Kamala Out-Alphas Trump
From the moment he first ran for president in 2016, Donald Trump has centered his entire political career around masculinity. He’s boasted about the size of his “hands” and obsessed about the size of the crowds that come to hear him speak. He physically stalked Hillary Clinton around a debate stage and has openly drooled over strongman dictators. He walked into this summer’s Republican National Convention to James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” And he seemed to think that simply being taller than the five-foot-four Kamala Harris was going to advantage him bigly in their first match-up on Tuesday.
So it was particularly satisfying to watch Harris out-alpha Trump from the second she stepped onstage for ABC News’s presidential debate, striding over to his podium and introducing herself with an outstretched hand before he could even get his bearings. A confident and well-prepared Harris smiled coolly as she laid traps all night for Trump to walk right into, making a sexist ass out of him as he repeated some of his biggest lies on abortion, immigration, and his own economic record.
“You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter,” she said in what felt like an opening statement. “He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
It was the perfect bait. “People don’t leave my rallies,” Trump spat in his defense. “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” He angrily fired back, absurdly, that Harris has to pay people to attend her own record-breaking events.
She went on to repeatedly bruise the former president’s ego. “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” she said in response to a question about election interference. “And clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that.” World leaders are laughing at Trump, she said, and the military leaders who worked with him “say you’re a disgrace.” In response, much like a cornered 13-year-old, Trump insisted that other heads of state fear him while Joe Biden “hates” and “can’t stand” Harris.
He dripped with that kind of sexist scorn throughout the debate, at one point shushing Harris with an “I’m talking now.” During an exchange about the war in Gaza, he said that Harris refused to attend Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress “because she was at a sorority party of hers. She wanted to go to the sorority party.” But none of this got under Harris’ skin. She appeared unfazed and almost amused at the cartoonishness of the wannabe dictator standing next to her, as if it were beneath her to have to debate him at all.
Trump, of course, spewed his usual stream of absurd lies: that Democrats want to “execute” babies after birth, that Harris wants to pay for surgeries for trans prisoners, that immigrants are eating their neighbors’ pets in Ohio. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” he said. (This conspiracy theory has been debunked.) “Talk about extreme,” Harris said with a laugh after the unhinged rant about immigrants eating dogs. Throughout the night, she alternated between a look of mild disbelief and a relatable eye-roll in response to Trump’s ramblings, exuding I’m wiping the floor with this clown through every facial expression.
But she shined the most when talking about abortion. She laid out the connection between Trump appointing the conservative Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade and the resulting “Trump abortion bans,” which make no exceptions for cases of rape and incest. “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,” she said. “And one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.”
Harris’s trouncing of Trump was so thorough that he went on a lonely walk through the spin room afterward, delusionally insisting that he won the night and that the vice-president “wants a second debate so bad because she lost.” Harris, meanwhile, didn’t need to bother declaring herself the winner to reporters. A certain mega pop star who was moved to endorse her immediately after she walked off stage basically did it for her.
“I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice,” Taylor Swift captioned an Instagram photo of herself holding a cat. In a dig at Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, that’s so perfect it belongs in a museum, she signed the endorsement “Childless Cat Lady.”