The presidential debate: Harris wins

To say that Donald Trump looked like an angry satsuma would be an insult to satsumas. But in last night’s televised presidential debate against Kamala Harris, that’s exactly what he resembled. The reason for his grumpy, citric scowl, was that by any objective measure, Harris wiped the floor with him.

She knocked him all over the place. She bated him into making angry, really very weird pronouncements about abortion and immigration, teased him about his political rallies which she said were boring, and succeeded in subtly perpetuating her campaign’s underlying attack line against Trump – that he’s weird.

And he is weird. There’s no doubt about that. The Donald Trump of this debate was more haphazard, swivel-eyed and barking than in previous debates – and that’s saying something.

His campaign rallies are ten a penny, and nowadays even Fox News tends to cut away from them when Trump goes too far “off the script”, as the current euphemism goes.

But a presidential debate is a whole different matter. People pay attention to these. And so today, millions of Americans watching the morning news will see clipped highlights of Donald Trump shouting about immigrants, and claiming, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats.” It’s hard to imagine Eisenhower or one of the Bushes, or really anyone at all in US political history coming out with a line like that.

Trump was then promptly corrected by a moderator, in a note passed by the live fact-checking team, who informed viewers that local authorities in Springfield had found no evidence of animals being harmed in this way. As Trump made his astoundingly weird claims, Harris smiled in disbelief, and also in triumph. She didn’t even need to say it. He was showing it.

Trump was like an army in retreat, burning villages as he went, making wild claims about abortion, about immigration, and claiming that Harris was a Marxist who would destroy the economy. The rampaging, stream-of-consciousness nonsense flowed out in such a torrent that post-match analysis showed Trump had spoken for substantially longer than Harris.

But it did him no good, because the more he spoke, the worse he looked. Harris wiped the floor with him because of her sharper debating skills, and her attack on Trump for his warm attitude toward dictators, especially Putin, landed very hard. But her greatest advantage, which gave her a victory of an even more significant kind, was that she appeared normal, while he did not. She could speak in coherent sentences, while he could not. She could form a clear thought, and articulate that thought, while he delivered a relentless tornado of word salad. People notice these things, especially undecided voters.

Perhaps the most chilling moment of the debate came when the subject turned to the result of the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Trump made clear that he still does not accept the result of the 2020 election.

When the moderator asked him whether he regretted his actions and statements on January 6, in which he gave a speech encouraging his supporters to go down to the capitol and “fight like hell”, Trump replied “I had nothing to do with that”, before going on, absurdly, to blame the riots on Nancy Pelosi, the democrat speaker of the house. In recordings taken on the day, the January 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol can be heard shouting “Nancy where are you?” Pelosi was the target of the mob, not its instigator.

Later, Trump appeared after the debate in the “spin room”, where campaign officials hobnob with the press, and began shouting about how he had won. Harris, he said, was weak, especially on foreign policy, which suggested that her jibe about Putin had obviously hit home.

He then claimed that the only reason Harris had immediately called for another debate wasn’t because she was confident but because she had lost and wanted to make up lost ground. With each moment, the margin of Harris’s debate victory seemed to increase.

Trump ranted and gurgled at the press pack, claiming that the moderators had been “very unfair” to fact-check him, but most of the journalists weren’t having it. One of them told him his claim about people eating pets was “nonsense”.

It was bedlam. The chatter was so loud one hack even had to shout at him to speak up. “This was my best debate,” said Trump “I thought it was very good.” But the glaring fact was that Harris didn’t go into the spin room. She didn’t have to.

Things became even worse for Trump when it transpired that Taylor Swift, perhaps the biggest pop icon in the world, had decided to endorse Kamala Harris. The consequences of that for the female vote, particularly when combined with Trump’s anti-abortion views, will be substantial.

Throughout last night’s debate, Trump appeared laughable, relentlessly petty and delusional. From almost every angle, he is absurd, and Harris skilfully encouraged him to emphasise the worst elements of his character. But that should not obscure the fact that Trump is desperate – and dangerous. After this drubbing by Kamala Harris, he will be even more so.