From the courtroom to the debate hall, Vice President Kamala Harris the prosecutor tried to put former President Donald Trump on defense during their first and potentially only debate before November’s election, something President Joe Biden could not.
Harris prosecuted her case against Trump on Tuesday in Philadelphia in deeply personal terms, provoking him to be a less presidential version of himself by alluding to his crowd sizes and claiming world leaders were laughing at him. At the same time, Harris did not emerge unscathed, appearing perturbed by Trump parroting her “I’m speaking” line from her 2020 vice presidential debate and later telling her to be quiet.
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Harris and Trump, in their first-ever meeting, cross-examined each other on the economy, immigration, and abortion policy for 90 minutes at the National Constitution Center during the ABC-hosted debate after an awkward Harris-initiated initial handshake.
Harris tried to portray herself as a positive, forward-looking candidate as she appealed to undecided and independent voters and as Trump sought to tag her to Biden in the hope his record will drag her down, in addition to her flip-flopping on policy positions she adopted during her 2020 Democratic primary campaign, the last time she ran for president.
“Donald Trump actually has no plan for you, because he is more interested in defending himself than he is in looking out for you,” Harris said during her opening remarks, introducing her economic plan and criticizing Trump’s for creating an in-kind “sales tax.”
“That’s just a soundbite they told her to say,” Trump replied. “She doesn’t have a plan. She copied Biden’s plan, and it’s like four sentences. Like, ‘Run, Spot, Run.'”
Harris went on to remind Trump she was now the 2024 Democratic nominee, saying, “You’re not running against Joe Biden running against me.”
But since 2020, the last time Trump ran for president, his own record now includes the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, the Supreme Court’s repeal of abortion precedent Roe v. Wade, and his civil and criminal prosecutions, all of which Harris litigated during the more Trump-dominated debate.
“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” Harris said. “We cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election.”
“I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” Trump responded. “They say I’m a threat to democracy — they’re the threat to democracy.”
Trump, who mentioned Harris’s “Marxist” economist father, would also not commit to blocking a federal abortion ban, conceding he did not “discuss it” with Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH). Last month, Vance told NBC News Trump would veto an abortion prohibition.
Ed Lee, director of Emory University’s Alben W. Barkley Forum for Debate, Deliberation, and Dialogue, admitted he was surprised Trump raised Hungarian Prime Minister’s Viktor Orbán endorsement.
“However, it is consistent with his desire to be seen as strong and decisive,” Lee told the Washington Examiner. “While Harris should be in a better position by talking more about the bipartisan immigration bill and the ‘Trump tax,’ she controlled a lot of this debate by getting Trump to talk about issues unrelated to inflation. She was clearly getting under his skin. The interruptions and dismissal of the moderator did not look good for him.”
Both campaigns were concerned about what repercussions Harris’s gender and race as the first minority woman to be a major party’s presidential nominee would have on the debate, especially after Trump told the National Association of Black Journalists in July that Harris’s embrace of her blackness was political opportunism. Some of his interactions with 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton during their debates, including calling her a “nasty woman,” became viral moments that election cycle too.
To that end, Trump was helped by the debate’s time limits and muted microphones, as well as having no one in the room to pander to, though he did promote a disputed story that illegal immigrants are eating pets in Ohio unprompted. At times, both his and Harris’s complaints about one another could be overheard, despite the muted mics, with Harris using the television split-screen to convey her emotions, while Trump stopped looking at her completely.
But Trump was not helped by the moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, who concentrated on Trump’s policy positions, including on foreign policy and Obamacare, and took time to fact-check the former president. Yet they did push Harris on her flip-flops.
“This wasn’t a debate between Trump and Harris,” Republican strategist Cesar Conda told the Washington Examiner. “It was a debate between Trump and the ABC moderators. It was a draw between Trump and the Harris-ABC moderator team.”
Before the debate, the Harris campaign downplayed expectations for the vice president, describing Trump as being “ready” for his seventh presidential debate, the most of any candidate in modern history, regardless of polls indicating respondents anticipated their principal to “win.”
“He is a showman who won his most recent debate back in June, and we know he has been practicing even more and preparing harder than ever before,” a Harris campaign spokesman told the Washington Examiner. “His constant lies and the lack of fact-checking by the moderators make him difficult to prepare for, and his team has insisted on muted microphones to keep him as disciplined as possible.”
But the Harris campaign was confident the vice president could underscore the choice between herself and Trump, specifically comparing her “new way forward” approach to politics to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Trump again distanced himself from the conservative think tank’s policy proposals during the debate.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign emphasized what was at stake for Harris with the debate as polls, including last weekend’s New York Times-Siena College survey, demonstrate that her summer momentum may be slowing as the season transforms into fall, with her aides having protected her from the press and unscripted moments so far.
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“Those poll results underscore that after spending over $250 million on ads over just seven weeks coupled with the most positive stretch of media coverage, Harris and her allies have failed to convince voters that Harris doesn’t own the failures of the last 3.5 years and that she still isn’t the radical liberal who has embraced kooky ideas throughout her career,” Trump campaign co-managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles wrote in a memo.
After the debate, Harris is scheduled to travel to New York for Sept. 11 memorial services before heading to North Carolina on Thursday and Pennsylvania on Friday. Simultaneously, Trump will be in Arizona on Thursday and California on Friday.