"THEY'RE EATING THE DOGS!"

Question: Would it have been better for Trump if he had simply slept through the entire debate with Kamala Harris?

Nation’s dogs ask: “Why the fuck did you make me watch this fuckin shit?”

Before Tuesday evening, I had not watched a political debate [sic] in nearly 30 years. I’m assuming I watched at least part of the 1996 Clinton-Dole debate; if not, it was 1992.

I fired up a livestream of Harris-Trump in the hopes of witnessing a historic, LIVE, meltdown from the Orange Turd. Trump held things together in the opening minutes (relatively speaking), but Harris needed to poke him only a tiny little bit to send him careening off the rails and into the weeds. Diaper Don’s face turned a brighter shade of orange, he scrunched his features into a permanent scowl, and he began YELLING his comments. It was as predictable as tomorrow morning’s sunrise, but it was also fantastic.

Harris dominated Trump from every angle, on every point, for every minute of time. They appeared from opposite sides of the stage, walking on at the same time. Harris moved briskly and confidently, Trump slowly shuffled towards his podium with his head down. Harris had decided beforehand that she would shake his hand. Trump tried to avoid her by going behind his podium. Harris forked right and nearly cornered Trump against the stage curtain. Trump petulantly refused to attend Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, so they had never met. “Kamala Harris,” she said loud and clear, extending her hand. “Let’s have a good debate.” Trump was flustered, and muttered, “Nice to see you, have fun.” (She did — and Trump “unraveled like a shitty sweater”.)

Harris is a woman, so it was crucial that her performance be perfectly calibrated for the entire broadcast. It was a near-impossible threading of a needle. Be strong, but not overbearing. Be substantive, but not wonky. Note Trump’s constant idiocy, but don’t react too much. Be passionate and caring, but don’t get angry. Make sure the audience understands Trump’s overall selfishness, callousness, and criminality, but pick your spots. Facial expressions are a minefield, so do some, but not too much.

She did it all — and outside of some early nervousness, she made it look easy. No one’s performance in a debate can be perfect, and I can’t think of anything she should have done better. Her talking points smoothly alternated between the future and the past. Whatever the topic was, she exactly where to go and just what to say. She eased into her personal digs at Trump and they were not simply insults. She worked them into her policy comments. And because Trump has the self-control of a three-year-old (on his best day), he knew her barbs were coming — and he could not stop himself. He chased after every shiny object, he grabbed every baited hook, he tripped every wire, he fell into every trap, until he was raging, spittle flying out of his mouth, tossing off little insults at both Harris and Biden.

Trump mentioned Biden so often (he still talks publicly of his fantasy of Biden returning to the race), Harris had to remind him, “You’re running against me.” Once Trump was triggered, she knew he would never recover and she went back to emphasising her most important points.

She demonstrated how easily Trump can be manipulated — and tied that to the fact that most world leaders know he’s a joke, and they all understand that if you flatter him a little (say “you’re such a tough negotiator” in a semi-defeated voice, for example), he’ll do whatever you want. The KGB knew this about Trump in the late 1980s (Yuri Shvets, a former KGB major: “He was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery. This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality.”)

Trump could not even look at her. Not even once. What a spell Harris had him under, though that is also his doing by being so cowardly. Trump spent most of the night practicing his mug-shot face when he wasn’t stewing and seething, looking like he was being held prisoner. Harris, on the other hand, watched Trump quite a bit, often with a curious expression, as if to say, What in the world are you talking about?

It was more than a TKO. Did Trump land even one punch? If he did, I missed it. Everything he said was gibberish. He had no coherent statement on any topic, even the ones he brought up himself. He pinballed from topic to topic, often within the same sentence. Trump was not going to win any new voters no matter what he said. He hit that ceiling years ago. His only strategy was to bring Harris down. But he couldn’t do it. Instead, he lost control when she invited people to go to a Trump rally and observe how his constant whining forces people into an early exit (they absolutely leave early or fall asleep) and he never recovered.

Trump said he had nothing to do with January 6 insurrection. “I had nothing to do with that. . . . It wasn’t done by me, it was done by others.” Trump insisted that Nancy Pelosi was the mastermind behind the whole insurrection.

