Harris Wallops Trump in September 10 Debate – But Will It Really Matter?

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Well, the Great Debate between sitting Vice-President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump finally happened on ABC-TV September 10 – and by all reality-based accounts, Harris wiped the floor with Trump.

Harris had Trump on the defensive even before the two candidates took their podia and started speaking. Trump made a bee-line to his podium and tried to avoid Harris. Harris walked out with her arm outstretched to shake his hand – the traditional greeting at one of these occasions – and Trump at first tried to pull back. Then he bowed to the inevitable and reluctantly shook her hand.

Trump’s body language, not only in that encounter but throughout the debate itself, showed off the racism and sexism that are integral parts not only of his political identity but his personal life. That’s the reason why, aside from a couple of sidelong glances, he didn’t make eye contact with her even once during the debate. You are not my equal, Trump’s body language said. You’re a woman, you’re part Black, you’re part Asian and I shouldn’t have to have anything to do with you because you are subhuman.

The debate itself pretty much followed along those lines. Harris was visibly strong, in command of herself and ready and waiting to attack Trump on his most obvious vulnerabilities, including his boasts that he put the three justices on the U.S. Supreme Court that ended American women’s Constitutionally guaranteed right to abortion after 49 years. She went into the debate determined to go after Trump on everything from the size of his campaign rallies to whether the 2020 election was fair to the bizarre story cooked up virtually from nowhere about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio stealing people’s cats and dogs so they could eat them.

Just about everyone in a position to know about this story has publicly debunked it. The debate’s co-moderator, ABC News anchor David Muir, said that ABC News had checked that story with the Springfield city manager, who had told them there were no credible reports of immigrants from Haiti or anywhere else capturing and eating people’s house pets. Even the person who took the photo of a person carrying a goose, which got posted to Facebook and started the whole meme of “Haitian immigrants are stealing cats and dogs to eat them,” said the picture wasn’t taken in Springfield and he has no idea of the subject’s immigration status.

But that didn’t matter either to Trump or his running mate, Ohio Senator J. D. Vance, who have run with the story and said it was true. When I first heard it, it reminded me of the vile propaganda the Nazis (the original ones) spread about the Jews to convince non-Jewish Germans that they were the scum of the earth and therefore they should be killed en masse. Like the lies the Nazis told about the Jews, it was outrageous B.S. but it’s also being believed by a large number of people, including ones who worship Trump the way all too many Germans worshiped Adolf Hitler and believed he would be the strongman they needed to “make Germany great again.”

Throughout the evening Harris kept springing rhetorical traps for Trump – and Trump kept falling for them all. Perhaps the most telling moment came when Harris actually invited people to attend a Trump rally, not only because they wouldn’t hear Trump say anything about how he would make their lives better, but because people were walking out of them because his speeches were so nonsensical and boring. Trump reacted like Harris had suddenly slapped him in the face, claiming that his rallies were the biggest anyone’s ever seen (a repeated and very annoying rhetorical tic of Trump’s; in his world everything is the biggest, the best, or if it’s against him the worst, thing there’s ever been) while accusing Harris of paying people to go to hers. (At least that’s a slight improvement over Trump’s previous claim that nobody was actually going to Harris’s rallies and the images of crowds watching her speak were AI-generated fakes.)

Trump kept falling into traps like that virtually the whole night. Questioned by the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, about a recent interview he gave with a young podcaster admitting that he’d lost the 2020 election “by a whisker,” Trump denied it and insisted he actually won the 2020 election and it was “stolen” from him.

Asked about abortion – one of the trickiest issues for Republicans these days because in every state that has voted on it since Trump’s Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, the pro-choice position has won with 60 percent of the vote – Trump repeated his standard lies that “everyone” wanted Roe overturned and the issue returned to individual states. But he refused to say whether or not he’d sign a nationwide abortion ban if Congress passed one.

