Former President Donald Trump’s advisers and allies had hatched his plan to attack Vice President Kamala Harris during the debate, and it didn’t take long for him to rip up their plans.
Before the debate, polls showed voters trusted Trump more on immigration and economic issues, advising him to focus on those issues and voters’ anger over high prices. Instead, he reminded many Americans why they turned against him in the first place.
At times, it was hard to separate his answers from the bizarre, angry musings he posts on his social media platform, Truth Social. At one point, Trump even brought up a debunked racist conspiracy theory that Haitian migrants were eating people’s pets – a claim so widespread on the internet that few Americans probably even knew they had a stake in the fight.
“Let me first address the rallies. She said people are starting to leave, people are not going to her rallies, there’s no reason to,” Trump said, adding, “We have the biggest rallies in the history of politics.”
The topic was immigration.
Neither candidate could afford to blow this moment. Harris built a small national lead over the summer, but her momentum appears to have stalled. Polls are even tighter in the few swing states that will decide the election, including Pennsylvania, where the debate took place.
Harris provoked Trump by first distracting him from talking about his favorite topic, immigration, by getting him to rant about the size of the crowd.
By the end of the evening, an angry Trump had quadrupled his false claim that he had won the 2020 election, spread the bizarre conspiracy theory that migrants were eating cats in Ohio, and complained about his own former government officials who had written exposé books.
“If somebody does a bad job, I fire them. Take a guy like Esper. He wasn’t good. I fired him, so he’s writing a book,” Trump said of one of his defense secretaries, Mark Esper. “Someone else is writing a book, because with me they can write a book and nobody else can.”
The vice president’s troll tactics were not subtle. Harris talked about the Wharton School of Finance, Trump’s beloved alma mater, publishing research that calls his economic plans into question. She coupled a major appeal to Republicans with the notion that Dick and Liz Cheney support her, the latter long a subject of Trump’s ire.
“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” Harris said, connecting the story that made Trump a reality TV star to the 2020 election results. “Let’s get this straight, and it’s clear he’s having a lot of trouble processing this.”
Harris wasn’t the only one to infuriate Trump. He seemed visibly annoyed with the moderators of the ABC News debate, who repeatedly interrupted the debate to check his false claims. At one point, Trump interrupted moderator David Muir when he correctly pointed out that judges had rejected over 60 cases involving various claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trump even rejected Muir’s review of the claim that migrants eat pets.
“Well, I’ve seen people on TV,” Trump replied. “People on TV saying my dog was kidnapped and used as food.”
Trump’s team repeated those claims online, arguing that the former president had to take on Harris, Muir and co-host Linsey Davis.
“3 against 1, just as expected,” Jason Miller, a Trump adviser, wrote on X.
Both candidates have pushed for another debate but have not been able to agree on one yet. If Harris and Trump meet again, it will be after the election begins in the US. North Carolina will soon be sending out mail-in ballots, while Pennsylvania will begin early voting on September 16.