Trump was told he had to repeated hammer Harris with the line: “Why hasn’t she done it?” All the things she wants to do, she’s been VP for almost four years, why hasn’t she done it? . . . Trump finally snuck the line into his closing statement, after roughly 100 minutes of debate.

Afterwards, Trump was telling anyone in the Spin Room who would listen that he totally won the debate: “I’ve been told I’m a good debater. I think it was one of my better debates. Maybe my best debate.” On the phone to Fox: “We had a great night. We won the debate.” More: “I had a good time. I think it was out best debate ever. . . . We are getting great reviews.”

Trump also talked about the imaginary polls in his head:

We’re getting polls that show 92-6, 88-11, every single poll had me winning like 90-10 we had, uh, uh, C-SPAN at one point was at 80-20. We looked at one poll, it was 92-7. We had a 92% rating in one poll, we had an 86% rating in another, we had 77%, 90%, 60%, 72%, 71%, and 89%.

Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show commented: “Wow . . . those certainly were numbers. Is this what Trump did during his debate prep, memorize all the numbers between 70 and 98?”

Also from The Daily Show:

Trump, video clip: “They had a rigged show with somebody that maybe even had the answers. I mean I’ll be honest, I watched her talk and I said, you know, she seems awfully familiar with the questions.”

Klepper: “Okay, you think she was cheating because she seemed familiar with the questions. It’s a presidential debate — they always ask the same questions. It’s like being suspicious that someone knows all the words to Take Me Out to the Ball Game. How will you fix the economy, what’s your stance on abortion, do you promise not to overthrow the government — standard boilerplate debate questions. Meanwhile Trump seemed awfully familiar with the questions that nobody asked, like who’s eating all the cats in Springfield.”

Trump called for ABC to be shut down, have their broadcasting license revoked — because they had the nerve to fact-check a handful (four) of his most insane lies. Don’t like getting fact-checked? Don’t tell obvious lies. Most of Trump’s seemingly endless list of lies were not fact-checked.

Kevin “Jellyfish” McCarthy praised Trump’s performance and said he “controlled himself more than normal”. The CNBC hosts laughed in his face.

Because Trump is infallible, MAGA has been rooting around for things to blame. In addition to telling harris the questions beforehand and the biased moderators, Harris’s earrings were bluetooth devices that allowed her to receive talking points.

Harris called for another debate, but Trump has refused (for now?). The Harris campaign immediately began taunting Trump, saying his spirit animal is a “chicken”.

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Nostradumbass over here thinks (pre-debate) there’s a 0.001% chance that Trump loses his cool when provoked by Harris. That’s a 1-in-100,000 chance. That’s also the chance of him repeating those odds under oath in court.

Tim Dickinson and Asawin Suebsaeng, Rolling Stone: “How Harris Rattled Trump and Dominated the Debate”

In the debate spin room before the event, Trump campaign senior adviser Alina Habba signaled that Trump’s camp knew what was coming. Habba told Rolling Stone of Harris: “I think she will try to get under his skin.” But, she added, hilariously in retrospect, that her boss “doesn’t get easily rattled.”

Marc A. Caputo, The Bulwark: “‘Trump Blew It:’ Cat Scratch Fever on The Debate Stage”

Donald Trump had a plan for Tuesday night’s presidential debate. But then the cat, neither abducted nor consumed, got his tongue and talking points. . . .

It was all strategized in advance. There was just one problem: It required Trump to execute it. . . .

[P]rivately, Trump-world insiders told The Bulwark that they had worries about his chops and coherence on stage. . . . The failure to convert the rope-a-dope and the subsequent, frantic effort to clean up the debate performance left Trump sending mixed messages about whether he wanted to debate again, while supporters started scrambling.

Conservative groups pledged to head to Springfield to find instances of cat-eating there. Others offered up financial rewards for evidence.

Peter Wehner, The Atlantic: “Kamala Harris Broke Donald Trump”

I’ve been watching presidential debates since 1976 . . . I’ve never seen a candidate execute a debate strategy as well as Harris did. . . .

