It wasn’t a study in sartorial contrasts—he wore blue, she wore black—but in emotional ones. Vice President Kamala Harris was calm and composed, playing the role of matador to former president Donald Trump’s bull. She twirled her rhetorical cape as he lunged and bellowed with rage, openly pining for his old antagonist, who could barely stumble into the ring during their standoff in June.

Harris showed her mettle from the outset by striding over to shake Trump’s hand. In relentlessly prosecuting him, the former prosecutor accomplished the one thing that Trump always seeks to establish--dominance. And she dominated him for the rest of the debate.

In robbing him of his mojo, Harris exposed the authentic Trump under the harsh lighting at the National Constitution Center, whose small stage worked to her advantage. Her close proximity to Trump meant that she was even more nettlesome—in his face all night.

There was no dissimulation on his part last night. Harris was far more rehearsed, a product partly of her extensive debate preparation. She had smooth answers prepared. Trump, by contrast, was visceral, spontaneous and guttural. But it was depressing, a perpetual depiction of America as what he called “a failing nation.”

The only failure was Trump’s. Asked about his healthcare plan, he mused, “I have concepts of a plan.” He treated the debate as though it were a rally before his faithful flock rather than a moment to reach out to swing voters and to undermine Harris by tying her to President Joe Biden’s record. Instead, he openly pined for Biden, prompting Harris to note that she, not Biden, was running for the presidency. It made Trump look old and out of touch.

Trump’s anger was palpable, and it ensured that the debate centered on him, not Harris and her service in the Biden administration. He plunged into the mire of the 2020 election, claiming once more that it had been stolen from him. He ranted about the unfairness of his court cases. He once more raised doubts about Harris’ racial identity. And he claimed that she had been raised as a Marxist almost from the cradle by her father—“a Marxist professor in economics.”

Those weren’t his only outlandish claims. “In Springfield they’re eating the dogs,” he claimed about Haitian immigrants. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats.” The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser observed, “I’ve watched every Presidential debate for the past two decades, and I can’t think of anything that ranks higher in pure stupidity than Trump ranting and raving to a national audience about immigrants supposedly eating people’s cats and dogs.” 

Probably his loopiest moment came when he responded to Harris declaring that world leaders think he is a “disgrace” by citing Hungarian president Viktor Orban, who has established an illiberal democracy on the banks of the Danube, as, in effect, a character witness. Orban was a “tough man,” Trump said. “Look, Viktor Orban said it—he said the most feared, most respected person is Donald Trump.” In praising Orban, he ratified Harris’ assertion that he regularly gets played by foreign autocrats.

The result was a role reversal in foreign affairs. Harris was the hawk, and Trump the dove. He steadfastly refused to say that he would like to see Ukraine win. Instead, he blathered on about how he would solve the conflict in a day—most likely by abandoning Kyiv. His own running mate, J.D. Vance, after all, has already announced that “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other.” Harris was quick to pounce during the debate, noting that 800,000 Polish voters live in Pennsylvania who presumably harbor a less emollient view of Russia than Trump and his sidekick.

Whether the debate will be a game-changer is another matter. But it helped to establish Harris’ bona fides. She committed no gaffes. She put Trump on the defensive. As he lurches to the finish line, his performance should stir mounting unease in the Republican party that embraced him one more time in the conviction that he, and he alone, could lead it to victory in November. Right now, it looks increasingly debatable.

About the Author: Editor of the National Interest, Jacob Heilbrunn

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

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