Short of sticking two pencils up his nose and muttering the word “wibble”, Trump’s appearance on the debate stage on Tuesday night was never going to prove, decisively, to those on the fence, that he is unfit for high office. Unlike Biden’s disastrous turn two and a half months ago, chaos is part of Trump’s appeal – and if his thoughts are garbled, it signifies nothing beyond business as usual. And yet, even for Trump, aspects of his debate performance in Pennsylvania came so close to the edge on Tuesday that the next day what seemed most astonishing wasn’t that Harris had performed so well but that so many apparently sentient human beings were still shilling for her unhinged opponent.
Heading into the encounter, one had the strangest sense both of the height of the stakes and also of the sheer entertainment value of the encounter. I found myself wondering about Harris’s nerves – how a person handles them in such a unique situation. In the debate’s opening moments, the vice-president did indeed seem nervous. But she settled, and about 15 minutes in, it started to happen: while Harris’s keenly controlled anger rose to a point, Trump, mouth bunching, eyes disappearing into his head, unravelled.
A reference by Harris to her endorsement from Trump’s alma mater, the Wharton School, and some senior Republicans including – confusing for liberals! – Dick Cheney triggered a volley of “she”s from Trump. She, she, she, he said – always a sign he is losing it against a female antagonist. “She copied Biden’s plan and it’s like four sentences, like Run Spot Run!” And off he went on his downward spiral.
The next day, consumers of American rightwing media were partially apprised of Trump’s performance, but it was pretzeled around a lot of excuse-making. Even this very mild acknowledgement of Trump’s weakness, however, was a departure from the full-throated support of the Murdoch press in 2016. In the pro-Trump New York Post, the paper admitted that Trump had been “rattled” but bleated about unfairness from the debate moderators on ABC News. (They pulled Trump up on his lies about immigrants eating American pets and Democrats legalising infanticide – there were times, on Tuesday night, when the task of debating Trump looked a lot like trying to debate a copy of the National Enquirer.)
Over on Fox News, there was a lot of glum post-debate punditry. Brit Hume said sadly of Harris: “She came out in pretty good shape.” The most Sean Hannity could manage was that the “real loser” was ABC. Jesse Watters said: “This was rough,” pronounced that most people watching wouldn’t think “any of these people won”, and observed: “All the memorable lines were from Donald Trump.” Which, of course, technically was true. (Apart from the pet-eating thing, my two favourite Trump lines were “Venezuela on steroids” and “I told Abdul: don’t do it any more!” – an absolute corker from Trump on the subject of how he stuck it to the Taliban.) Then Trump himself popped up on the network to accuse the debate of being “rigged” – a sure sign, whatever the competition, that he had in fact lost.
On X, eugenics fan and world’s richest man Elon Musk admitted 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 followed up with: “We will never reach Mars if Kamala Harris wins” – a fact that, assuming Musk himself plans to undertake the journey, would be one drawback to a Harris win indeed.
In the rightwing British press, meanwhile, there were various milquetoast attempts to mitigate Trump’s failure, including the Daily Telegraph’s post-debate assertion that it was “difficult to crown Harris the victor when she said so little about her own platform”. Was it, though? Was it really that difficult to pick a winner between the woman who, if she loses in November, we can be fairly certain won’t refuse to accept the decision versus the guy shouting “Execute the baby!” and citing Viktor Orbán as a character witness? And yet the conclusion in the Daily Mail was: “Pathetic, both of them.”
Given the evidence before us, these moments of cognitive dissonance are becoming increasingly hard to process. Because the truth, of course, is that Trump looked like a lunatic on Tuesday night. As he got angrier, his shoulders slumped, his body twisted and certain familiar phrases started to pop up in his speech. “I’m not, she is”; repeated use of the word “horrible”. Of Biden he said, referring to Harris: “He hates her; he can’t stand her.” For my money, however, his craziest moment wasn’t any of this, or even the pets thing, but when he wandered off on a diversion about the horrors of solar energy, then said: “You ever see a solar plant? By the way I’m a big fan of solar.” During some of these rants, Harris, despite the tremendous pressure of the moment, actually succeeded in looking bored.
Much has been made of how calm she was, and of how her smirk – what the New York Post disapprovingly called her “dismissive laugh” – goaded Trump to greater depths of incoherence. But I think the best parts of the debate were when Harris, too, grew angry. As a candidate, she has had the problem of being tricky to read and has been accused of being too scripted. But in the abortion section of the debate, one felt she jumped beyond the rehearsed remarks, and you could feel the engine of her conviction roaring to life.
She was angry – seething, in fact – when she delivered the line about a miscarrying woman “bleeding out in a car in the parking lot” because an emergency doctor might be too frightened to treat her. I got that same flash of genuine outrage when, in relation to Russia’s expansionist ambitions, she said to Trump: “You adore strongmen instead of caring about democracy.” She was, one felt, a beat away from taunting him with: “You want to kiss Putin on the lips, you do.”
And then her language changed register, moving into a realm generally more favoured by Republicans than Democrats. “That is immoral,” Harris said of Trump making decisions about women’s bodies. It was a striking moment, this use of a word that might apply equally to all the high-information Americans and their allies in Britain continuing to excuse Trump this far into the game.
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Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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