What Harris appeared to understand, better than anyone else who has debated Trump, is that the key to defeating him is to trigger him psychologically. She did it by repeatedly calling him “weak,” mocking him, acting bemused by him, and literally laughing at him. As he lost control of events, Trump became enraged, his voice bellowing into an empty room, his face not just orange but nearly fluorescent. Trump realized that his opponent—and not just any opponent, but a woman of color—was dominating him. And so even as Trump exploded, he was, like a dying supernova, shrinking before our eyes. . . .

Half an hour into the debate, Harris was not only in control; she seemed to be having fun. Trump looked desolate and furious. Harris made him see “matador red,” in the words of The New York Times’ Matt Flegenheimer. Trump never laid a glove on her.

Eric Lutz, Vanity Fair: “Kamala Harris Made Donald Trump Look Silly and Small at the 2024 Debate”

Donald Trump was upset. He was supposed to be talking about immigration . . . But his opponent, Kamala Harris, had just savaged his bizarre rants about Hannibal Lecter and brought up the fact that more of his followers seem to be leaving rallies early. . . .

“We have the biggest rallies,” he insisted, his voice getting louder, his speech getting quicker, breaking from the comparatively subdued tone he had tried to strike for the first stretch of the proceeding. . . .

When Muir pointed out that the [Haitian immigrants] lie had been debunked, Trump responded, breathlessly, that he heard it from “the people on television.” He sounded pathetic. Harris—who’d been squinting at him in disbelief, as she had much of the evening—just laughed. She’d brought out the real Donald Trump. . . .

He tried to look tough, to fearmonger. But as he spent the night hunched over his podium—his beady eyes glowering, talking loudly about something he saw on TV—he just looked desperate.

Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic: “Kamala Harris’s Secret Weapon”

The definitive image from last night’s debate is a very specific split-screen view of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. In the left frame, Trump is mid-monologue, lips pursed and gesticulating. Harris occupies the right box, clearly watching her opponent. She’s leaning back ever so slightly, her hand on her chin. On her face is something halfway between a grimace and an incredulous smile—a facial expression that many Harris supporters likely recognize as a universal, exasperated response to a Trump rant. . . .

While Trump seethed, Harris seemed amused. She offered righteous indignation while attacking Trump’s position on abortion, his love for authoritarian strongmen, and his bald-faced lies about immigrant crime. She effectively baited Trump numerous times—most memorably about crowd sizes at his rallies. . . . [S]omehow, Harris seemed most withering and effective in the moments when Trump was speaking—the moments when she was able to look across the stage and act almost as an audience barometer for Trump’s answers. Crucially, Harris didn’t come off as furious or offended as she listened to Trump’s lies. Instead, she looked at ABC’s cameras the way you might look at your spouse in the presence of an overserved relative who doesn’t realize he’s making a scene at Thanksgiving dinner.

Dahlia Lithwick, Slate: “Kamala Harris’ Face on Tuesday Was the Stuff of Legend”

[C]ritics almost immediately became obsessed with Harris’ face-management choices: “If she wants to win, Harris needs to train her face not to respond,” tweeted GOP pollster and aspiring face-trainer Frank Luntz. “It feeds into a female stereotype and, more importantly, risks offending undecided voters.” . . .

Harris fans of course begged to differ. The slow blink, the chin stroke, the quirked brow, the squinting, laughing eyes? This was the stuff of legend. It was a brilliant tactical attack on Trump’s ego. It was a self-meming performance of the face of every woman who has ever been forced to listen to a bunch of unreconstructed insanity spewing from someone who has unidirectionally failed upward.

Put aside for a moment Luntz’s implication that female political faces need to be trained, like small dogs or cucumber plants. There is no better proof that we still can’t quite define what we require of women in public life than that we demand that their faces be either vibrant and expressive or cold and dead. . . . [W]hat does it signify that Kamala Harris, who has—against all political odds—managed to produce a voice, a wardrobe, a head of hair, and a spouse that all elicit very little horror when displayed publicly, is nevertheless excoriated for the sin of having Too Much Face?

