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It’s hardly a secret that one very effective way to get Donald Trump is to target the things he’s most insecure about. Heck, Joe Biden managed it back in June’s debate, but it was only near the end of the debate and too late to make any difference by then. Just before the final commercial break, Biden called Trump a “whiner,” and it rattled Trump so thoroughly that Trump’s closing statement was an unfocused attempt to “YOU’RE the puppet” Biden, insisting “this man is just a complainer,” and rambling.
Harris was far more deliberate in mashing Trump’s buttons, unlocking his incoherent rage mode like pimply teenager in 1986 who had mastered the Konami Code. But more presidential-like.
The Atlantic put it quite nicely: “Harris’s debate prep seemed to have concentrated on psychology as much as on policy. She drove Trump and trapped him and baited him—and it worked every time.”
Or to borrow the only thing I learned in ninth grade biology, it was cool to see how many times Harris could make that dead frog’s leg jump with just a little juice from a verbal nine-volt battery.
Harris started off by crossing the stage to shake Trump’s hand, which he wasn’t expecting; that moment was echoed at a 9/11 memorial event in New York this morning, where you can see Trump try that stupid dominance move of his where he pulls on the other person’s hand to try to pull them close — God, remember when we had to witness that at every global leaders’ meeting? — and she stayed anchored, unmoving.
Again and again, Harris found Trump’s weak points, and squeezed. On foreign policy, she used his own top appointed staffers’ words against him. Watch the pretend-smile and immediate scowl!
HARRIS: If you want to really know the inside track on who the former president is — if he didn’t make it clear already — just ask people who have worked with him. His former chief of staff, a four-star general, has said he has contempt for the Constitution of the United States. His former national security adviser has said he is dangerous and unfit. His former secretary of Defense has said the nation, the republic, would never survive another Trump term.
Trump was left sputtering and insisting that he’d had the good sense to fire those lousy idiots he’d appointed in the first place, because they were terrible so why did you appoint ‘em, Donald, why?
A half hour in, Harris went for the heavy guns, hitting Trump right in his beloved crowd sizes, the measure of how much he is loved. That was too much for him, and he snapped into a state of sputtering rage that lasted the rest of the debate; that may have broken something, since in response he shot back not only by accusing Harris of paying people to come to her rallies, but then immediately segued to the fake Haitian immigrants-eating-pets story.
If any of his debate prep people begged him not to say it — though why would they? — it didn’t take. Here’s a clip, lightly edited for time. Good lord, what a meltdown.
After noting the weird things Trump talks about at his rallies, Harris got him right in the voonerables: “And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” Let’s just note his reaction face:
Then it was on to the madness:
“A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in — they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
As the New York Times noted with a nice montage of screenshots from the debate, Harris’s facial reactions to Trump’s weirdness had a kind of rhetoric all in themselves, perhaps goading Trump, if he had looked at her, but certainly wordlessly reflecting or even coaching the viewing audience’s disbelief and amusement. Her mic was muted for most of his rants, but her expressions were not:
In a one-two punch, Harris took a dig at Trump’s election lies, saying “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. […] And clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that,” and then immediately Tomoe Nage’d one of Trump’s favorite lies, his claim that under Obama and Biden (and Harris), other countries are “laughing at us.” Well heck no, Donald, they’re laughing at YOU.
HARRIS: I have traveled the world as vice president of the United States. And world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump. I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you. And they say you’re a disgrace.
Trump, fuming, then invoked one leader who really loves him: Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban, “one of the most respected men.”
And everybody laughed at him yet again. We could list other examples, but honestly, Trump was run over by a truck. Not suddenly, but repeatedly.
OPEN THREAD!
[Atlantic / NYT / ABC News Debate Transcript / WaPo (gift link)]
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