In Debate With Trump, Harris’s Expressions Were a Weapon
“Tuesday’s debate was expected to center on defining Kamala Harris. Instead, with words and with body language, she turned it into a referendum on Donald Trump.
Follow along with live updates and debate analysis on the Trump and Harris campaigns.
She turned to him with an arched brow. A quiet sigh. A hand on her chin. A laugh. A pitiful glance. A dismissive shake of her head.
From the opening moments of her first debate against Donald J. Trump, Kamala Harris craftily exploited her opponent’s biggest weakness.
Not his record. Not his divisive policies. Not his history of inflammatory statements.
Instead, she took aim at a far more primal part of him: his ego.
At his rallies, on his sycophantic social media network and surrounded by flatterers at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump is unquestioned, unchallenged and never ever mocked.
That changed over the course of 90 minutes in Philadelphia on Tuesday, when the woman who had never before met him succeeded, bit by bit, in puncturing his comfortable cocoon and triggering his annoyance and anger.
Ms. Harris questioned the size and loyalty of the crowds at his rallies. She said world leaders call him a “disgrace.” And she claimed his fortune was built by his father, recasting a business mogul who proudly boasts of being a self-made man as just another nepotism baby.
Then she stood by and watched, as Mr. Trump did himself a whole lot of damage.
In answer after answer, the former president reminded Americans of his role in so much of what many would rather forget: the deadly and devastating pandemic, his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, a bloody siege on the U.S. Capitol and the fall of Roe v. Wade. He lingered on his criminal charges and praised Viktor Orban, the strongman leader of Hungary. He defended a false claim that migrants in Ohio are eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats and recycled years-old anti-abortion attack lines that Democrats supported “execution after birth.”
In such a fractured and polarized country, it remains unclear how the lopsided debate may alter the 2024 presidential race. But the immediate reaction was telling: Mr. Trump led Republicans in attacking the moderators — the debate was “three-on-one,” he complained — while Democrats notched perhaps the most important endorsement of the election cycle with Taylor Swift.
“He is so easy to trigger,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Harris ally, said in the post-debate spin room.
Since her head-spinning ascension to the Democratic ticket in July, Ms. Harris has faced a race focused on her record, history and shifts in positions. But from the moment she crossed the stage to shake Mr. Trump’s hand, the Democratic presidential nominee made clear her intention to transform a night expected to be about her into a referendum on him.
She displayed a composure and tactical restraint that was palpable through the television screen. Equally palpable was his fury, which at times seemed to make him unable to even look at his opponent.
“She’s a Marxist — everybody knows she’s a Marxist,” Mr. Trump said when Ms. Harris accused him of coddling China during the coronavirus pandemic. “Her father is a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well.”
Ms. Harris looked at him with a condescending smile, performatively leaning in to hear more. He’s the former reality television star, but she clearly understood the power of the medium. Her expression was her rebuttal. And when her turn to speak came, she focused not on rebutting the attacks on her character and ideology, but on the far more politically potent issue of abortion rights.
Mr. Trump, she charged, would ban abortion nationwide and monitor women’s pregnancies to ensure they carried the baby to term. Already, current restrictions in some states, she told viewers, make no exceptions for victims of rape or incest.
“That is immoral and one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” she said.
Instead of attacking Mr. Trump as an existential threat to democracy, as President Biden so often did, Ms. Harris invited voters to judge the former president for themselves. She urged them to attend one of his campaign events, hear his references to “fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter” and his claims that “windmills cause cancer,” and watch his followers leave early.“
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