On the one hand, it’s more of the same simple misogyny that will forever move the goalposts on how women can behave in public office so as to soothe doubters who think they should stay out of the ring. But when the candidate was pitted against Donald J. Trump—whose only discernible remaining power lies in his ability to threaten and discomfit women—the critique that Harris somehow owed the public and the former president a kind of button-down blank receptivity and amiability is simply ridiculous. The assumption seems to be that Trump gets to lie about you, insult you, threaten and mischaracterize, and that—with microphones turned off by design—your political obligation is to smoothly accept it. . . .

It must be beyond maddening for a political actor to be summoned into a “debate” that is not really a debate, pitted against some frothing amalgam of WWE reenactor and Tasmanian devil, warned that your microphone will be muted while he is speaking, cautioned that he will be allowed to talk over you and the moderators, then be criticized for … blinking? At some point, hopefully soon, we may all come to recognize that while Donald Trump’s range of expressions exists in the almost invisible band between fury and petulance, other, regular human faces reflect the many thoughts, feelings, and expressions that human brains typically produce and that one small luxury of human existence is the power to show that to others. . . .

Harris’ face roamed free and far on Tuesday, and it was thoroughly warranted and frequently enjoyable. I think of her mobile, legible face as a satisfying call-and-response to Trump’s lifelong preference for female adulation and Botox. Women have faces. Their faces have expressions. If that was upsetting to you during Tuesday’s debate, you might be dismayed to learn that deep beneath our expressive faces lie thoughts, dreams, frustrations, and other markers of human agency. If a woman smiling freaks you out, imagine what happens when a woman votes.

Fred Kaplan, Slate: “Harris Exposed How Easy Trump Is to Manipulate. Dictators Have Known This for a Long Time.”

Many noted, after the debate, how readily Vice President Kamala Harris lured the ex-president into traps. All she had to do was push one of his buttons—to remark that the crowds at his rallies are bored, or that he inherited all of his wealth (then blew it in successive bankruptcies), or that world leaders laugh at him—and he exploded in paroxysms of fury, ranting over grievances, rambling down ratholes of conspiracy theories, thrown off course from the issues at hand.

What we were seeing was the flip side of how easily foreign heads of state, especially tyrants, manipulate Trump to their favor. All they have to do is call him “Sir” (as he often recites them doing in stories, some possibly true, most clearly fictitious), and he will eat poison right out of their hands.

“I like people who like me,” Trump has publicly said in several contexts, and the heads of every intelligence agency on Earth no doubt took careful note. “He respects me,” Trump once said of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He famously sighed that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un sent each other “love letters,” and, even now, years after the bloom faded, still beams, “He likes me.” At the recent Republican convention, he boasted—boasted—that the head of the Taliban called him “Your Excellency” . . .

After showing how deeply she could rattle him with the slightest personal insult, Harris turned the tables and spelled out how deeply others can win him over with the slightest compliment. “It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again,” she said, “because they’re so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favors.”

She claimed that if Trump wins in November, Putin would soon after be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, beginning with Poland . . . Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator, who would eat you for lunch.

Harris said all this while looking straight at Trump. . . . [I]t’s quite possible that Harris is the first person ever to say these things straight to his face.

Megan Garber, The Atlantic: “Kamala Harris’s Most Successful Power Play”

The rules [each candidate’s microphone would generally be muted while the other was speaking] were meant to ensure, among other things, equal air time. Predictably, Trump ignored them. He talked out of turn, again and again, forging ahead until ABC’s production staff relented, turning on his mic to let him have his say. . . .

Trump is a man of many words, but it does not follow that the words he speaks will be coherent, compelling, or true. On the contrary: They might be so unhinged that the only reply they deserve is a look of baffled incredulity. . . .

Harris’s reactions were fact-checks too. They denied Trump’s assertions the dignity of a check in the first place. They refused to take the former president at his word. They refused to normalize him or entertain his antics. . . . Her wordless responses were language by another means, eloquent in all they left unsaid. . . .

[H]er success was written on his face. Trump’s expression, at the debate’s outset, was frozen into a stoic glare. As Harris baited him, though—and as he repeatedly took the bait she offered—his composure frayed. He began grimacing and puckering and glaring. He seemed, at several moments, to lose control of his emotions. He seemed, indeed, to become a little hysterical—and appeared far from presidential.

