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Donald Trump’s campaign team and his allies had hoped that a debate against Kamala Harris could offer him another chance to finally target his Democratic rival.

Instead, he became beside himself.

The former president repeated false claims about abortion, promoted conspiracy theories and reacted with frustration and defensiveness to discussions about the size of the crowd at his rally, in a series of evasive responses at the first and possibly last presidential debate of 2024.

In the end, he predicted a third world war without his term in office and one of the biggest pop stars in the world, Taylor Swift, supported his rival.

In their highly anticipated prime-time face-off in Philadelphia on Tuesday, the former president repeated discredited claims that immigrants steal and eat pets, made the false claim that abortion patients kill their children after birth and bristled at Harris’ accusations that his supporters leave his lengthy rallies “exhausted and bored.”

The first-ever face-to-face meeting between the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates presented not only completely different visions of the American future, but also what American reality actually looks like.

Harris promised voters to leave Trump’s distortions behind and instead “build on the hopes and aspirations of the American people.”

Trump, on the other hand, was in a downward spiral, resorting to his tired list of lies and personal attacks while apparently struggling with the fact that he is no longer running against President Joe Biden.

ABC News anchors Linsey Davis and David Muir were tasked with directing the 90 minutes of chaos. But with no audience and his microphone muted when it wasn’t his turn to speak, Trump seemed alone, helpless, out of control and visibly unsettled.

He repeatedly attempted to raise the issue of immigration, claiming that immigrants were “violently occupying buildings” and at one point blurting out that Harris wanted to “perform transgender surgeries on illegal immigrants in prison.”

Haitian immigrants in Ohio would “eat the dogs,” he said.

“The people who have come here are eating the cats,” Trump said. “They’re eating – they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.”

Harris seemed to laugh and shake his head in disbelief and say, “This is unbelievable.”

“This is really extreme,” she said.

She predicted right at the start that Trump would return to immigration during the debate, an issue that she believes he uses against his supporters to scare them and get them to vote for him.

Trump, Harris said, “would rather race against a problem than solve it.”

At his rallies, he “talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter” and claims that “windmills cause cancer.”

“And what you’ll also notice is that people are leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” she said. “And I’m telling you, the one thing you won’t hear him talk about is you.”

Trump, who then lashed out and was visibly annoyed by the jibes about the size of his crowd, replied that “nobody” goes to the vice president’s events except the people who are “paid” and “bused in.”

On the future of abortion access, Harris argued: “You don’t have to give up your faith or your deeply held beliefs to agree that the government – and Donald Trump certainly – should not tell a woman what to do with her body.”

Trump, on the other hand, falsely claimed that doctors were “executing babies after birth.”

However, he refused to state clearly that he would veto a national abortion ban if it passed Congress and landed on his desk.

When asked if he regretted anything about his response to the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump said he had “nothing to do with it” and again called for the prosecution of people crossing the US-Mexico border.

“To all those who remember January 6, I say, ‘We don’t have to go back,'” said Harris, who was in the Capitol that day as a senator.

“It’s time to close the chapter,” she added. “And if that was too much for you, we have a place for you in our campaign.”

When asked whether his recent statements that he lost the 2020 election “by a hair’s breadth” were a years-delayed admission of defeat, Trump said he was being “sarcastic.”

He referred to the millions of votes he received in 2016 and 2020, without mentioning that Biden received even more votes.

Harris quoted her opponent as saying that Trump was “fired by 81 million people.”

A question about Trump and his allies embracing false and racist attempts to undermine their biracial heritage gave Harris an opportunity to reflect on his history of racist attacks, from a federal court lawsuit in the 1970s alleging racial discrimination in Trump’s housing projects to his recent comments about the vice president.

“I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president when he has, over and over again, tried to divide the American people on racial issues,” she said. “I think the American people want more than that – want more than that.”

In her opening remarks, she reminded Americans of “what Donald Trump left us” and listed what she said the Biden administration inherited after Trump’s four years in office: the “worst unemployment since the Great Depression,” the “worst health epidemic in a century” and “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War” after a Trump-incited mob tried to overturn the 2020 election results.

“We have cleaned up the mess that Donald Trump created,” she said.

Trump, the first former president to be convicted of a crime, is running for a third term on his “Make America Great Again” agenda. In his retribution-focused campaign, he has painted an apocalyptic picture of a nation plagued by violent crime and a faltering economy under Biden’s administration. Trump has now blamed the vice president for it all.

Harris has adopted the slogan “We are not going back” and is relying on optimism and the promise of an “economy of opportunity” that would build on Biden’s platform.

Tuesday’s debate took place less than two months before Election Day and just seven weeks after Biden ended his re-election campaign and endorsed the vice president as the Democratic nominee.

Harris officially accepted her nomination less than a month ago, on August 22, at the Democratic National Convention, marking an extraordinary turn of events that compressed what would normally be a months-long election cycle into a few crucial weeks.