When one of the moderators quoted J. D. Vance as saying Trump would veto a nationwide ban (even though Vance himself has previously spoken out in favor of one), Trump said he’d never spoken to Vance on the issue and Vance had no authority to speak for him on it. Trump also repeated his lie that some states allow women to have abortions even after their babies are born – which, to her credit, Linsey Davis called him on. “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Davis said.

Trump also refused to say whether or not he wanted Ukraine to win its current two-year-old war with Russia. “I want the war to stop,” he said, leaving open the possibility that his way to “stop” it would be to broker a deal that would give Russia effective control, if not total sovereignty, over Ukraine. And when Harris said that “world leaders are laughing” at Trump, the one world leader Trump could name that supports him was Viktor Orbán, authoritarian leader of Hungary, whom Trump praised as “a tough person. Smart.”

And Trump also declared that he had nothing to do with the radical-Right “Project 2025” agenda concocted by the Right-wing Heritage Foundation under the title “Mandate for Leadership” (also the name of the document they gave Ronald Reagan for his first term in 1981). When Harris tried to hold him accountable for its blueprint, which is basically to remake the U.S. Presidency as a dictatorship, Trump proudly boasted that he’d never read it and didn’t intend to.

In one respect that’s believable – Project 2025 is 922 pages long and that’s 921 ½ more pages than Trump ever reads of anything – but 200 former Trump administration officials were involved in drafting Project 2025 and his vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, wrote a foreword to a book explaining it written by its head, Kevin Roberts. The book was originally called Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, but the subtitle was later changed to Taking Down Washington to Save America and its publication was delayed until after the November 5 election.

And, as they noted in their fact-check of the September 10 debate, “CBS News identified at least 270 proposals in the published blueprint that match Trump's past policies and campaign promises as he runs again for the White House.” At least one of them, the so-called “Schedule F” – an attempt to destroy America’s tradition of a nonpartisan civil service by reclassifying 50,000 Federal employees as “at-will” political appointees the President could fire at any time – was already ordered by Trump in October 2020. Because he lost the election, it never took effect and his successor, Joe Biden, rescinded Trump’s executive order just two days after becoming President, but it remains a long-term goal of Trump’s.

Spinning in the “Spin Room”

At some level, at least, Trump seems aware that the debate went badly for him. He made the unusual decision to go to the so-called “spin room” – the space where reporters interview surrogates for the candidates – himself. There he cited numbers, whose sources he did not name, as saying he’d won the who-won polls with 75 to 90 percent. (The one poll that said Trump won which any reality-based journalists have been able to trace came from a totally unscientific survey of viewers on the Right-wing Newsmax Web site.)

Yet on September 12 Trump angrily turned down Harris’s offer of a second debate. He posted on his oxymoronically named Web site “Truth Social,” “When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are ‘I WANT A REMATCH.’ Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate. … THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” (Trump is apparently counting the June 27 debate with President Joe Biden, which he won so decisively various Democrats called on Biden to exit the race, as the first debate and the September 10 debate with Harris as the second.)

Trump’s angry rejection of a second (or third) debate may be one of his stupidest moves yet. Not only does it make him look weak (one of his greatest fears), it runs against the experience of Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Barack Obama in 2012. Both of them had surprisingly failed performances in their first debates – Reagan against Walter Mondale and Obama against Mitt Romney – but recovered in their second debates and went on to win re-election. In fact, Reagan won in 1984 by so overwhelming a margin it remains the biggest single Presidential election victory in U.S. history. Not only did he carry 49 states (losing only the District of Columbia and Mondale’s home state of Minnesota), he won 58.8 percent of the popular vote.

Danger Signs for Harris, Especially on the Economy

And yet, despite her debate victory, there are still danger signs ahead for Kamala Harris’s campaign. She is still a woman, and we remember all too clearly the last time Donald Trump ran for President against a woman. If elected, she’d be not only the first female U.S. President but the first one of Asian ancestry and only the second African-American. (“How can she be both Black and Asian?” Donald Trump asked rhetorically. “The same way you can be both German and Scottish!” I replied.)