Tim Dickinson and Asawin Suebsaeng, Rolling Stone: “How Harris Rattled Trump and Dominated the Debate”

The debate turned decisively when the questions turned to immigration — Trump’s wheelhouse issue, generally seen as a vulnerability for the Democrat. But Harris cleverly used the question to bait Trump.

Harris began the exchange, and opened by inveighing against Trump for killing a bipartisan immigration deal so he could preserve the issue to “run on.” But then Harris veered off topic. She curiously brought up Trump’s campaign events, inviting Americans “to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies, because it’s a really interesting thing to watch.” . . . [S]he took direct aim at Trump’s ego: “What you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” . . .

Harris immediately had Trump seeing red. When it was his turn to address the immigration question, Trump detoured . . . to address his hurt feelings. “First let me respond as to the rallies,” he said. “People don’t leave. My rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

Trump then jumped awkwardly into a racist, unfounded conspiracy theory about new immigrant arrivals in Ohio supposedly feeding on their neighbors’ pets . . .

The entire debate dynamic shifted after that, creating a debacle for [a seething] Trump. The former president fell into an angry, shouty mode of address . . . He directed his seething answers [at the moderators] . . .

Harris, by contrast, settled into her groove. She delivered her criticisms of her Republican counterpart by staring straight at Trump, repeatedly putting him on the defensive. And then she would speak directly to the camera, creating a sense of intimacy with viewers that wholly eluded Trump . . .

Alexander Sammon, Slate: “That Was Not a Joe Biden Debate”

Harris proved herself to be a more than capable messenger for the Democratic Party and an unflappable sparring partner in the face-off with the contentious former president.

Compared to Biden, the difference in style couldn’t have been more obvious. Harris was able to go on the offensive, attacking Trump on his record and his character. She was able to engage with and rebut his obvious falsehoods. She was—let’s just say it like it is—able to avoid looping, elliptical digressions, speak in short and complete sentences, and avoid major gaffes . . .

This was especially clear on the issue of abortion, arguably the chief political priority for Democrats in this election cycle and one that Joe Biden always approached from a very uneasy angle. . . . arguably, there are few senior Democrats worse suited to deliver a forceful message on the issue. . . .

When Trump ambushed Biden in June with the flagrantly false claim that Democratic abortion policy allows for a child to be killed after birth, Biden mounted little pushback. He was unable to clearly verbalize the connection between abortion bans and maternal mortality and the plight of rape victims. . . .

Harris was the opposite, as she has been on the stump since July. She wanted to talk about abortion and made clear that she was more confident as the party’s standard-bearer on that particular issue. In fact, her debate performance swung on that issue. After a somewhat faltering start on the economy, Harris found her footing talking about abortion and never looked back. . . .

Ben Mathis-Lilley, Slate: “Donald Trump Nailed It Tonight (Just Kidding)”

[Harris did not waste much time before her first attempt at] what regular people might call “easily tricking Donald Trump into talking nonsense.”

Well, that’s not entirely fair: Sometimes Trump did it entirely to himself. Next the moderators asked Trump about abortion, an issue on which voters widely agree with Harris . . . His best strategy would have been to say that he would leave the matter to the states and move on. Instead, he defensively insisted on repeating one of his strangest and most empirically untrue talking points, which is that a majority of the country’s voters . . . “wanted” . . . Roe overturned, and that overturning it was a “great service.”

This, in turn, set up Harris to describe some of the consequences for pregnant women who’ve suffered miscarriages in parking lots or been told to take their rapist’s child to term, and in an effective (and seemingly spontaneous) rhetorical twist, to ask if that’s what they “wanted.” . . .

During the immigration segment, she placed the world’s largest piece of cheese on a mousetrap when she said that people walk out of Trump’s rallies halfway through because they get bored of hearing him whine. . . .

He responded defensively, every time, at self-sabotaging length and with references to right-wing arguments that the average viewer probably didn’t understand. He referred to Capitol rioters as “we” and to the police who were defending the counting of electoral votes as “the other side,” and passed on a chance, offered by Muir, to admit he lost the election, arguing still that he can prove that fraud took place in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and other states where fraud did not take place.

