Sn addition to sticking two pencils up his nose and muttering the word “wibble,” Trump’s performance on the debate stage on Tuesday night was never going to definitively prove to those still undecided that he is unfit for high office. Unlike Biden’s disastrous turnaround two and a half months ago, chaos is part of Trump’s appeal — and when his mind is jumbled, it means nothing more than business as usual. And yet, even for Trump, some aspects of his debate performance in Pennsylvania on Tuesday were so close to the brink of disaster that the next day, what seemed most astonishing was not Harris’s good performance but that so many seemingly sane people were still campaigning for their wacky opponent.
There was a strange sense in the lead-up to the debate of how high the stakes were and how entertaining the encounter would be. I wondered what Harris’s nerves were like – how one handles them in such a unique situation. In the first moments of the debate, the vice president did seem nervous. But she calmed down, and after about 15 minutes, it started to happen: While Harris’ tightly controlled anger rose to a point, Trump became confused, his lips pressed together and his eyes sunk into his head.
A reference by Harris to her support from Trump’s alma mater, the Wharton School, and some high-ranking Republicans, including – confusingly for liberals! – Dick Cheney, prompted a barrage of “she”s from Trump. She, she, she, he said – always a sign that he is losing his composure against a female opponent. “She copied Biden’s plan and it’s like four sentences, like ‘run spot run’!” And off he went into his downward spiral.
The next day, consumers of the right-wing American media were partially informed of Trump’s performance, but it was laden with apologies. Even this very mild admission of Trump’s weakness, however, was a departure from the Murdoch press’s unreserved support in 2016. The pro-Trump New York Post admitted that Trump had been “unsettled” but complained about the unfairness of the debate’s moderators on ABC News. (They rebuked Trump for his lies about immigrants eating American pets and Democrats legalizing infanticide – there were moments Tuesday night when the task of debating Trump resembled trying to debate a copy of the National Enquirer.)
There was a lot of downcast commentary on Fox News after the debate. Brit Hume said sadly of Harris, “She came out of it in pretty good shape.” The best Sean Hannity could manage was that the “real loser” was ABC. Jesse Watters said, “That was tough,” explained that most viewers wouldn’t believe “any of those people won,” and noted, “All the memorable lines were Donald Trump’s.” Which, of course, was technically true. (Aside from the pet-eating thing, my two favorite Trump lines were “Venezuela on steroids” and “I told Abdul, don’t do that anymore!” — an absolute slam from Trump on the subject of how he showed the Taliban.) Then Trump himself appeared on the network to call the debate “rigged” — a sure sign that, no matter what the competition was, he had indeed lost.
On X, eugenics fan and the world’s richest man Elon Musk admitted that Trump had had a bad night and that Harris had “exceeded most people’s expectations.” This was grudging, but had the advantage over the reaction of other Trump supporters of actually acknowledging reality. He added, “We’ll never get to Mars if Kamala Harris wins” – a fact that, assuming Musk himself is planning that trip, would actually be a detriment to a Harris victory.
Meanwhile, the right-wing British press has made various watered-down attempts to whitewash Trump’s failures. After the debate, for example, the Daily Telegraph claimed that it was “difficult to crown Harris the winner, given that she has said so little about her own agenda”. Was it really that? Was it really so difficult to pick a winner between the woman we can be fairly certain will not refuse to accept the decision if she loses in November and the guy shouting “Execute the baby!” and citing Viktor Orbán as a character witness? And yet the Daily Mail’s conclusion was: “Pathetic, both of them”.
Given the evidence at hand, these moments of cognitive dissonance become increasingly difficult to process. Because the truth, of course, is that Trump looked like a madman on Tuesday night. As he grew angrier, he slumped his shoulders, twisted his body, and certain familiar phrases cropped up in his speech: “It’s not me, it’s her”; repeated use of the word “terrible.” Of Biden, referring to Harris, he said, “He hates her; he can’t stand her.” For my money, though, his craziest moment was none of that, or even the pet thing, but when he went on a ramble about the horrors of solar power and then said, “Have you ever seen a solar power plant? By the way, I’m a big fan of solar power.” During some of these rants, Harris actually managed to look bored despite the enormous pressure of the moment.
Much has been made of how calm she was, and how her smirk—the New York Post disapprovingly called it her “dismissive laugh”—goaded Trump into deeper incoherence. But I think the best parts of the debate were when Harris got angry, too. As a candidate, she had the problem of being difficult to read, and she has been accused of speaking too formulaically. But in the abortion part of the debate, you felt she went beyond the rehearsed remarks, and you could feel the engine of her conviction revving.
She was angry—she was seething, even—when she said a woman who had a miscarriage had “bleeded to death in a car in the parking lot” because an emergency doctor might have been too scared to treat her. I felt the same pang of genuine indignation when she told Trump, in reference to Russia’s expansionist ambitions, “You worship strongmen instead of caring about democracy.” It felt like she was on the verge of taunting him by saying, “You want to kiss Putin on the lips, that’s what you want.”
And then her language changed, moving into territory generally favored by Republicans rather than Democrats. “This is immoral,” Harris said of Trump’s decisions about women’s bodies. It was a remarkable moment, this use of a word that could equally apply to all well-informed Americans and their allies in Britain who continue to excuse Trump even after so long.
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Emma Brockes is a columnist at the Guardian
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