Takeaways From The First Harris-Trump Debate

Everyone who has observed former President Donald Trump in public life over the past decade seems to agree: He is his own worst enemy, and anyone hoping to get the better of him need only encourage his worst instincts.

When Trump is dwelling on the 2020 election, making outlandish claims or harping on personal grievances, he is not focusing on areas like the economy and immigration, where voters sometimes give him an advantage.

In a clear attempt to get Trump to go off-script before a national audience, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign tried to get him to agree to have his microphone unmuted during the two contenders’ ABC News debate on Tuesday — a change from Trump’s debate with President Joe Biden on June 27.

Harris did not succeed there — each candidate’s microphone would stay muted while the other was speaking — but she did find plenty of other ways to trigger Trump’s bad habits. On this score and several others, the debate was an indisputable success for Harris, who has sometimes faced doubts about her extemporaneous speaking abilities.

A turning point came close to the half-hour mark, when Harris laid a trap for Trump that he walked right into, predicting that he would bring up immigration unprompted throughout the debate and mocking him for holding rallies where he discusses fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. She even said people leave his rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”

“The one thing you will not hear him talk about is you,” she said, addressing viewers. “You will not hear him talk about your dreams and your needs and your desires. And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first.”

Trump could not resist the opportunity to defend the size of the crowds at his rallies, a frequent fixation of his.

“People don’t go to her rallies, there’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing in and paying them,” he said, baselessly. “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

He also managed to bring up perhaps his weirdest immigration talking point of the night ― an entirely unproven, racist rumor about Haitian migrants eating pets in Ohio ― effectively confirming her point about his immigration-themed outbursts.

The exchange set the tone for the rest of the debate. Harris’s overarching theme was that she would not be distracted from helping working families, and that Trump could not be trusted to do the same. Trump never regained his footing, and embarrassed himself by continuing to take her bait.

Harris got a notable win early in the night, when the moderators brought up a topic seen as one of her strengths: abortion rights.

“Let’s understand how we got here. Donald Trump hand selected three members of the Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v. Wade. And they did exactly as he intended,” she said.

The vice president referred to the abortion bans and strict limitations in many states as “Trump abortion bans” ― laying blame at his door for the stories of medical horror and trauma that have emerged since the national right to abortion was overturned in 2022.

Harris decried abortion bans without exceptions for rape or incest, passed in the wake of Roe’s reversal. “Understand what that means ― a survivor of a crime, a violation of their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next,” she said. “That is immoral.”

“I think the American people believe that certain freedoms, particularly freedom to make discussions about one’s own body, should not be made by the government,” she continued.

Harris’ answer, both passionate and detailed, was a far cry from how President Joe Biden, during his one debate against Trump before he dropped out, prosecuted the issue against the Republican candidate.

When asked about abortion — which is supposed to be the issue where the Democratic Party has the largest advantage for the coming election — Biden confusingly redirected his answer to focus on immigration, an area where Republicans are seen to be stronger.

“Look, there are so many young women who have been, including a young woman who just was murdered, and he went to the funeral. And the idea that she was murdered by an immigrant coming in, to talk about that. But here’s the deal. There’s a lot of young women are being raped by their in-laws, by their, by their spouses. Brothers and sisters, by — it’s just ridiculous,” Biden said at the time.

Harris spokesman Ian Sams said after the debate that the abortion exchange went over well with battleground-state voters participating in dial tests — where voters grade candidates’ performances in real-time by moving a dial up or down depending on how they feel about what the candidate is saying.

“Her answers in the abortion exchange were very high,” Sams said. The only higher-testing moment, he said, came when Harris responded to Trump questioning her racial identity by reiterating that she wants to bring Americans together.

At both the start and end of the debate, Trump was able to zero in on the economy and immigration to attack Harris. As both campaigns seek primarily to define the Democrat, who is still new on the campaign stage, rather than redefine Trump, the former president’s advantages on these issues have helped keep him neck-and-neck with Harris in the polls.

“She’s been there for three-and-a-half years. They’ve had three-and-a-half years to close the border, they’ve had three-and-a-half years to create jobs,” Trump said in his closing statement. “Why haven’t they done it?”

On the economy, Harris pivoted by arguing her plans for the future — including increased child tax credits and expanding housing construction — were stronger than Trump’s plans for tariffs, which she focused on framing as effectively a tax hike on American families. On immigration, she tried to use her own version of her boss’ famous line about Rudy Giuliani.

“He’s going to talk a lot tonight about immigration, even though it’s not the subject being raised,” Harris said.

Neither response is likely to be effective enough to negate Trump’s advantages, but it might close the gap.

Throughout the debate, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from his own right-wing allies, including the figures behind plans for a potential second Trump administration ― and even his own vice-presidential nominee.

When Harris brought up the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, drafted as an outline for a second Trump term by conservative policy thinkers, including many of Trump’s close advisers, the former president acted as if he knew nothing about it.

“I have nothing to do with Project 2025,” Trump said. “I haven’t read it. I don’t want to read it, purposely. I’m not going to read it.”

(At least 140 former Trump staffers worked on crafting the Project 2025 agenda, according to CNN.)

In a discussion about abortion, Trump refused to answer whether he would veto federal legislation banning abortion nationwide. ABC moderator Linsey Davis pointed out that his own vice presidential nominee JD Vance said Trump would veto it. Trump proceeded to throw Vance under the bus.

“I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness,” Trump said.

But despite his best efforts to disavow his conservative allies, Trump consistently revealed himself to be swimming in the deep end of the right-wing swamp.

He claimed that Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity “debunked” the fact that he said that there were “very fine people on both sides” after a white supremacist in Charlottesville, Va. murdered a counter-protester with his car. (They did not debunk this.)

When Trump sought a world leader to cite as someone who supports him, he pointed to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, a favorite autocrat of the far right.

If there was one moment that best captured how frazzled and unhinged Trump came off during much of the debate, it was the point when Trump repeated the baseless and racist rumor that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating cats and dogs. (The debate moderators debunked the claim.)

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people are eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. This is what is happening in our country,” Trump said, repeating the wild smear his running mate helped popularize.

That wasn’t all: “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” Trump said of Harris, mashing several strains of GOP fear mongering into one absurd sentence.

Trump was clearly on a tear on Tuesday, opening himself up to embarrassing moments and brutal sound bites that Harris can use to make him look bad in campaign ads and future debates.

The 45th president has a history of unhinged debate moments during his three presidential runs — and they’re hard to forget. But the contrast Tuesday was made starker by Harris’ steadiness and her ability to stay on message.

The debate’s moderators, Davis and David Muir, calmly fact-checked Trump during the debate, debunking his lies about abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy and other false statements.

It was a reversal from the first debate hosted by CNN, which did not include any live fact-checking from the moderators.

“I thought the moderators were very unfair. It was basically three-on-one,” Trump told reporters in the spin room after the debate.