Trump was hunched over and peeved throughout all of this, while Harris chuckled and stayed relaxed but dignified . . .

Harris’ job, as such, wasn’t just to remind viewers that they don’t like him, but that having him as president is an actively unpleasant and invasive experience, that he does not use the government to advance the general good . . . The challenge was to make him seem like the person that voters in a presidential election would be relieved to turn the page on, even though she is the one who currently helps run the country from the White House.

Nardos Haile, Slate: “‘I went to the Wharton School of Finance’: Harris getting Trump flustered makes for great TV”

[Harris stated:] “What the Wharton School said is Donald Trump’s plan would actually explode the deficit. Sixteen Nobel Laureates described his economic plan as something that would increase inflation by the middle of next year and would invite a recession.”

However, Trump responded, “I went to the Wharton School of Finance, and many of those professors — the top professors — think my plan is a brilliant plan. It’s a great plan.”

Katy Milkman, a Wharton professor, tweeted on X after the back-and-forth between the opponents, “Hi! Wharton Prof here. Show me the many colleagues who say Trump’s plan is any good? I count 0!”

Amanda Marcotte, Salon: “‘The same old, tired playbook’: Harris baits an aging Trump into being his grumpiest, weirdest self”

“I’m going to tell you on this debate tonight, you’re going to hear from the same old, tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in the first few moments of the debate. It was a response to Donald Trump’s first comments and she didn’t portray him as scary, so much as sad. . . .

Harris never said Trump, as a person, is too old to be president. She didn’t need to. He was glowering through pink-rimmed eyes under his combover, every inch the mean man everyone avoids at the retirement home. She even avoided the viral word of the campaign: “Weird.” But she didn’t need to say it because Trump kept saying weird things like, “I have been a leader on fertilization.” . . .

Old, weird, and tired: Trump knew those were the words he had to contend with going into the debate. Yet he couldn’t help but prove the charge. As practiced a liar as Trump is, he can’t hide who he is and how much worse he’s getting. He spent the debate vomiting out all the weirdest right-wing conspiracy theories as though he was a scowling human embodiment of an illiterate MAGA meme. . . . He sounded very much like a chatbot programmed to speak only in far-right phrases, except worse, because it’s shorting out. . . .

Harris, who has always nailed those “Jim in ‘The Office’“-style reactions, took full advantage. She spent much of the debate staring at Trump in disbelief, while he refused to even look in her direction. . . . The choice was visible on the split screen: Harris, the normal, competent politician; Trump is Gramps wandering in the streets without his pants on because he won’t take his medication. . . .

“People leave his rallies early, out of exhaustion and boredom,” Harris said at one point. It worked on two levels. First, it caused Trump to freak out. Second, it created a rare moment of national unity, as everyone can empathize with the almost physical need to leave any space that Trump is filling with his manic, endless blather. . . .

Harris didn’t just bait Trump into showing off how much age has degraded his already low levels of coherence. She also tied it to his anger and authoritarianism. . . .

After last night’s debate performance, hopefully, the questions about Trump’s basic brain functionality will grow even louder. One of the biggest issues with Trump is every trait he has and everything he does is terrible, paralyzing efforts to narrow down criticisms into something digestible. The Harris campaign made their choice to focus on how Trump is old and weird. . . . Now every garbled statement or odd behavior from Trump will reinforce her message. Luckily for her, Trump can no more stop acting weird than he can stop wearing orange makeup.

In addition to mopping the floor with Trump in the debate (it was slick with Trump’s flop sweat), Kamala Harris also received the endorsement of Taylor Swift, whose post, signed “Taylor Swift / Childless Cat Lady”, was sent to her 280 million followers. On Wednesday, more than 400,000 people visited vote-gov.

Sam Stein, The Bulwark: “Harris Managed To Do TV Better Than Trump”

Her demeanor was calm and professional. She didn’t seem to break character or get flustered. But she also didn’t seem oblivious to her surroundings. When Trump told a lie, she shook her head. When he told a real whopper, she smiled knowingly.

