The Unexpected Relief of Politics-As-Usual
The Unexpected Relief of Politics-As-Usual
Harris grinds out a win with a calm, professional performance.
Ah, subjects and verbs! Direct objects, sometimes. I still have the memory of the June debate seared into my mind, so I watched the Trump-Harris debate as a grammarian as much as anything else, looking for coherence as well as senescence.
The overall feeling of tonight’s debate is of having been stuck in a traffic jam forever and finally picking up speed again—regaining politics-as-usual. The debate was perfectly professional, mean-spirited, featuring what Kamala Harris called “the same old tired playbook”—a set of locked-in talking points with in many cases little resemblance to any recognizable reality.
What a relief. Like hearing a pop song that used to drive you crazy but triggers a certain nostalgia when it comes back on the radio.
What comes back, also, is the lost art of debate point-counting. The Trump-Biden debate was the sort of knockout in which Trump seemed to be making an effort at times to keep his opponent upright. In this debate, at least in the early going, the candidates were trading actual blows. Harris was slightly stiffer on the economy, with Trump painting her “opportunity economy” as an empty talking point and successfully defending tariffs. Not surprisingly, Harris was better on abortion, with Trump trotting out an off-kilter line of claiming that Democrats favored not only late-term abortions but infanticide.
By the immigration question, a divide seemed to be opening up between them. In what should have been Trump’s strongest issue, he got himself pulled into the claim that immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio—and then into a back-and-forth with the moderators who pointed out that the Springfield city manager had credible reports of no such thing. “I mean, you talk about extreme,” Harris said in what may have been the night’s most effective soundbite.
Toward the midway point, the debate fell into a pattern that was more like judo than boxing—with both sides trying to get the other to step out-of-bounds and reveal themselves as more extreme. This was where Harris’ contained approach started to pay dividends. She mostly stuck to her preparation, repeating damning quotes about Trump, depicting herself as a champion of the average American. Trump had his attack lines, trying to tie Harris back to her more progressive 2019 positions, but he just had less to go on than he did in past debates with Biden and Clinton. His claim that Harris had been inculcated in Marxism by her Marxist professor father—“everybody knows she’s a Marxist”—was the kind of wild overreach that didn’t land. Meanwhile, Trump’s focus on infanticide in the abortion question and on cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio in the immigration question could only have led to the perception, among swing voters watching, that he was out of control. Same went for his sourcing. As usual, Trump seemed to get all his information from Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Viktor Orbán. Harris was more effective in citing all the horrible things that Mark Milley, Mark Esper, and a wide array of Trump’s former officials had said about him.
Trump was, of course, fast-and-loose with facts, and, accordingly, the mainstream media immediately spun the debate as a major victory for Harris. It likely wasn’t quite that. Trump did get in his lines. Saying of Harris’ soundbite-y economic plan, “It’s four sentences, it’s like run spot run” was amusing enough. But what I imagine would make the difference with swing voters was that Harris was poised, controlled, and ran a tight ship, while a great deal of what Trump said could only have come across as hot air—and tired hot air at that.
So, in the end, point-counting gets you only so far, and we end up watching like grammarians—or acting coaches. Trump plowed his way to the presidency, and has maintained his hold on the political discourse, by overawing opponents, by speaking more loudly and more forcefully and by trying to dominate. But after enough years of this, it comes across like hectoring. His shrill demands that Harris keep quiet when he thought she was about to interrupt him registered as a shock to her—and, likely, to many viewers. She was professional, respectful, but didn’t yield an inch. He was a bully and those sharp moments of telling Harris to shut up may well be what people most remember from the debate. The question, in the end, becomes whether Americans are on the side of the bully or not.
Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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Harris's debate staff did a brilliant job of training her to tweak Trump's weird trigger points: get him distracted into talking about the size of his....crowds; how much money he started with; cat-eating in Ohio; whether he thinks he won the 2020 election, etc.
I felt like I was watching the "Caine Mutiny" or "A Few Good Men," just waiting for him to blurt out something about strawberries or "you're damned right, I ordered the code red." I didn't have to wait long: "Yes I won the election!" Oh boy.
I think Harris has a lot of very dangerous policy ideas (e.g. price & rent controls), but she was Tom Cruise and Trump was Jack Nicholson tonight.
I too thought the debate went poorly but for different reasons. Trump displayed a disjointed performance on defending his policies while Harris was polished in her gauzy advocacy of vague policies of no substance. The moderators however displayed such rank animosity toward Trump, repeatedly and sometimes incorrectly fact checking his statements. For Harris they not once fact checked her statements although many were previously and elsewhere disproven. Admittedly it was hardy to fact check Harris as most of her statements were not explaining her policies but espousing vague emotional platitudes. Moderators should either equally fact check both debaters or fact check neither of them. Debaters should be free to make any statements they wish and it’s the opponent’s job to counter them. But I was surprised that a post-debate Reuters poll of their Independent voters showed a plurality favoring Trump despite most viewers declaring Harris the debate winner. Perhaps debates have just lost their influence over such highly polarized voting groups today. And we just havee no information yet whether any of this sturm und drang will influence the election outcome in any significant way.