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A poised and prepared Kamala Harris met a crabby and thin-skinned Donald Trump in a presidential debate, and it didn’t feel like much of a fair fight. 

Over the course of almost two hours Tuesday night, the Vice President effectively needled the former President on his deepest insecurities while painting a clear choice for voters. Trump in response repeatedly took the bait and doubled down, leading him to go on wild tangents, engage in angry outbursts, and relitigate old battles. It was a striking dichotomy for voters to take in from two figures who share so little when it comes to political instinct, personalities, and even personal discipline. Harris leveraged Trump’s total lack of that last element to set the agenda for the evening.

While Trump spoke dismissively of Harris, she systematically dismantled his rhetoric. Trump invoked Fox personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity as validators for his claims and she cited Nobel-winning economists. Trump admiringly invoked autocrats and Harris noted a raft of former Trump staffers were voting for her. 

It was a snapshot of a bitter race that remains a jump ball with less than two months before Election Day. And it was the first time since Trump launched his first campaign in 2015 that he found himself on a debate stage against someone who matched him on political showmanship.

“What we have in the former President is someone who would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” Harris said, summing up the thesis of her campaign.

In turn, Trump ticked through a litany of right-wing talking points about Jan. 6, 2021, immigrant violence, and a failed border. Sticking with his belief that feeding culture wars stuffs ballot boxes in his favor, his roster of falsehoods included claiming Harris supported allowing the government to murder newborns in a process masquerading as abortion. “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison. This is a radical-left liberal,” Trump said at another point, sneering at a rival he called Marxist.

It was clear even before the debate ended that the balance of this election cycle will be spent trying to rev the engines of each political camp. Harris in many ways is picking up where Biden’s 2020 campaign left off in a pitch for normalcy and decency, but with a polish that gives Democrats fresh loads of optimism. Where Trump advisers saw opportunities to drag down Harris by tying her to all of Biden’s record, the candidate only intermittently kept up the strategy. Instead, Trump kept his focus on his own political record, aiming largely for the audience that takes their cues from right-wing sources and shares his belief that he should still be in the White House.

Put plainly, Harris made a very clear argument for the nation to move forward with a new generation of leadership while Trump continued to linger in his previous elections. Some of her answers didn’t exactly match the question asked, but at no point did her statements devolve into ad hominem attacks and easily fact-checked falsehoods.

“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. So let’s be clear about that and clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that,” Harris said, one of her many tweaks aimed squarely at his ego.

Trump could not help himself, pivoting to his assertion without evidence that there remains enmity between Biden and Harris: “I’ll give you a little secret. He can’t stand her. He hates her.” Later in the evening, Trump even questioned if Biden still had the job and suggested Harris and her rhetoric were responsible for political violence aimed at him.

“I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they say about me,” Trump said, invoking the failed assassination attempt against him.

But for every moment that aimed at the handful of voters who are unsure about their choice this fall—who to vote for, or even whether to cast ballots—he took many more detours that most clearly targeted his die-hard supporters and his individual ego. For instance, in a bizarre moment that has been debunked widely, Trump wrongly said Haitian immigrants in Ohio are hunting dogs and cats for food.

“They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said as a puzzled Harris did little to hide her disbelief. Confronted by anchor David Muir that there is no evidence of that, Trump, naturally, doubled down.

Similarly, Trump demanded he was correct in inflating the number of migrants in the country without legal status, that the FBI cooked the books on crime stats, international monitors were lying about the death toll in Ukraine, and government economists manufactured the number of new jobs created on the watch of Biden and Harris.

Understanding Trump’s unique vulnerabilities, Harris consistently threaded the needle to derail Trump, who never seemed to catch onto the transparent trickery.

“People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Harris said of her rival. 

It’s a bait Trump always takes. “People don’t go to her rallies. The people who do go, she’s bussing them in and paying them to be there, showing them in a different light,” Trump said.

Then he puffed up his political chest: “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” The dispute was completely immaterial for undecided voters and would win him zero new votes, but Harris understood exactly what she had done: in inviting Trump’s ego to overtake actual issues, she was showing his pettiness in full display. And, for millions of voters watching Harris in such an environment for the first time, it’s impossible to imagine a better first showing.

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