The defining image of the night will be the wide shots of the stage: a dour Trump—appearing joyless and increasingly agitated—never seemed to look at Harris once. She, by contrast, shifted her body to the right when he spoke, turning to him like a mother addressing a child in tantrum, or to look on confusedly as he went on a rant.

In the end, Harris beat Trump at the business of television, which is a remarkable achievement, and probably one that Trump will rue. For him, television is gospel. . . .

She and her aides went in with a plan to bait Trump into overreactions. And he took it—repeatedly fumbling debate sections that would have favored him (on subjects like immigration, inflation, and Afghanistan) to address sideshow topics that Harris tossed out like chum to a hungry shark (just how much was his inheritance???). . . .

He was unable to keep his focus or cool. . . . He called himself a leader on "fertilization." He glommed on to online MAGA’s fever dream that dogs are being eaten by migrants in Ohio. His closing remarks touched on energy policy in . . . Germany.

This was not savvy stuff. . . . The frustration was evident on Trump's face. As the night went on, he went from talking with cadence to something more akin to barking.

Will Saletan, The Bulwark: “The Narcissist Lost the Debate”

Donald Trump lost Tuesday night’s debate for many reasons. In theory, some of his mistakes could be fixed. Some Republican politicians are blaming his debate prep team and suggesting that officials in his campaign should be fired.

But Trump’s problem is bigger than a bad debate. He can’t fire the person responsible for his bad performance, because that person is himself. And he can’t repair his many bad answers, because those answers were driven by a fundamental defect: He simply doesn’t care about other people.

That’s what Kamala Harris exposed. She used the debate to speak to Americans. She told them how she would improve their lives. You can argue with her plans or her level of clarity about them, but at least she described those plans and addressed them to voters. She said Trump had no such plans. She accused him of focusing on himself, not on people’s daily concerns.

To rebut that accusation, Trump needed to set aside his ego and speak to viewers about how he would help them. But he couldn’t do it. Instead, he bragged about himself—which just proved Harris’s point. . . .

Again and again, Trump hurled insults and obvious lies . . . but offered no constructive ideas. Then, half an hour into the debate, Harris said something that really ticked him off:

“People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams, and your desires. And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first.”

The correct response to this accusation—if Trump were a normal human being or even a sensible politician—would have been to talk about people’s needs and dreams. That would have shown that the accusation of self-absorption was false. Instead, the first words out of his mouth were: “First, let me respond as to the rallies.” . . .

In foreign affairs, Trump offered no solutions. He said his charisma would cure everything . . . In Trump’s mind, the world’s tragedies are just another illustration of the greatness of Trump.

When the debate turned to health care, Trump came up empty again. Muir asked: “Tonight, nine years after you first started running, do you have a plan, and can you tell us what it is?”

“We are working on things,” said Trump.

“You still do not have a plan [after promising it for nine years]?” asked Muir.

“I have concepts of a plan,” said Trump.

Andrew Egger, The Bulwark: “A Man You Can Bait With a Tweet”

Over and over, Harris deployed the same formula. She’d answer a question from the moderators on her terms, hitting her marks and making the points she wanted to make. But along the way, she’d make a quick digression: dangling some shiny object for Donald Trump to fixate on.

And time after time, he couldn’t help but take the bait. The result: He was perpetually embroiled in rhetorical dead ends while she was already onto the next thing.

The first such moment may have been the most important, as it came during a segment on immigration—generally strong turf for Trump. Harris made an extended point about the bipartisan border security bill that fell apart earlier this year because Trump opposed it. But then she swerved: “I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies,” she said, noting that “you will also see people leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

The moderators then went to Trump. Here was his moment to uncork one on a bill he previously described as a “horrible open borders betrayal of America.”

“First let me respond as to the rallies,” Trump said . . .

On and on he went—and he wasn’t done there. . . . [H]e was rattled and angry enough that whatever disciplined message he'd planned went out the window. . . .

Incredibly, he then spent the rest of his allotted time for that answer circling back around on how great his rallies are. . . . This happened repeatedly throughout the night . . .

