The baiting is the hardest part

Harris played Trump. Repeatedly.

During one of her debates with Donald Trump in 2016, Hillary Clinton described her opponent as “a man you can bait with a tweet.” Tonight, Kamala Harris provided overwhelming evidence in support of this thesis.

The debate started off a bit more evenly. Harris introduced herself as a product of a middle class childhood and began to list a series of economic proposals to address housing prices. Trump introduced himself with a series of attacks on the administration’s economic record and repeatedly claimed that the economy under his stewardship had been better. He was often fabricating details, but the overall image of the incumbent party offering proposals while the challenger lambastes the record was at least familiar.

But with that introductory material taken care of, Harris pivoted to her strategy of baiting Trump into more and more damaging behavior. Knowing that his ego is much like Galen Erso’s reactor design in the Death Star — unstable and vulnerable to even a small attack — Harris described a Trump rally as a long, boring event that many people wander out of long before it’s over. And she did this during a discussion of immigration, a subject on which the administration is politically vulnerable.

“Any criticism of his rallies will set off a chain reaction that will destroy the entire station."

And so Trump, instead of attacking her on literally his strongest issue, instead spent valuable time absurdly defending his own rallies: “First, let me respond as to the rallies. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” This was the pattern of the rest of the debate.

Discussing crime rates, Harris rattled off Trump’s own criminal indictments and convictions, goading Trump into a conspiratorial rant about the prosecutions against him instead of attacking the administration’s record. She went after his ego again by saying that democratic leaders around the world think he’s a joke and a dictatorial threat to democracy, prompting him to offer Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, a literal strongman, as a character witness.

Her discussion of abortion, and the dangers pregnant women face in the wake of the Dobbs ruling, was likely her strongest moment of the night, and showed an ability to use that issue to political advantage in a way that Joe Biden was never able to do. And it also put Trump in the position of repeatedly talking about an issue that was clearly uncomfortable for him and his party and making wild claims about abortion, such as that literally everyone in the US wanted Roe v. Wade overturned and that it is legal in some states to kill a baby after its birth.

Trump’s pivot from his own answer on immigration to repeatedly promote racist and unsubstantiated claims about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating their neighbors’ pets was a freebee for Harris.

On the live-blog last night, Julia Azari and I had a brief discussion about whether women candidates present a unique challenge for Trump — he got mauled in his debates with Hillary Clinton, and repeatedly got in trouble when facing Carly Fiorina in 2016. It may well be that, as Kris Kanthak, Jennifer Lawless, and other scholars have noted, women running for office just tend to be better prepared than men are at that level, and Trump has found himself running against two very sharp lawyers and a corporate leader. It may also be that women candidates particularly get under Trump’s skin and easily irk and bait him.

I stand by my prediction from the end of the debate: “My guess is that polls will show her winning this debate by a substantial margin, although that will be a brief story and will not likely affect the contest much.” But there’s at least some chance this ignites several days of coverage about Trump not being up for this task (a la Biden in July) and maybe, just maybe, steers pundits away from the “Voters won’t be satisfied until they see the details of Harris’ corporate tax rate plans down to the hundredths decimal place” coverage.