Because she’s a woman, Harris is routinely attacked as not being “tough enough” to take on other world leaders. We’ve had enough experience with women as heads of state – from Queen Elizabeth I of England, who took on Philip II of Spain, the leader of Europe’s greatest superpower at the time, and won, to Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and Angela Merkel – to lay aside that ancient sexist canard that “women can’t be tough enough” to govern and lead major nations. But it persists.

And she’s still the representative of one of the most bizarrely unpopular Presidencies in American history. Though Joe Biden’s term has been objectively one of the best for the American people – unemployment is at a 50-year low, the stock market has steadily risen (despite Trump’s prediction in 2020 that a Biden victory would collapse it) and the U.S. post-COVID economic recovery has been the strongest in the world – most Americans don’t have good feelings about the economy.

The reason is stubbornly high inflation, especially in the two biggest items where Americans feel price increases the most: food and gasoline. Harris knows how vulnerable she is on this; that’s why she’s proposed controls on so-called “price gouging” by major food retailers. Other plans for what she calls the “Opportunity Economy” include a subsidy for first-time home buyers, and reinstating and broadening the child tax credit enacted under Biden but killed by Republicans after one year. Her plans have been criticized by some economists, and it will be difficult for her actually to implement them, but at least she has plans.

Trump, as he infamously said about his long-standing ambition to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act during the debate, at best has “concepts of a plan” on the economy. The 2024 Republican Party platform, which echoes not only Trump’s fustian rhetoric but his 19th Century Style of Capitalizing All Significant Nouns and Verbs, promises as the first of its 10 chapters to “DEFEAT INFLATION AND QUICKLY BRING DOWN ALL PRICES” – but the actual proposals are just warmed-over Reaganism: increasing fossil-fuel energy production (which under Biden is actually at an all-time high for the U.S.), cutting taxes for the very richest Americans, deregulating and reducing government spending.

Indeed, one of the centerpieces of Trump’s economic plan – to the extent he has one – is jacking up tariffs, which are simply taxes American consumers pay on imported goods. Even Harris muffed this issue during the debate, calling Trump’s proposed tariffs “a national sales tax” and saying they would cost the average American $4,000 per year. (The progressive Center for American Progress Action estimated Trump’s tariffs would cost Americans an average of $3,900 per year; another group, the Tax Policy Center, said it would be $1,800, a bit less than half that but still a significant burden on many people.)

What Harris didn’t explain – and what Trump seems terminally confused about – is that tariffs are not taxes imposed on foreign countries or their governments. Tariffs are paid by the American people via higher prices on anything they buy that is either made abroad or depends on imported raw materials – in short, virtually everything. Gary Cohn, Trump’s economic adviser during his first (and hopefully only) term as President, tried to explain this to him. Trump wouldn’t believe him, and Cohn famously left that meeting muttering to himself, “What a fucking moron.”

Nonetheless, CNN’s instant poll after the debate showed, “[V]oters who tuned in gave Trump a 20-point advantage over Harris after the debate on handling the economy, 55% to 35% – a margin that’s slightly wider than his pre-debate edge.” Just what on earth did Trump say during the debate that would give anyone more confidence that he could handle the economy better than Harris? And there’s still more bad news for Harris in other polls. On September 4 Matt Vespa of the Right-wing Web site townhall.com published an analysis in which he said even Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com had calculated Trump’s odds of winning a second Presidential term as 56.7 percent, his best showing since July 31.

According to Vespa, Silver also predicted Trump would win five of the seven so-called “battleground states” that will decide the election (Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada), while Harris would win the other two (Michigan and Wisconsin). “Of course, Silver doesn’t say Trump will win — no one should say that – but his Electoral College advantage has only increased since the Democrats’ convention,” Vespa wrote.

Why Is This Election Even Close?