Doktor Zoom, Wonkette: “Five Times Kamala Harris Flawlessly Triggered That Idiot, By A Doktor Of Rhetoric”

Harris started off by crossing the stage to shake Trump's hand, which he wasn’t expecting . . .

Again and again, Harris found Trump’s weak points, and squeezed. On foreign policy, she used his own top appointed staffers’ words against him. . . .

Trump was left sputtering and insisting that he’d had the good sense to fire those lousy idiots he’d appointed in the first place . . .

A half hour in, Harris went for the heavy guns, hitting Trump right in his beloved crowd sizes, the measure of how much he is loved. That was too much for him, and he snapped into a state of sputtering rage that lasted the rest of the debate; that may have broken something, since in response he shot back not only by accusing Harris of paying people to come to her rallies, but then immediately segued to the fake Haitian immigrants-eating-pets story.

Evan Hurst, The Bulwark: “It’s Not Just That Kamala Harris Called Trump A Starf*cker For Dictators. It’s HOW She Did It.”

One of the most effective things Kamala Harris did to end Donald Trump last night — one of the things that triggered him earliest and most often — was the way she continually made fun of him and demeaned him directly.

To be sure, sometimes she would look at the camera and speak about him in the third person. Indeed, early on when she invited the American people to attend one of his rallies — so they could hear his weird dementia stories about Hannibal Lecter and windmills, and so they could sit in the seats of all the Trump supporters who got up to leave because they were bored — she did that fully in the third person.

That sent him into a tailspin he never found his way out of, as he defended his crowd sizes and started screaming at clouds about THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS, THEY’RE EATING THE CATS!

But it was really effective when she would start in the third person, then pivot to Trump and say to his face that YOU are being laughed at, that YOU are a disgrace, that everybody thinks YOU are a goddamned loser.

This was particularly powerful during the sections about Ukraine and foreign policy, in general, as Harris called Trump the starfucker for dictators he is, right to his face.

After moderator David Muir of ABC News tried to get Trump to say out loud that he wants Ukraine to win the war, and not the genocidal madman Putin he’s so in love with and indebted to — Trump would not — Harris took the opportunity to get right in Trump’s cowardly little face about how far up Putin’s ass he lives. . . .

She said twice that if Trump was president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv. And then she turned and said this is why our NATO allies are grateful you are not president. That Putin wouldn't be stopping in Ukraine, he’d be looking at the rest of Europe, starting next door to Ukraine in Poland, a NATO ally. And why don’t you tell 800,000 Polish Americans how fast you would sell them out for the continued privilege of giving Vladimir Putin his daily rimjob, for the sake of what you so pathetically think is a real friendship, with a dude who would eat you for lunch.

For a weak man like Trump, that was dagger after dagger after dagger.

You see, Donald Trump, despite being one of the most mocked and beclowned men on the planet, deserving of the least common courtesy and respect from his fellow man, surrounds himself by the most pathetic, dick-slobbering, try-hard yes men on the planet. He does this because he has to. Donald Trump does not have the self-esteem, the self-confidence, or the thick skin to even be around people who mildly disagree with him, much less people who openly tell him who he really is and what the world really thinks of him.

He cannot handle this. . . .

After Trump insisted that he had too won the 2020 election, Harris mockingly noted that he had been "fired by 81 million people." Talking about Trump in the third person, she added, "And clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that."

And then she turned to him. . . .

She reminded the American people how Trump piddles himself when he’s around Putin, how even weirdo fuckstick Kim Jong-un managed to get him hot and bothered. Then, turning, she said we all know these dictators are rooting for you, because they know you are easy to manipulate, because they know you are goddamn dumb as shit and emotionally needy as a motherfucker. And again, the line about how military leaders told her that you are a disgrace. . . .

History may look back on this debate as the thing that fully unraveled Donald Trump. If so, we have one woman to thank for it, and pretty soon, we're going to be calling her Madam President.

Also: Evan Hurst, Wonkette: “Eight Times The Moderators Were Mean And Hurtful To Donald Trump, Very Meanly, Very Hurtfully — And RIGGED and STOLLENLY.”