 40 years have (Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, Hillary).

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Harris the prosecutor showed up, loaded for bear. It’s not just that she made her arguments with lawyerly relentlessness. She spoke with a steady outrage, a force, an almost lyrical anger, waving her hands around like a conductor. And the place the anger came from was ironic indeed. For she could never have been this angry in a presidential debate if Trump himself hadn’t been in his mode of fulminating demagogic fury. Harris, in fact, fed off his anger, locking into it almost as if the two candidates were dueling weapons systems. Michelle Obama, in her famous quote, said, “When they go low, we go high,” but the problem with that strategy in the Trump era has been that Donald Trump has a genius for going low and making it look like he’s telling the dirty truth that everyone else wants to avoid. That’s a key to his power.

So Harris didn’t simply “go high.” She got onto Trump’s angry wavelength and said, as they used to say on “Celebrity Deathmatch,” “Let’s get it on.” And when she did that, it made Trump even angrier. He was flabbergasted; she was fighting him on his own take-no-prisoners terms. And the angrier he got, the more he started to take on the role that Joe Biden did in the previous debate: the man who inadvertently reveals himself as not competent to be president.  

Trump, sounding more than ever like a broken record, seemed to have exactly two issues, because he kept bringing them up regardless of what the question was. He had immigration, which always came down to his evocation of a dystopian horror thriller in which migrants are stealing your jobs, committing violence, destroying the “fabric” of the country. And he had how “great” the economy was under his own watch — a lie fueled, with obvious opportunism, by the fact of our current inflation, which Trump exploited the way that any politician would.

But Harris, confronting his canards, was more than just the voice of sanity. She dressed him down. She glared at him and gave him verbal slaps. She called Vladimir Putin “a dictator who would eat you for lunch.” She said of the 2020 election, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people.” And you could see it starting to work on him when she talked about his rallies, and about how the people who showed up for them would start leaving out of boredom.

This is hitting the narcissist-bully where he lives. She was goading him, poking his weak spot. And he took the bait. When a presidential debate has any influence on the outcome of an election, it often boils down to one line, one key pugilistic punch (“There you go again”). But in this case, the line that may resonate for the next few months didn’t come from Harris; it came from Trump himself. He was talking about how the migrants are guilty of cooking and eating your cats and dogs, and he said, picking up on a viral “rumor” about the town of Springfield, “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Trump might have lost the election in those five seconds. Because for a moment, at least, he sounded like he was out of his mind.

It turns out that the angrier Trump gets, the choppier his thought patterns are. That’s why, in major sections of the debate, he began to sound like the “Saturday Night Live” parody of himself. It was the “weave” as word salad, with Trump taking free-associational leaps in logic, and making statements so extreme (“If she’s president, I’m pretty sure Israel won’t exist two years from now!”) that the deranged hyperventilating quality of it all is what most people will take away. The case he made for himself on the international stage boiled down to, “Viktor Orbán is a friend of mine! And so is Putin!” Would you want to belong to a club that had these two as members? It was the perfect set-up for Harris’s lacerating observation that Trump, true to his word, would end the war in Ukraine in a heartbeat…because he would hand the whole country over to Putin.

But even as Harris got Trump to reveal himself at his most bullying and nonsensical, none of that would have mattered had Kamala herself not projected a force that was, in a word, presidential. She had true authority. She had a vital quickness. She had empathy. She had concrete plans for the central issue in America: how to rescue the middle class. True, she had to finesse the awkwardness of her flip-flops on several major issues, notably fracking. She’s a politician — which is to say, she’ll make moral compromises to win. (No one who wins doesn’t.)  

But most of all she had passion. She had a kind of brainy fire. This is the X factor that too many Democratic presidential candidates have not had. And in the debate, it just built. You could feel it take wing during the extended discussion of the abortion issue. She tore through Trump’s lies, ridiculed the preposterous notion that Democrats support abortion after a baby is born, and made the human case for reproductive rights with a fervor that was wrenching and inspiring.

From that point on, you could feel Harris dominating the debate. She set the tone; she set the terms. And as Trump got angrier and angrier, lowering those eyebrows into a look of pure hate, you realized that she had gotten to him. Trump’s anger, let’s not deny it, has been the source of his power from the beginning. But this was not his transgressive pompadored-rock-star-from-hell showbiz anger. He sounded like a frazzled doomsayer, and she set him up to sound like that. His anger, by the end, seemed to be describing the world that he actually preferred to live in. And Kamala Harris’s righteous rejection of Trump’s seething dystopian narcissism is destined to echo through the next few months. Let’s be clear: Harris’s own clear-eyed anger is something a candidate can’t fake. It’s something she can’t script. But you know the fire of a leader when you hear it.