Trump was his own worst enemy in his debate with Kamala

“So I think you’ve heard tonight two very different visions for our country,” Vice President Kamala Harris insisted in her closing remarks at last night’s presidential debate. Viewers, I suspect, may disagree. This was not a debate where we learned anything new. There was no great “vision” put forward by Harris or Donald Trump. Public policy was barely touched upon. If what the candidates discussed in terms of specific plans is really their great vision for the United States — distorting the housing market, jacking up prices on consumers — then Americans should be very worried indeed. For a country facing a myriad of economic and existential problems, nothing mentioned by the former president or the vice president could be described as a comprehensive solution.

Mostly, Trump struggled to resist that one task he had: to not take the bait

But that wasn’t the purpose of Tuesdays’s debate. Each candidate had one, albeit tricky job to do: Trump needed to stay calm and Harris needed to make herself look more moderate, having promoted some of the most left-wing views of any Democratic senator only five years ago. As it turned out, Harris’s test never came. Trump took her bait so early into the debate, he fast descended into messy rhetoric, forgoing countless moments to land some ideological blows. It’s no surprise Harris is in the lead for snap reaction, with CNN’s instant poll showing a decisive win for the VP: 63 percent said Harris won, compared to 37 percent for Trump. 

Trump started out the debate relatively strong, going after the economy under Biden. But on the topic Americans have been citing as their biggest concern for years now — and cite more confidence in Trump on the issue than Harris, by a margin of two to one — Trump didn’t seem to take much care to land his points. “Everything she believed three years ago, four years ago, is out the window,” he said. “She’s going to my philosophy now. In fact I was going to send her a MAGA hat.” It was a funny line, delivered with zero context. Political DC types will have worked out in an instant that he was talking about his tax plan to exclude workers’ tips — a policy Harris picked up almost immediately after being announced as Joe Biden’s replacement. But anyone tuning in tonight to get a sense of what the candidates might offer them will have struggled to put the dots together.

That became the theme of the event: Trump’s struggle. He struggled to land some simple points, he struggled to stay on topic. Mostly, he struggled to resist that one task he had: to not take the bait. Harris didn’t wait to start throwing it out: “People leave his rallies early,” she said, out of pretty much nowhere. “People don’t go to her rallies,” he retorted — a simple comeback that was more than enough, but became the start of a long rant about how his rallies are “the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

It was convenient timing for Harris, who chucked the grenade at the start of the immigration debate. There was a muddled reference to her completely botched job to get the US border under control. There was no mention of the “border czar.” There was simply a lot of talk about Trump, by Trump, defending himself and coaxing his ego.

If there was any real clash of ideas, it was over America’s role in aiding Ukraine. Trump’s refusal to condemn Putin should have lost him every point. But Harris fast went down the path of hawkishness: the kind of foreign policy Americans are now very skeptical about (it didn’t help Harris that the debate was followed up with a question about the Afghanistan withdrawal). What’s worse, she gave a free-flowing, waffle-eqsue answer that has become associated with her communication style, making it seem like she just sort of drifted, casually, towards a 2000s foreign policy. 

Tuesday was about swaying undecided voters against the other candidate. If you haven’t made your mind up about your voting intention yet, it’s not because you are so taken with both candidates, oscillating between who is the better public servant, that you haven’t been able to pick. The question, rather, is crude and simple: between two highly unpopular candidates, which one can you simply not bring yourself to vote for? 

So did the debate create more NeverTrumpers or never-progressives? I suspect it will have tipped more people into the former camp, though perhaps not by as much as Harris’s team currently think (they’ve already come out championing the result, calling for a second debate). Trump never landed the definitive blow on Harris’s ideological leanings. He almost certainly could have: when he called her “Marxist,” her famous giggle fast came out, and she offered no counter to his claims. He brought up her support for a fracking ban and single-payer healthcare a few times, but never as a question she had to answer. Her most recent plans for price control on groceries — right out of the socialist playbook — were never even mentioned. It’s a particularly bad failing from the Republican nominee: after all, Harris has held virtually every policy position in the book. But there wasn’t one she was ever forced to defend.

Harris’s answers on January 6, 2021 were particularly strong: instead of going for a full-blown attack on Trump, she instead offered up her party as a vehicle to “turn the page” and move on. The point of unity was a stark contrast to Trump continuing to insist he won in 2020, making glowing remarks about Viktor Orbán, and coming across as someone who was not only stoking, but generally enjoying, the chaos that his political style conjures. 

The obvious comeback to this message of unity is that it sounds eerily familiar: indeed, it was exactly Biden’s message to the public back in 2020. How did that go? Biden’s antidote to healing the nation was to spend trillions of dollars, which did very little to bring the country together, apart from giving people the shared scepticism that Bidenomics was a good idea.

“Why hasn’t she done it?” Trump asked at the start of his closing speech, bringing into focus that every promise of policy or nation building made by the vice president could have been put into practice three and a half years ago. It was his strongest point of the evening, made far too late. 

Last night won’t be the end of the road for that messaging. It’s not the end of the road for either campaign. This debate may well give Harris a bump in the polls, but there is plenty of time for them to even back out. Harris had the night she needed. Trump got through it as his own worst enemy: not too badly beaten up by Harris, but instead let down by his own rash impulses. Most importantly, nothing that happened last night can declare this race over.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.