Trump Has Always Been a Ruthless Bully. The Debate Exposed His Weakness.

For years, Donald Trump has bullied and blustered and beaten up on his generally hapless debate opponents. He has mocked their appearance and their energy levels, made up offensive nicknames for them — Sleepy Joe, Low-Energy Jeb, Lyin’ Ted Cruz, and on and on and on; he has lied about their records and he has hyped his own performances. And time and again, he has somehow gotten away with it. Trump insults people, yet some even reward him with their eventual endorsements.

The MAGA leader’s blizzard of lies buried a forlorn Joe Biden in late June, leaving the president slack-jawed with amazement and vulnerable to claims of confusion and rigidity. In the wake of that debate, Biden’s image was shredded, his ability to convey authority and competence irrevocably compromised. He exited the campaign stage three weeks later.

But during Tuesday night’s debate, tens of millions of U.S. voters watched as Vice President Kamala Harris turned the tables on Trump with what seemed to be almost a perfectly executed psy-op. It was striking to watch and could be as politically self-destructive for Trump as Biden’s June 27 performance was for the sitting president.

Harris had clearly been coached, to devastating effect, on how to bait Trump into saying the most obnoxious things possible, the sorts of things that independent voters will cringe on hearing and that even many Republicans will realize shouldn’t be coming from the mouth of a man who seeks the world’s most powerful position. And when, time and again, Trump took the bait and did indeed go down the rabbit hole, she stepped back, looked at him pityingly as if he were the ranting relative everyone is slightly embarrassed by, and let him hoist himself by his own petard. She used the televised split screen and muted mic rule to mock Trump by gently, and silently, laughing away at the absurdities of his statements. She looked calm and collected while he looked, and sounded, like he was about to pop a blood vessel. Her pantomimed expressions of disbelief were far more effective than Trump’s high-decibel outrage game. By debate’s end, if anyone had any doubt that Trump was a loose cannon, those doubts were surely put to rest.

Vice President Kamala Harris turned the tables on Trump with what seemed to be almost a perfectly executed psy-op.

On immigration (which polls show to be the Democrats’ Achilles’ heel, with progressives wanting them to be more open to migration and many centrists siding with the GOP in arguing they should be tougher on the border), instead of sticking to defense, Harris went on the attack. In doing so, she somehow got the ex-president to rant horrific, racist lies about immigrants stealing Ohioans’ pets and eating them. When the ABC moderators fact-checked Trump in real time on his outlandish and offensive claims, Harris wisely chose silence, instead letting Trump double down even further into the realm of the grotesque. I have watched many political debates over the decades; I can’t recall a single instance in which a candidate for high office chose to stake so much political capital on such bizarre, bigoted, baseless smears.

Harris needled Trump about his crowd sizes and about audience members being so bored by his disjoined tirades that they upped and left while he was still orating, to the point that she got him to spend several minutes boasting about how he had the “biggest rallies, the best rallies in the history of politics.” In doing so, he came off as nothing but self-absorbed, a wealthy old man utterly unable to talk about the needs of working-class U.S. voters.

Harris turned to the camera and explained to the audience just how entirely thin-skinned and needing of praise Trump was, and how this left him particularly vulnerable to being flattered into making horrendous national and international decisions. In doing so, she indelibly etched an image into viewers’ minds of Trump as an insecure and immature man-child who always needs to be told just how great he is.

The vice president made her case against Trump for his role in the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and then she stood back and let Trump spout wild lies (which are all too easy to fact-check) about Democrats supposedly supporting laws allowing for the post-birth execution of babies. She decried his role in fomenting the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and got him to defend the rioters and, in so doing, to attack the law enforcement officers who put life and limb on the line that day to try to protect the seat of government from the mob. As he spouted this high-volume nonsense, Trump looked more and more uncomfortable by the minute; if his nose didn’t exactly elongate with each whopper that came out of his mouth, at the very least his scowl intensified, as did his evasive eye movement. The GOP presidential candidate wasn’t talking into the camera to the American people; instead, he was talking to himself, caught in an endless self-centered loop. No wonder that even such a sycophantic supporter as Sen. Lindsey Graham admitted that the debate performance was a “disaster” for the GOP candidate.

Trump doubled down on his unfounded and confusing assertion that Harris “was not Black” previously and “happened to turn Black” a few years ago — all while insisting that he didn’t care either way. He was asked how he would deport 11 million people; instead of even making a bare-bones effort at a policy response, he provided only a meandering answer about how most of the world is seeing a decline in crime, baselessly deducing that those drops are a result of “criminals” being deliberately exported to the United States. He talked about having a “concept of a plan” for how to replace the Affordable Care Act, but didn’t even make the slightest effort to articulate what that concept might look like — which one would think was something of a failure of the imagination given how many tens of millions of Americans, including many Trump supporters, depend on the Affordable Care Act for their health care.

Harris explained to the audience just how entirely thin-skinned and needing of praise Trump was, and how this left him particularly vulnerable to being flattered into making horrendous decisions.

None of this was the stuff of a master politician, of the genius whom Trump fashions himself as being, the oratorical wizard who can “weave” strands together so persuasively as he appeals to voters around the country. In fact, the longer the night went on, the smaller Trump became. It came to resemble a great disappearing act. The man who prowled the stage to such menacing effect against Hillary Clinton in 2016 came undone with only a few questions and fact-checks.

For Democratic staffers and pundits — and, I suspect, for a huge number of viewers — it was a perfect example of schadenfreude. The Oxford English Dictionary defines this German word as meaning “pleasure over another’s misfortune.” But it’s also about comeuppance — about taking joy in someone else reaping what they have long sown. Not surprisingly, many instant reactions, from CNN polls of viewers to Fox News commentaries, declared Harris the debate winner.

There are, of course, still nearly eight weeks to go until the election. And Trump has long been a master at changing the political focus when things temporarily go wrong for him in the court of public opinion. Indeed, his unusual decision to enter the post-debate “spin room” to give interviews to reporters immediately following the debate was likely the opening salvo in a campaign to claim Trump was unfairly derailed by a conspiracy of left-minded journalists and corrupt debate officials. This time around, however, may be different. On national television, Trump was shown to be weak and petty. That is perhaps the most devastating scenario for a man who has always been such a ruthlessly effective bully.