Yes, the moderators of ABC’s debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were egregiously biased in favor of Harris. Yes, Harris recycled patent lies about Trump without the slightest pushback from the referees—that Trump has embraced the supposedly infamous Project 2025, that he supports a national abortion ban, that he called the anti-Semitic and racist demonstrators in Charlottesville in 2019 “fine people,” that he refused leases to black would-be renters. (The New York Times lauded the ABC team as a “model for real-time fact-checking.”)
But a low-information voter who, incredibly, still has not made up her mind about the election could easily decide for Harris on the basis of Tuesday’s debate. Trump put all his worst traits on display—his narcissism, his gratuitous nastiness, and above all, his penchant for using hyperbole as a substitute for argument.
Conservative commentators have been busy collecting examples of ABC’s shocking partiality. The following set-up, from the worst offender of the two moderators, David Muir, is particularly hilarious in its sycophantic delivery to Harris of a soft pitch over home plate:
[Trump] said he didn’t say that he lost by a whisker. So he still believes he did not lose the election. That was won by President Biden and yourself. But I do want to ask you about something that’s come up in the last couple of days. This was a post from President Trump about this upcoming election just weeks away. He said, “When I win, those people who cheated,” and then he lists donors, voters, election officials, he says “Will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, which will include long-term prison sentences.” One of your campaign’s top lawyers responded saying, “We won’t let Donald Trump intimidate us. We won’t let him suppress the vote.” Is that what you believe he’s trying to do here?
Gee, will Harris respond: “No, Trump is merely signaling that he wants to restore transparency and trustworthiness to the electoral system?” Unlikely.
But Trump was the architect of his own downfall. The one piece of advice he clearly absorbed was to make immigration the central theme of his indictment of the Biden–Harris regime. (Indeed, it would have been hard to ignore that advice, since conservative pundits had hammered the point ad infinitum.) Unfortunately, he absorbed the lesson too thoroughly. His efforts to wrench every topic back to the theme of immigration became tedious. And his doing so only increased the sense that his thought process is disjointed and non-consecutive.
The following passage is a Trumpian trifecta: exaggeration, insult, and non-sequitur:
She’s a Marxist. Everybody knows she’s a Marxist. Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics. And he taught her well. But when you look at what she’s done to our country and when you look at these millions and millions of people that are pouring into our country monthly where it’s I believe 21 million people, not the 15 that people say, and I think it’s a lot higher than the 21. That’s bigger than New York state. Pouring in. And just look at what they’re doing to our country. They’re criminals. Many of these people coming in are criminals.
No modern progressive politician is a true Marxist; our coddled leftist pols are too dependent on the largesse of America’s tech entrepreneurs and of Hollywood celebrities to consider the abolition of property. There is no evidence that Harris’s father influenced her anodyne Democratic embrace of redistributionism. To call Harris a “Marxist” is to invite incredulity.
Mass low-skilled Third World immigration is indeed an existential threat to this country’s identity and cultural cohesiveness. But the instinct to duck those sensitive cultural questions in favor of exaggerated claims regarding immigrant crime and terrorism—an instinct shared by most of the conservative press—is a mistake. Despite the recent influx of shockingly violent Venezuelan gangsters, there are not “many, many millions of criminals” coming across the border, as Trump repeatedly claims. The academic Left is correct for once: most illegal aliens come to work, not to steal or even to collect welfare. (That fact does not make their presence here a net benefit or even merely innocuous.) Trump, however, repeatedly stated that crime was “way down” in the rest of the world because other countries had rounded up their criminals and had “given them to [Harris] to put into our country.” If there is a study out there making the empirically complicated case that crime is down internationally because of illegal immigration to the U.S., I am unaware of it. It is implausible on its face. The literally untrue claim that Third World leaders are handing over their criminals to Harris may be written off as acceptable poetic license.
Trump does not need his inflated rhetoric about millions and millions of immigrant criminals. One rape, one murder, one robbery are too many from people who should not have been in the country in the first place. In his June debate with President Biden, Trump brought up the recent rapes and murders of females by illegals and named the victims. Inexplicably, he failed to do so here. Instead, he leaned repeatedly on this week’s swamp meme about pet-eating immigrants in Springfield, Ohio:
And look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk—not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.
Other than demonstrating that Trump remains an avid consumer of social media, this line of argument didn’t accomplish much. He was setting himself up for rebuttal from a moderator, who invoked a denial from Springfield’s city manager that such pet-icide was going on. Trump’s only defense was that he had seen the claim on television: “Well, I’ve seen people on television . . .The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. . . . But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.” That settles it, then. (Trapping wild birds, for which there may be more solid evidence, is a different matter than grilling someone’s Fluffy.)
After the assassination attempt on Trump and what was then thought (naively) to be his “iconic” raised fist, many conservative commentators celebrated the return of manliness to the public sphere. That celebration was as premature as the belief that the assassination attempt and Trump’s instinctive response to it had sealed the election. If the current electoral landscape was unforeseeable, so was Harris outfoxing Trump during the debate. She showed a Machiavellian vigor that exposed him as unmanfully controlled by his emotions.
