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 beat him need only encourage his worst instincts.
As Trump muses about the 2020 election, making outlandish claims or teasing personal grievances, he’s not focusing on areas like the economy and immigration, where voters sometimes give him an edge.
Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign clearly tried to get Trump to go off script in front of a national audience and get him to agree to have his microphone muted during the two rivals’ ABC News debate on Tuesday — a change from Trump’s. President Joe Biden on June 27.
Harris didn’t succeed in that — each candidate’s microphone remained muted while the other spoke — but he found plenty of other ways to trigger Trump’s bad habits. On this and many other issues, the debate was an undisputed success for Harris, who has at times faced doubts about his unique speaking abilities.
The turning point came in the half hour when Harris set a trap for Trump, which he walked right into, predicting that he would bring up immigration without prompting throughout the debate and mocking him for rallies where he discusses fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. . He even said that people leave his rallies early from “exhaustion and boredom.”
“The only thing you don’t hear him talking about is you,” he said as he addressed the audience. “You don’t hear him talk about your dreams and your needs and your hopes. And I’m telling you, I think you deserve a president who really puts you first.”
Trump couldn’t resist the chance to defend the size of the crowds at his rallies, a recurring fixture of his.
“People don’t go to his rallies, there’s no reason to go. And the people who go, he busses and pays them,” he said without justification. “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.
He also managed to bring up perhaps his weirdest immigration line of the night — a completely unsubstantiated racist rumor about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio — effectively cementing his position on his immigration-related outbursts.
The conversation set the tone for the rest of the conversation. Harris’ main theme was that he won’t be bothered about helping working families and that Trump can’t be trusted to do the same. Trump never regained his footing and embarrassed himself by continuing to take his bait.
Harris hit Trump where Biden couldn’t: on abortion.
Harris scored a notable victory early in the evening when the Moderators brought up an issue considered one of her strengths: abortion rights.
“We understand how we got here. Donald Trump handpicked three members of the Supreme Court with the intention of overturning Roe v. Wade. And they did exactly what he intended,” he said.
The vice president called abortion bans and tight restrictions in many states “Trump’s abortion bans” — blaming the stories of medical horror and trauma that have surfaced since the 2022 repeal of the national abortion law.
Harris condemned abortion without exceptions for rape or incest, which were accepted after Roe’s retraction. “Understand what that means – a survivor of a crime, having his body violated, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to his body next,” he said. “It’s immoral.”
“I think the American people believe that certain freedoms, especially the freedom to discuss one’s own body, should not be granted by the government,” he continued.
Harris’ response, both impassioned and detailed, was a far cry from how President Joe Biden, during one of his anti-Trump debates before he drops, made the case against the Republican nominee.
When asked about abortion — which is supposed to be the issue where the Democratic Party has the biggest advantage in the upcoming election — Biden confusingly shifted his response to focus on immigration, an area where Republicans are seen as stronger.
“Look, there are so many young women who have been involved, including a young woman who was just murdered, and she went to a funeral. And the idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming into the country, to talk about it. But here’s the deal. There are a lot of young women being raped by their in-laws, by their spouses. Brothers and sisters, it’s absolutely ridiculous,” Biden said at the time.
Harris spokesman Ian Sams said after the debate that the abortion debate went well with voters in battleground states taking part in the polls, where voters rate candidates’ performances in real time by moving a dial up or down depending on how they feel. the candidate says.
“His responses on the abortion debate were very high,” Sams said. The only trying moment, he said, came when Harris responded to Trump, who questioned his race, by repeating that he wants to bring Americans together.
Trump occasionally—very occasionally—hit his mark
Both at the beginning and end of the debate, Trump was able to zero in on the economy and immigration to attack Harris. With both campaigns primarily looking to define the Democrat, who is still new to the campaign trail, rather than redefine Trump, the former president’s interests on these issues have helped keep him neck and neck with Harris in the polls.
“He’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 closing remarks. “Why haven’t they done that?”
On the economy, Harris countered by arguing his future plans — including increasing child tax credits and expanding housing construction — were stronger than Trump’s tariff plans, where he focused on crafting equally effective tax increases for American families. In immigration, he tried to use his own version of his boss’ famous text about Rudy Giuliani.
“He’s going to talk a lot tonight about immigration, even though that’s not the topic,” Harris said.
Neither response is likely to be effective enough to reverse Trump’s gains, but it might close the gap.
Trump pretends to distance himself from the right-wing psychosphere – but poorly
Throughout the debate, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from his own right-wing allies, including those behind plans for a possible second Trump administration — and even his own vice presidential nominee.
When Harris brought up the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, which conservative policy thinkers, including many of Trump’s closest advisers, outline for Trump’s second term, the former president acted as if he knew 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 on purpose. I’m not going to read it.”
(CNN reports that at least 140 former Trump employees worked on Project 2025.)
During the abortion debate, Trump refused to answer whether he would veto a federal law banning abortion. ABC Moderator Linsey Davis pointed out that her own running mate, JD Vance, said Trump would use his veto. Trump threw Vance under the bus.
“I didn’t discuss that with JD, to be honest,” Trump said.
But for all his efforts to ditch his conservative allies, Trump consistently revealed that he was swimming in the deep end of the right-wing quagmire.
He claimed that Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity “dismissed” the fact that he said there were “very fine people on both sides” after a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Va. murdered a protester with his car. (They did not refute this.)
When Trump was looking for a world leader to name to support him, he pointed to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the far-right’s favorite autocrat.
1 sentence that summed up Trump’s absurdity
If there was one moment that best illustrated how angry and agitated Trump appeared throughout much of the debate, it was when Trump repeated the baseless and racist rumor that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eat cats and dogs. (The moderators of the discussion refuted the claim.)
“In Springfield, they eat dogs. People eat cats. They eat the pets of the people who live there. This is what’s happening in our country,” Trump said, echoing the wild smear his running mate helped popularize.
That wasn’t all: “Now he wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison,” Trump said of Harris, cramming several GOP fearmongers into one absurd sentence.
Trump was clearly in tears Tuesday, opening up to awkward moments and vicious sound bites that Harris can use to make him look bad in campaign ads and future debates.
The 45th in the history of the presidency is an undeniable debate moments during his three terms as president – and they are hard to forget. But Tuesday’s contrast was enhanced by Harris’ consistency and his ability to stay on the post.
The moderators eventually pushed back
Debate Moderators Davis and David Muir calmly fact-checked Trump during the debate, debunking his lies about ninth-month abortions and other false statements.
It was a reversal of the first CNN-hosted debate, which did not include direct fact-checking by moderators.
Trump was not pleased.
“I think the moderators were very unfair. It was basically three to one,” Trump told reporters after the debate.
