Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Donald Trump was not a happy camper.
If this had been a prizefight, the ref would have stopped it after the first hour.
Kamala Harris was so successful in prompting Trump to be Trump that by then—actually, considerably earlier than then—he was clearly punch-drunk. He fell back on old conspiracy theories (he really won the 2020 election), dredged up urban legends (immigrants are chowing down on people’s pet dogs and cats), and packed together fictitious horror stories in one breathtaking sentence (in the midst of his word salad, I think he actually said, “She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison”).
There you have the Republican platform for 2024.
In a sense, though, I think we may be a little unfair in singling out Donald Trump for his failure to actually state what he’d do to benefit the American people, rather than himself and his ego, in a second term as president. One of the many questions at which he was totally at sea concerned what he’d replace the Affordable Care Act with, as the ABC moderator noted that he’d been talking about doing that for nine years but had never come up with a replacement plan. After a minute or so of fumfering, Trump said he and his people probably had “concepts for a plan.”
But the entire Republican Party, really, has been unable to come up with a replacement for the ACA. In 2017, this was the reason John McCain cited in casting the deciding vote in the Senate against repealing it. Trump’s failure to articulate any policies on Tuesday night that would make housing more abundant and affordable, or help families meet the costs of raising children, or reduce the price of prescription drugs is matched by the failure of his fellow Republicans to advance any such legislation in Congress’s lower house, which they control. The only issue of concern to the House Republican leadership, as Speaker Mike Johnson made clear this week, is to make it harder for some (probably pro-Democratic) voters to cast a ballot this November, in order to allegedly keep undocumented immigrants from the polls (something that’s already illegal). Which is to say, the only real legislation of concern not just to Trump but to the entire Republican Party is anything that can deter the horror of majority rule.
Harris accomplished three things in the course of the debate. First, she did lay out the rudiments of a program aimed at making life for working- and middle-class Americans less financially onerous. Second, she projected herself as a normal political leader committed to normalizing the nation’s civic life—sounding tough on defense like presidents past (citing, as she did at the Democratic National Convention, her goal of ensuring our armed services are “lethal”), making clear she understands the value of alliances, outlining real-world policies for real-world Americans, and projecting herself as a generational break from the leaders who’ve polarized national civic life. A normal leader, as it were, for a normal America.
This fed into her third accomplishment, which was baiting Donald Trump into his characteristic displays of narcissistic abnormalities, spewing out the random pieces of garbage rattling around his brain. She didn’t have to contrast herself with an abstraction, with, say, an ideological preference for autocratic leaders and autocracy itself; she just had to wind up Trump and let him rant. She didn’t have to exactly say, “I’m normal and he’s not,” because she knew that provoking Trump to be Trump would lead viewers to reach that conclusion on their own. That fed into her other message aimed at swing voters: “He’s dangerous and I’m not.” I’m not sure how many swing voters will come away thinking Trump is as dangerous as he actually is; I do suspect that many of them may come away thinking that she’s not all that dangerous after all.
One of the antonyms for “weird” is “normal.” For Harris, for the Democrats, that may prove to be the most helpful contrast of all.