Harris set her traps to escape her greatest vulnerabilities: her policy flip-flops and the Biden open border. Moderator Muir gently asked Harris why the administration had waited “until six months before the election to act” on the border surge. Harris initially responded by invoking the allegedly tough border security bill that she and Biden supported and that Trump, in her telling, sabotaged because he did not want the border problem to be solved on Biden’s watch. Harris has told this false narrative many times before; it should have been easy for Trump to discredit it. The bill was not tough: it allowed thousands of illegals to continue crossing each day without consequences, triggering enforcement only when a very high threshold of illegal entries was reached. But Harris took Trump off her trail with a sabotage that he walked right into:
And I’ll tell you something, he’s going to talk about immigration a lot tonight even when it’s not the subject that is being raised. And I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch.
This moment was closely-scripted and well-rehearsed. The phrase—“he’s going to talk about immigration a lot tonight even when it’s not the subject that is being raised”—while true, was no longer apt since Trump had already been dragooning immigration into unrelated topics. No matter. Like a matador waving his cape to redirect the bull’s horns from his torso, Harris waved the red flag at Trump: “You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
Trump faced a choice. Ignore the bait and dive into Harris’s phony claim about the border bill, or resurrect his dreary obsession from the 2016 election regarding his crowd sizes. Hmmm . . . which course would he take?
First let me respond as to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back.
Then, still ignoring the overhyped border bill, he brought in his theme of cat-eating immigrants. Even that brief return to immigration was short-lived, however. The virus was eating away at his brain and he could not conquer it: “As far as rallies are concerned, as far—the reason they go is they like what I say. They want to bring our country back. They want to make America great again. It’s a very simple phrase. Make America great again.”
Amazingly, Trump walked again into the same trap, set under the same conditions: Harris being confronted on her worst vulnerabilities. Moderator Linsey Davis had asked: “Vice President Harris, in your last run for president you said you wanted to ban fracking. Now you don’t. You wanted mandatory government buyback programs for assault weapons. Now your campaign says you don’t. You supported decriminalizing border crossings. Now you’re taking a harder line. I know you say that your values have not changed. So then why have so many of your policy positions changed?”
Harris dodged and lied but then loaded up the Trump goad-o-gun: “As it relates to my values, let me tell you, I grew up a middle-class kid raised by a hard-working mother who worked and saved and was able to buy our first home when I was a teenager. The values I bring to the importance of home ownership knowing not everybody got handed $400 million on a silver platter and then filed bankruptcy six times.”
Would Trump hit her hard and in detail on fracking and the preposterous Green New Deal? Nope. Though it is easier to understand Trump’s impulse to defend himself here, every moment spent building himself up is a moment not spent dismantling Harris. “Well, first of all, I wasn’t given $400 million. I wish I was. My father was a Brooklyn builder. Brooklyn, Queens. And a great father and I learned a lot from him. But I was given a fraction of that, a tiny fraction, and I built it into many, many billions of dollars. Many, many billions. And when people see it [sic] they are even surprised. So, we don’t have to talk about that.” True.
When Trump returned to the main issue—Harris’s flip-flops—he muddied the force of that issue with dubious embellishment, piled on top of the usual puzzling sentence construction. “Fracking? She’s been against it for 12 years. Uh, defund the police. She’s been against that forever. She gave all that stuff up, very wrongly, very horribly. And everybody’s laughing at it, okay? They’re all laughing at it.” What is Trump referring to here? Who is the “everybody” who is laughing “at it?” Impossible to say.
Whether consciously or not, Trump was trying to use the same goading tactics against Harris as she used against him. He repeatedly claimed that Harris and Biden were being “laughed at”—for the thin-skinned Trump, a fate nearly worse than death. By now, however, his coherence had reached a low ebb. “But when this weak pathetic man that you saw at a debate just a few months ago that if he weren’t in that debate he’d be running instead of her, she got no votes, he got 14 million votes, what you did, you talk about a threat to democracy. He got 14 million votes and they threw him out of office. And you know what? I’ll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can’t stand her.”
Harris let the taunt pass.
Trump’s inability to focus allowed Harris to get away with her most infuriating deception of the evening: That it is Trump who is using “race to divide the American people,” as opposed to Biden–Harris, who want to transcend identity politics: “You know, I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us. And we don’t want this kind of approach that is just constantly trying to divide us, and especially by race. . . . I travel our country, we see in each other a friend. We see in each other a neighbor. We don’t want a leader who is constantly trying to have Americans point their fingers at each other.”
