Kamala Harris was as perfect in a debate as ever, and Donald Trump – who doesn’t understand parody – came as close to self-parody as he can get. Harris laid out the bait repeatedly, and Trump couldn’t resist taking it, spinning through a maze of gibberish about the size of his crowd, the Central Park Five, and pet-eating migrants, all designed to distract from the ready-made answers he had prepared. These usually came later; first, before almost anything else, and after a slightly nervous start from Harris, whatever momentum Trump might have gained was immediately lost when he tried to answer an inevitable question about women and abortion. That was it.
For over two years – since Roe v. Wade was overturned by a Supreme Court more interested in your feelings than your health care – women have been waiting for a clear, convincing answer to the simple question: Who decides what happens to your body when you’re pregnant? On Tuesday, Harris gave that answer flawlessly. It was long overdue.
One reason it felt like such a special relief is that President Joe Biden spat out a horrific rhetorical hairball in the infamous June debate when he spoke about the fall of roe: “I have Roe v. Wadethat had three trimesters,” he hesitated. “The first time is between a woman and a doctor. The second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And the third time is between the doctor – I mean it would be between the woman and the state.” On this point he was kind of right – abortion as it is in Roe, is a question of doctors’ rights. But it was by no means a satisfactory answer for the women who suffered the consequences of Dobbs in states across the country.
The third question of the night in Tuesday’s debate gave Trump a chance to explain his previous incoherent evasions when it came to which abortions are legal and what kind of abortion bans he would support. The moderator, ABC News anchor Linsey Davis, ended the questioning with a simple question: “Why should women trust you?”
Trump answered the question in the way he always does today: with two lies. The first is the now-famous lie that Democrats support abortions “in the ninth month” and also support “executing babies after birth.” Before Harris could answer, Davis stopped the lies: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after birth,” she said, before giving Harris a chance to answer in more detail.
Harris was also tasked with answering Trump’s second lie, which was more subtle but more stupid. Abortion has nothing to do with women, as he put it, but with the “legal scholars” who get to decide what women need. Trump repeated his well-known parody that “for 52 years they’ve been trying to Roe v. Wade to the states” and that “every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue brought back to the states where the people can vote.” The word “woman,” by the way, appeared nowhere in his answer, because in his imaginary construction of the issue, the imaginary “scholars” decide for the rest of us. (So, the scholars and “the genius and heart and strength of six Supreme Court justices.”) In other words, Trump’s answer to the question why women should trust him was, quite literally, that “scholars” and the Supreme Court would decide—and they left it to the states to decide. So trust Trump!
Harris’ answer made it clear who loses because her bodily autonomy has been relocated “to the States” after Dobbs:
There are Trump-imposed abortion bans in over 20 states that criminalize doctors or nurses from providing medical care. In one state, they face life imprisonment. Trump’s abortion bans do not even make exceptions for rape and incest. And you have to understand what that means. A survivor of a crime, of an injury to her body, does not have the right to decide what happens next with her body. That is immoral. And you don’t have to give up your faith or your deeply held beliefs to agree with that: The government, and Donald Trump certainly should, should not tell a woman what to do with her body.
Then she explained what Trump’s supposed legal scholars and hand-picked Supreme Court zealots never wanted to understand:
You want to talk about what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, have a miscarriage, are denied treatment in the emergency room because the doctors are afraid she’ll go to jail, and she bleeds to death in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12 or 13 year old incest victim forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.
You see, in his 2025 project, there would be a national abortion monitor that would monitor your pregnancies and your miscarriages.
When asked if he would oppose a national ban on abortion, Trump did not answer. When asked why his running mate JD Vance had announced this, Trump said he and Vance had not discussed it. The impression was that the issue was not even worth a discussion between running mates; it was best left to the “scientists” and the “courageous” Supreme Court.
Harris’ response was to paint a still life of American womenDobbs– a snapshot of the people whose lives were destroyed and decimated by the former president and his handpicked Supreme Court judges, even though they never really cared about their dignity or autonomy:
There is not a woman anywhere in America carrying a pregnancy to term who asks for an abortion. That doesn’t happen. It’s an insult to the women of America. And understand what happened under Donald Trump’s abortion bans. Couples who pray and dream of starting a family are being denied IVF treatments. What’s happening in our country is that working people, working women who work one or two jobs and can barely afford child care anyway, have to travel to another state, get on a plane and sit next to strangers to get the medical care they need. They can barely afford it. And what you’re doing to her is unconscionable.
And for millions of us it was finally: “Oh my God, Finally, the right answer, delivered convincingly and passionately, without apologies or prevarication. Harris put it this way: “The majority of Americans believe in a woman’s right to decide what to do with her own body. And that’s why Americans voted for freedom in every state where this issue was on the ballot, red states and blue states alike.”
There is a strong minority of American voters who are so enamored with Donald Trump that they take great comfort in his solipsism: If Donald Trump says Haitian immigrants in Ohio are feasting on pets, it must be true. If Donald Trump says there would be no war in Ukraine today if he were president, it must be true. If Donald Trump says every single American expert, Republican and Democrat alike, thinks our most intimate health decisions should be voted on by random members of state legislatures, it must be true. For these voters, Trump’s answers on abortion must feel like reassuring reminders that Big Daddy knows everything and that Viktor Orbán has his back if there are any lingering doubts.
But feeding a whole lot of Americans, and the majority of American women, debunked lies about executing live babies, and then blinding them with the claim that they shouldn’t make decisions about miscarriage treatment or fertility because the “scientists” and the “courageous” judges wanted their state legislators to make decisions for them, is not exactly reassuring. It’s a tactic so weak it conveys contempt. In the end, it feels like Trump is saying, I’ve had eight years to prepare for this debate question, and all I’ve been able to manage is that you’re invisible to me.
The contrast was underscored by perhaps the most riveting moment of the debate. In her closing remarks, Harris laid out a leadership philosophy for Americans trying to understand who she is for the first time: “I started my career as a prosecutor. I was a district attorney. I was an attorney general. A United States senator. And now vice president. I’ve had only one client. The people. And I’ll tell you, as a prosecutor, I never asked a victim or a witness, ‘Are you a Republican or a Democrat?’ The only thing I ever asked them: ‘Are you OK?'”
Donald Trump doesn’t care whether You are OK, because he only cares about He is fine. He is unable to imagine a world outside his own weird, smoky, pet-eating inner hellscape. He never could. On Tuesday, Harris told millions of American women who have been serially insulted by Samuel Alito and their state legislators and then, in Trump’s staged response, not even deemed worthy of being addressed as a “you,” that they were seen and that their experiences mattered. Harris looked into the camera and said simply that when your needs and demands and basic human rights are urgent and life-changing, it is not enough to be handed off to another Big Daddy. And that moment won the Debate.
