The News
PHILADELPHIA — Kamala Harris planted traps. For much of Tuesday night, Donald Trump stepped on them.
She overstated how much money the former president had been loaned by his father. “I wasn’t given $400 million,” he said. “I wish I was.” She warned that Trump would implement the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025: “That’s out there, I haven’t read it, personally.”
She urged viewers to attend a Trump rally, so they could watch bored people stream out; Trump, obviously irritated, claimed no one attended Harris’s rallies, then meandered into a false, viral story of migrants devouring pets in southwest Ohio.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats,” he said.
“Talk about extreme!” said Harris, with a laugh.
The first debate between Trump and his unexpected opponent was, at times, the antithesis of Joe Biden’s meltdown in Atlanta. Harris was often the aggressor, getting in crisp talking points that landed as planned, and spending less time than Biden bogged down in the weeds of her record and “opportunity economy” agenda. Trump didn’t get trapped in his thoughts, as Biden had, or leave as obvious an opening for Harris to exploit, but he struggled to make his own case consistently.
For most of the night, Harris executed a clear strategy. She invoked a fact from the Trump years that Democrats felt had been forgotten by voters since 2020, she said something that would set her opponent off, and then she used his familiar eruptions in response to urge voters to take the offramp on the Trump era.
The effectiveness changed depending on the question. Trump repeatedly spent time rebutting her instead of landing the lines Republicans wanted to hear: Harris’s abandonment of progressive ideas from her 2020 Democratic primary campaign, a constant theme in Republican advertising, and her active participation in Biden’s unpopular presidency Trump supporters grumbled afterwards that the moderators didn’t interrogate her enough on these topics more themselves.
“Kamala is VP RIGHT NOW,” Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene texted Semafor at the debate’s halfway point. “Why don’t they ask her why isn’t she doing all of these things she’s promising right now? But they won’t.”
But Trump even appeared to directly undermine that argument at one point: After his allies spent the week boasting that he would use the debate to tie her to Biden’s record, he claimed that there was a rift between the president and his vice president. “I’ll give you a little secret — he hates her,” he said.
David’s view
The risk of Harris baiting Trump was well-known before the debate, and much of what she said had been tested out on rally stages.
And it didn’t always work. A transition between two moments in the second half of the night — Harris citing accusations of racism from early in Trump’s career at length, then asking for the “belittling and name calling” to stop so they could discuss their economic plans, was jarring.
But Trump simply wasted more time than Harris, sometimes pining for the opponent he’d demolished in Atlanta; he wasted one of his last rounds discussing a House Republican report on financial payments to Biden family members. Harris stepped around follow-up questions designed to trap her in Biden administration mistakes or unpopular old views.
After the debate, surrogates for both campaigns were peppered with questions about Harris leading Trump into distraction.
“Look, this guy can’t stay focused on anything, which is what makes him very, very dangerous,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro told reporters. “He’s only thinking about himself, he’s not thinking about the American people.”
Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., accused Harris of spending the debate “trying to get under his skin, trying to do everything to get away from her own record.”
Democrats had prepared for Trump to name individual criminals who had been released into the country by Biden administration asylum policies, or put back on the streets by California laws. Some of them had starred in swing-state advertising campaigns.
But Trump never mentioned them, and repeatedly got stuck in a feedback loop of names and terms that required advanced courses in Being Online. How many viewers were aware of Germany’s disastrous move away from nuclear energy, when Trump said “Germany tried that and within one year they were back” to using fossil fuels?
Harris was far more strategic; Democrats thrilled when she boasted about the “the largest increase in domestic oil production in history,” a fact that Biden had struggled to ever deploy. Instead of rebutting each Trump reference to her abandoned 2020 views, she focused on fracking and gun buybacks.
“Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away,” she told Trump. “Stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.”
One question coming out of the night: Did Harris do enough to rebut a persistent and effective Trump attack line, that she was “weak” and unable to explain herself under pressure? Harris scoffed at Trump, looked at him as if she was embarrassed for him, and at one point crooked her hand under her chin to take in an unfocused answer.
Did that narrow Harris’s disadvantages when voters are asked who could best handle immigration and the economy? Maybe not, but a similar approach worked well for Hillary Clinton eight years ago, who polls showed winning their debates that year even as she lost the election.
In that cycle’s first debate, when both candidates were less personally popular than Harris and Trump are now, she suggested that someone “you can provoke with a tweet” shouldn’t be commander-in-chief. Harris suggested that Trump’s “temperament” and “confused” responses were a risk to everyone. It’s remarkable that this worked twice.
The View From Republicans
Trump’s supporters in Philadelphia acknowledged that the nominee spent a lot of time responding to Harris, but some said it had been effective. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who helped prep Trump for the debate, said that he’d “held the ball” for longer than the vice president, taking more speaking time and using it effectively.
“We thought that she would try to get under Trump’s skin; we didn’t know she would be so effective at getting under the American people’s skin,” said Gaetz. “I think she came across as caustic at times, and pretty unlikable.”
The View From Democrats
After struggling to spin away Biden’s debacle in June, Democrats celebrated Tuesday night.
“She is kicking his old nasty orange [peach emoji],” California Rep. Norma Torres told Semafor midway through the debate.
“Democrats are euphoric,” said North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, laughing when he was asked if he felt better than he did in Atlanta.
“I don’t think DT was ready for her,” California Rep. Nanette Barragan wrote in a text message. “The facts. Receipts.”
Shelby Talcott and Kadia Goba contributed to this story.