This was sickening. Biden and Harris have made a constant theme of white Americans’ enduring “systemic racism.” In a 2020 address, Harris claimed that systemic racism “seeps into every part of American life.” After the murder verdicts against Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for George Floyd’s death, Harris said that the Floyd incident showed the “racial injustice” that keeps the U.S. from “fulfilling the promise of liberty and justice for all.” As California attorney general, she enacted policies that presumed that the criminal justice system was permeated by racial bias. The Biden administration constantly hires on the basis of race, not merit; it appoints federal judges on the basis of race, not jurisprudential excellence; the federal science agencies continue to privilege race over scientific capability in the award of research grants.
Trump brought up none of that. Instead, he let himself be diverted by Harris to a tangential point regarding the “Central Park Five”—five juvenile delinquents said by activists and the media to have been falsely accused of a horrific rape and assault in Central Park:
This is the most divisive presidency in the history of our country. There’s never been anything like it. They’re destroying our country. And they come up with things like what she just said going back many, many years when a lot of people including Mayor Bloomberg agreed with me on the Central Park Five. They admitted—they said, they pled guilty. And I said, well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately. And if they pled guilty—then they pled we’re not guilty. But this is a person that has to stretch back years, 40, 50 years ago because there’s nothing now.
Trump then swiveled to generalized non sequiturs:
I built one of the greatest economies in the history of the world and I’m going to build it again. It’s going to be bigger, better and stronger. But they’re destroying our economy. They have no idea what a good economy is. Their oil policies—every single policy—and remember this. She is Biden. She’s trying to get away from Biden. I don’t know the gentleman, she says. She is Biden. The worst inflation we’ve ever had. A horrible economy because inflation has made it so bad and she can’t get away with that.
Trump’s penchant for clear untruths is such that he recycles howlers from one venue to the next. He botched the abortion discussion generally with his inadequate explanation of the very real advantage of returning abortion policy to the states. He failed to rebut Harris’s horror stories about would-be parents unable to attain an unwanted but medically necessary abortion. But it was Trump’s claims about the legal consensus against Roe v. Wade that were the most astonishing: “Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote.” Trump made the identical claim during his debate with Biden. We will give him the benefit of the doubt and stipulate that when he refers to “every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative,” he means every Democratic legal scholar, and not every Democrat generally. But even with this stipulation, the claim is absurd on its face. To be sure, when Roe was first decided, a liberal academic here and there suggested that the opinion lacked a constitutional basis. But since then, criticism of Roe has been confined to the conservative legal commentariat. In the academy at large, Roe has been sacralized into gospel truth.
Few viewers will know whether Trump’s claims regarding Roe’s legal reception are true. But among those who do know, such falsehoods undermine whatever credibility he has on more serious issues.
Trump’s closing statement started out promisingly. He was unwontedly succinct in making the case that he should have stressed all along:
So, she just started by saying she’s going to do this, she’s going to do that, she’s going to do all these wonderful things. Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for 3 1/2 years. They’ve had 3 1/2 years to fix the border. They’ve had 3 1/2 years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t she done it? She should leave right now, go down to that beautiful White House, go to the capitol, get everyone together and do the things you want to do. But you haven’t done it. And you won’t do it. Because you believe in things that the American people don’t believe in.
So far, so good. But then Trump adds in fictions concocted in his own imagination: “We’re being laughed at all over the world. All over the world, they laugh, I know the leaders very well. They’re coming to see me. They call me. We’re laughed at all over the world. They don’t understand what happened to us as a nation.” The chance that “leaders” are visiting and calling Trump to express their derision about Biden is zero. Victor Orban and Jair Bolsonaro? Maybe. But other Western leaders? They loathe Trump for his defiance of borderless, cosmopolitan globalism and his refusal to continue bankrolling NATO while other Western nations get a free ride. They are most certainly not seeking out Trump to complain about Biden’s leadership.
Trump then limped over the finish line: “I rebuilt our entire military. She gave a lot of it away to the Taliban. She gave it to Afghanistan. What these people have done to our country, and maybe toughest of all is allowing millions of people to come into our country, many of them are criminals, and they’re destroying our country. The worst president, the worst vice president in the history of our country.”
The received wisdom that it is wrong for Trump or any other politician to speak apocalyptically about “American carnage” or American decline is usually wrong. If the facts warrant such a diagnosis, so be it. But in this case, Trump’s concluding negative assessment lacked the rhetorical force to compensate for the missing, if overrated, “positive vision” that politicians are exhorted to embrace.
Harris, by contrast, ended on phrases of uplift, however trite, however saccharine, however empty: “The only thing I ever asked them, are you okay? And that’s the kind of president we need right now. Someone who cares about you and is not putting themselves first. I intend to be a president for all Americans and focus on what we can do over the next 10 and 20 years to build back up our country by investing right now in you the American people.” Arguably, there is as much falsehood in these tired formulae as in Trump’s more extravagant boasts. But that falsehood is harder to rebut, since it is subtler and more systemic. Harris thus capped a performance that, whatever its truth value, was unexpectedly focused and nimble, outmaneuvering the perennially scowling Trump. Whether Trump can gain mainstream coverage for a belated presentation of the devastating case against Harris remains to be seen.
Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images