In one seventeenth-century panoramic drawing of London, Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is mistakenly labeled “Beere-bayting.” The mistake is understandable—the arena in which live animals were tormented was cheek-by-jowl with the one in which epic history plays were staged. A few centuries from now, those looking back on the TV debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris may well slip into the same confusion. This was a consequential episode in a drama of historic import. But it felt a lot more like a bear-baiting display. Trump was the arthritic old beast, tethered to his lectern, repeatedly goaded by Harris into striking out at thin air.
Objectively, the debate was rather desultory. With so much hanging in the balance, for the United States and the world, it does not seem naive to hope for something a little more elevated. Climate change got a token acknowledgment right before the closing statements, with each candidate offered (literally) a minute on the subject. Discussion of America’s place in the world after the failures of the “forever wars” never rose beyond a spat about who was most responsible for the debacle of US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Israel’s war on Gaza prompted no serious reflections: Harris managed some familiar generalities while Trump offered nothing better than that “she hates Israel” and that, if she is elected, “the whole place is going to get blown up.”
The debate had been going on for over eighty minutes when Harris suggested, as if a bright idea had just come to her, “Let’s talk about our plans. And let’s compare the plans.” She was implicitly acknowledging that this had not happened yet. She had not carved out any space in which to communicate a clear set of economic and social priorities for her presidency.
This absence should have worked in Trump’s favor. He is caught between too many plans (the Heritage Foundation’s radical “Project 2025” roadmap for his second term, which he was eager to disavow) and none at all. (Asked how he would replace the Affordable Care Act, he replied that “I have concepts of a plan.”) Avoiding specifics and filling the vacuum with bombast is his modus operandi. And yet, even as he dragged the debate down to his own level, it was on that home ground that he failed so miserably.
The startling thing about the debate was not that Harris was especially brilliant—it was that she did not need to be. She was confident, authoritative, fluent, disciplined, and sometimes (especially on reproductive rights, Trump’s racism, and his courting of dictators) eloquent. These were the basic requirements for her. She could not afford to falter or cower or allow herself to be bullied, and she didn’t. But beyond those essentials, even she must have been surprised about how easy it all was. Trump did most of the work for her.
The neat slogan coined by his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, “Let Trump be Trump,” turned out to be, for Harris, a bespoke version of the dictum often attributed to Napoleon: “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” It was Trump’s campaign that insisted that the mics be muted when a candidate was not speaking, and Harris, seemingly forgetting this, did try to interrupt her opponent on a few occasions. But it turned out to be much better for her that she couldn’t—because Trump did such an extraordinary job of interrupting himself.
Trump being Trump translated into what philosophers might call a category error. He spoke in a TV debate as though he were addressing one of his own rallies. This meant, in general, that he in effect addressed his committed fans—he could not change the frequency to one more attuned to the only people who really matter: the small number of undecided voters. But it also meant that Trump used the limited time slots of the debate format as though they were the indefinite epochs of his solo rambles. He spoke like a man who had hours to fill and an indulgent audience that would hang on while he straggled from subject to subject and, if they were lucky, back again.
The surreal bricolage of his rally speeches has its own strangely mesmeric force when an audience is given time to get sucked into its rhythms. But in the debate format, it seemed merely deranged. His teeming thoughts were packed into brief segments of time like too many garments stuffed into a washing machine. In the two minutes or so in which he conjured the now notorious image of immigrants eating America’s cats and dogs—a baseless slander against the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, that had spread across right-wing media in the preceding days—he introduced no fewer than five disparate topics.
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There was his own “incredible rallies,” then the US as “a failing nation.” He swerved into how we’re “going to end up in World War III, just to go into another subject”—this latter phrase indicating that somewhere in the back of his head he was aware of his own manic logorrhea. But he could not stop himself pinballing on to dog-devouring foreigners before coming to rest in Venezuela—the country the US will turn into under Harris. It reminded me of nothing so much as Lucky’s speech in Waiting for Godot—less stream of consciousness than spurt of disconnected verbiage.
This was a boomerang effect: the provoker provoked. Provocation has been Trump’s weapon of choice. But here it was Harris doing the goading. There was an element of the courtroom drama in her performance—the prosecuting attorney needling the accused, who knows he should try to seem calm and collected before the jury, into revealing his unstable menace. It felt like she had done this before.
It was not irrelevant that this was not just anyone who was mocking him. It was a woman. Whereas Joe Biden tried to deal with Trump’s boasting by bickering about who had the bigger golf swing, Harris deflated it by telling him that world leaders were laughing at him, that the dictators he imagines as his friends “would eat you for lunch,” and, most wounding of all, that even his own devotees are “leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” She knew that Trump could not take that kind of female lip.
Exhaustion and boredom were well-chosen words. Strategically, what Trump needed to do in the debate was to consolidate for the electorate the notion that he is the change candidate. Polls have shown that this is fertile ground for him. But the effect of Harris’s baiting was to channel Trump’s energies back into his over-familiar tropes and complaints. In trying to control his rage, he defaulted to the stuff that was already in his head—which is also, of course, the stuff he has expressed over and over since he first declared his candidacy in 2015.
In one of the most telling moments of the debate, we got a brief glimpse of his sudden realization that this was not what he needed to be doing. Trump rehearsed his grievances about how the 2020 election was stolen and offered to show everyone “facts and statistics” that would prove he really won. Then, for a moment, he had a flash of self-awareness: “But you know what? That doesn’t matter. Because we have to solve the problem that we have right now. That’s old news.” This was exactly right. The debate showed that the danger for Trump is not that his rhetoric is extreme or that his lies are outlandish. It is that they are getting stale. The risk for him is that, as people see more and more of him in the run-up to November, he himself may become old news.
In this, he may just be a victim of his own success. His triumph has been the normalization of the imagery and ideas of the extreme right. The outrageous has, over the nine years in which he has dominated US politics, gone mainstream. But what we saw in the debate is the working out of a law of diminishing returns. Saying the unsayable works—until it ceases to be unsayable because it has been roared from the rooftops over and over again by a once and potentially future president. It is hard for Trump to increase the volume when he long ago turned it up to eleven.
The debate leaves us with two critical questions. Can Trump pivot back toward the campaign his advisers presumably want him to run, one that, alongside the anti-immigrant bile, articulates clear messages on immediate issues like inflation, taxation, and health care? And can Harris exploit Trump’s failure to present himself as the change candidate by fully and convincingly embracing that role for herself? The answer to the first question is almost certainly no, but it is on the second that the outcome of the election will surely hinge.
