Kamala Harris could do this all day

A few reactions to last night's debate

Look, I wrote back in June that

The strategy for beating Donald Trump in a debate is pretty straightforward. All you need to do is poke him, heckle him, and let the guy come unglued.

His unique weakness is that he has zero impulse control. He’s a loser, and he falls apart whenever you point out that he’s a loser. So what you need to do is just keep delivering jabs and letting him swing wildly in response, reminding the audience that he’s a complete and utter disaster.

I had high hopes for last night’s debate. Kamala Harris is a prosecutor. And this sort of rhetorical performance — telling a clear story while picking apart a witness with something to hide — is what prosecutors are best at.

Kamala Harris delivered. She poked, she needled, she rebuked, and in between she made her case to the American people. It was an absolute masterclass.

I have four notes:

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(1) The recipe here was equal parts fan-service and centrism.

If you just focus on Harris’s policy lines and positive claims, what stands out is how centrist she sounds. She has an economic plan to lift up the middle class. She supports fracking and domestic oil production, alongside renewable energy development. She wants a U.S. military strong enough to stand up for our allies around the world. She wants to move beyond the politics of racial division.

Vice President Harris is clearly aiming her remarks toward disaffected Republicans and low-information centrist voters — the “double-haters,” who broke toward Trump in 2016, left him for Biden in 2020, and are unhappy with the state of the country right now.

Normally the candidate would have to worry about holding the party coalition together. Appealing to low-information centrists can lead to news cycles where pissed off high-information partisans register their discontent.

But she didn’t need to worry about that, both because (a) we get it. We understand the gravity of the situation. And (b) all the high-information partisans are reveling in seeing her break the guy on national television.

We got to watch Kamala Harris stand on the stage last night and say, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people… and clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that.”

That is both a very effective contrast point on the merits and electric fan service. If you are an engaged partisan, that line (and a dozen others beside it) left you cackling with glee. This is what we wanted. It’s all that we wanted. And it clears the space for her to focus the rest of her rhetoric on different audience segments.

(2) This fits especially well with the current social media landscape

Social media in 2024 is essentially just TikTok and a bunch of large platforms trying to emulate TikTok. Instagram wants to be TikTok. X/Twitter wants to be TikTok too. Short video clips+commentary is what travels online today.

I’m old enough to remember Mitt Romney talking about “Binders full of women” in the second 2012 debate. That line stuck, because it was a perfect match for making jokes around a Twitter hashtag. And hashtags and memes were how online culture circulated twelve years ago. Today its video clips, mashups, and commentary.

There were so many moments from last night’s debate that will haunt Trump for the next two months. (“I have concepts of a plan,” paired with video of Harris’s barely contained laughter? “I’ve seen people on television… people on television say my dog was taken and used for food.”)

The immigrants-eating-your-pets insanity is particularly telling, since a whole lot of online scolds spent the previous 24 hours insisting there was no real difference between JD Vance and Elon Musk spreading this racist lie online and a bunch of digital progressives making “JD Vance takes ‘loveseat’ way too literally” jokes last month. There are a lot of differences between the two memes, but the most impactful one is that Donald Trump is incapable of separating made-up internet memes from reality.

The guy seems to have prepped for the debate by bingewatching Newsmax. Not a great choice.

(3) The contours of the broader campaign

All joking aside for a moment, Trump’s central message became abundantly clear last night. His argument is that the country has been utterly destroyed by 3.5 years of Biden/Harris. He insists, repeatedly, that the country is a hellscape now, unrecognizable, overrun by crime and hyperinflation.

Anyone who believes that will indeed vote for him despite last night’s debate. If you think Minneapolis has been burned to the ground and that all of the jobs in Nebraska have been taken by undocumented immigrants who escaped from South American insane asylums, then you’re going to vote against Harris.

But that is such an unbelievably narrow, Fox-News-Extended-Universe type of message.

Crime rates have gone down.

Inflation rates have gone down.

Unemployment rates have also gone down.

Even though Biden’s public approval numbers aren’t great, this isn’t anything like late ‘70s stagflation. People are frustrated that the political system seems broken. They are frustrated that they can’t buy a home. Everything seems to be getting both shoddier and more expensive, and the government often doesn’t seem able to help.

But that doesn’t mean that the non-Fox-News-watching public actually thinks the entire country has collapsed. His message doesn’t resonate very well because it matches neither objective reality nor the mass public’s subjective experience of reality. Minneapolis is quite nice! Unemployment rates are historically low.

What authoritarian demagogues like Trump do best is declare the system is broken and promise that “I alone can fix it.” He is less adept at delivering those lines than he was eight years ago.

Donald Trump looks and sounds like an elderly relative who lives in a nursing home and spends the whole day watching television. He’s barely coherent, untethered from reality, shouting about how much better things used to be.

Even after memories of last night’s debate fade, I suspect his campaign is going to run into the insurmountable problem that neither the candidate or his message actually fit the moment we’re living in.

(4) The action is in the reaction. Watch for the tailspin.

Campaigns are not won or lost in early September. The direct impact of Presidential debates on election outcomes is effectively nil. We can savor this moment, but no one should kid themself that Harris has it in the bag.

That being said, I expect last night’s debate will carry more weight than usual specifically because Trump is such an undisciplined candidate.

They’re making fun of him on the news right now. They’re making fun of him online. The guy might stick to Newsmax and Truth Social, but he’s still gonna hear things. A woman of color stood up to him on national television last night. She cooked him, and she laughed at him. Does anyone believe Donald Trump will handle this well?

A disciplined Presidential campaign would complain about the moderators for a day or two, then plan a news event that changes the subject and recenters the conversation.

The Donald Trump Presidential campaign is probably going to go into a tailspin. People tend to forget how poorly October 2016 was going for the Trump campaign up until the Comey letter. He was behind in the polls and melting down in a series of self-inflicted errors. The Comey letter was an unforeseen, unprecedented campaign-saving gift. I don’t expect there will be anything of similar magnitude in 2024.

So he’s going to tailspin, and I’m not sure what sequence of events could pull him out of the tailspin.

The action is in the reaction. Harris pulled off a masterclass debate performance. In normal times, that would be a limited-duration victory. But against Donald Trump, it could open up a spiral of nonsense that helps define the next 55 days.

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Last night was quite a moment. And we should be cautious in our optimism — moments aren’t monuments.

But it was one hell of a display, and it could have real, lasting effects.