It’s frankly unbelievable and amazing that the overall election is still as close as it is. On the eve of the debate, the New York Times released a poll it co-conducted with Siena College that showed the national popular vote as dead-even (Trump led 48 to 47 percent, well within the margin of error). Seeing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris together in the September 10 debate, and watching both his visceral contempt for her – including his refusal to look her in the eye, something a number of swing-state voters commented on in interviews with the British newspaper The Guardian – and hearing his insane babblings about infanticide and pet murder, it seems impossible that any reasonably sane person would prefer him to her as their nation’s leader.

And yet, according to the polls, almost half of all Americans do. As I remember telling friends during the 2020 Presidential campaign, it was hard for me to believe that anyone could have lived through the chaos of the first Trump term and decided, “Yeah, that was great! Give me four more years of that.” It’s partly due to the increasing polarization of American politics and partly because the Right has carefully constructed a media bubble (the Fox News Network, Right-wing talk radio and Web sites like Newsmax and One America News) by which people receive only “news” that reinforces their beliefs.

It’s also due to Trump’s extraordinary success at selling himself to the American people – or at least the Right-leaning half of it – as a uniquely messianic figure. I remember watching during the 2016 campaign a PBS documentary on the 1976 Presidential campaign that featured a clip of Ronald Reagan, who that year unsuccessfully challenged Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, saying that anyone who believed he personally could change America misunderstood both him and the conservative movement. Watching that clip was a galvanic moment for me; it was as if the Gipper had come from beyond the grave to declare himself a never-Trumper.

When he finally won the Presidency in 1980, Reagan’s slogan was, “Let’s Make America Great Again,” and a lot of people during Trump’s campaign noted the similarity between Reagan’s and Trump’s slogans. But there was also a key difference: the word “Let’s.” Reagan was basically saying that reclaiming America for conservative values was a collective enterprise that needed public participation. Trump, by contrast, during his acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican convention presented himself as a unique figure who could transform America by the sheer force of his personality; he listed all the things he thought were wrong about America and said, “Only I can fix it.”

Trump’s messianic complex has only grown since then. It reached its peak – or its depths – when a would-be assassin took a shot at him at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania on July 13. Both Trump himself and his most ardent supporters proclaimed that he had literally been spared by God because the Lord wanted him to regain the Presidency and reclaim America from the horrors of liberalism. At the Republican convention Trump wore a bandage over his ear as if it were a badge of honor.

And Trump’s belief that the sheer power of his personality is enough to transform the world was on full display at the September 10 debate as well. He said that if he had remained in the White House, Russia would never have attacked Ukraine, Hamas would not have attacked Israel on October 7, 2023 and no Americans would have died in the withdrawal from Afghanistan – something Trump actually negotiated and Biden carried out.

America’s choice in 2024 is between a dedicated public servant who’s already shown her skills as a leader – as San Francisco district attorney, attorney general of California, U.S. Senator and Vice-President – and an egomaniacal psychopath. Though I haven’t agreed with everything Kamala Harris has said or done. I trust and admire her enough I’ve voted for her in every election in which I could.

I believe that, within the limits imposed by America’s capitalist republic, Kamala Harris will do her best to make ordinary Americans’ lives better – and Donald Trump will do his best to destroy America’s republican experiment and emulate his dictator heroes, including Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Viktor Orbán of Hungary, in ruling America by decree and using the enormous power of the government to punish his ever-growing list of political, social and cultural “enemies” for the rest of his life.

And it will be for the rest of his life because it’s clear one thing Donald Trump will never do again is allow himself to lose power. If he’s returned to the Presidency in 2024, either in a free and fair election or by installing his minions onto election boards (as he’s already done in Georgia) and having them rig the results for him, he will be President for life, either by “terminating” the 22nd Amendment or by installing one of his children as what Latin Americans call an imposición candidate. Trump has already told his followers on the Christian Right that if they vote for him in 2024, “You’ll never have to vote again.”