Trump’s improv stood no chance against Harris’ coached attacks

Vice President Kamala Harris did exactly what the political professionals said she should do.

In some cases, that was what operatives would tell any candidate to do in any election at any time: Don’t worry about the specific question you are asked, just use it as another opportunity to recite the lines we practiced.

In other cases, of course, Harris’ strategy in her first debate as a presidential nominee was custom-tailored for one specific moment and one specific opponent. She plainly used her long days of debate prep in a Pittsburgh hotel to compile a rich anthology of taunts, putdowns and derisive one-liners against former President Donald Trump. The rehearsal was enough to commit dozens of them to memory — not enough to avoid sometimes sounding a bit stagy in delivery. At times, one could almost see the candidate flipping through a stack of neatly organized 3-by-5 index cards in her mind.

Harris’ strategy worked because Trump arrived at the National Constitution Center without much of a strategy — or at least not with one that could survive past the first 15 minutes or so of the encounter.

On countless occasions, he did the opposite of what any conventional operative would tell him to do.

He responded to her jabs in detail, and thereby let her drive the agenda for the evening. He raised his voice and scowled. For flashes he was clear and forceful, attacking parts of the current administration’s record on immigration or inflation that are genuine vulnerabilities. Then he would let his sentences wander in ways not unlike what President Joe Biden is prone to do. Rather than developing a clear and sustained argument throughout the evening, he flung thick brushes against the canvas and let the paint drip wherever.

While Harris was coached up to her eyeballs, Trump was improvisational to the point of incontinence.

No need to hedge: By any conventional measure of debates, she won the debate by getting him to do most of her work.

Better hedge at least a little: Trump thrills his supporters in part because he shreds media- and operative-class assumptions about presidential comportment or winning campaign strategies. By conventional standards, Hillary Rodham Clinton won her debates against Trump in 2016.

Still, Harris plainly accomplished her objectives for the evening — prosecuting her case against him in relentless detail and issuing four different invitations to Americans, in nearly identical language each time, to “turn the page” on Trump and a brand of politics that has hovered over all aspects of politics for nearly a decade. The New York Times stopwatch said he spoke for 43 minutes while she had just 38 — but it is hard to imagine she begrudged him the extra five minutes. She might have benefited from giving him ten.

If someone ever builds the Political Consultants Hall of Fame, this evening may deserve its own exhibit.

Historically, the mythology of debates is that they are occasions to transcend the realm of pollsters and commentators and campaign gamesmanship and present the candidates in ways that speak to everyday voters watching in their living rooms.

This debate, by contrast, underlined how much the inside game — the daily trash-talk and fevered speculation of cable television and social media — now infuses the highest-profile moments of the public campaign.

Harris charged that Trump’s rallies are filled with nonsensical references to windmills causing cancer and the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, and that people now commonly leave early “out of exhaustion and boredom.” Trump couldn’t resist an extended reply, including an allegation that most of the people who attend her rallies are stooges who get paid to be bused in.

She jabbed him on the number of former Trump appointees and other Republicans who say he is not fit to serve another term. She responded to his criticism about crimes committed by undocumented immigrants by saying, “Well, I think this is so rich,” because of his own felony convictions in New York, his loss of a civil suit charging sexual assault, and the ongoing investigations of his role promoting election denialism and trying to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory.

She baited Trump for being “handed $400 million on a silver platter” by his father and then filing for bankruptcy on six occasions. On this occasion, as on multiple others, Trump took the bait with an angry defense that kept the spotlight on his controversies rather the Biden-Harris record.

The reality is that we learned little new about the essential characters of either candidate. Who did not know that Trump is vain on some matters and can’t let criticism go unanswered? Most people who have been around Harris’ ascent in national politics know how much her rhetorical style is shaped by her early career as a local prosecutor and her penchant for preparation. Now a much larger share of Americans has seen that in action.

While Harris sometimes seemed to be delivering answers that ChatGPT might have produced for a composite Democrat, there were more moments of real passion. The strongest was the measure of sincerity she conveyed — the pitch of her voice shifted a register — when she decried the situation in some states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and its protection of abortion rights: “A survivor of a crime, a violation to their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next. That is immoral.”

Both candidates at times made contradictory arguments. Trump said of Harris: “She is a Marxist. Everybody knows she is a Marxist.” But the notion that the vice president is a dangerous leftist doesn’t sit easily with his contention that she is a lightweight who “doesn’t have a plan” for almost any issue.

Harris, meanwhile, frequently derided Trump as “weak.” But if Trump is really so weak there would be little reason to fear Harris’ argument that he is a potential dictator who in a second term would be “back in the White House with no guardrails.”

As the evening finished, one hovering question was: Will there be another one of these before Nov. 5? Trump clearly could benefit from another swing at bat. Harris might now have less incentive — but also more confidence to accept the challenge. From the voters’ perspective, it was an entertaining show — but also one that invited a sequel a bit less steeped in the obsessions of campaign operatives and television producers.