Who you consider the winner of the consequential first presidential debate between former president Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris is likely based on who you liked before the two even took the stage Tuesday in Philadelphia.
But after watching the two spar on ABC, I would give the win to Harris, mostly because she managed not to tell wild bold-faced lies about her opponent’s positions, and because she maintained a silently strong visage that evoked Gen X’s favorite fictional lawyer and mother: “The Cosby Show’s” Clair Huxtable.
Clair could say more with a well-placed disapproving look than with words — do you remember how she eviscerated daughter Vanessa when she lied about going to a concert in Baltimore, and that poor dumb child just kind of wilted because she knew she was done? There were moments during Trump’s ranting that Harris’ face in the split-screen said it all: “Go ahead and keep talking, kid. I can’t say anything worse about you than you’re going to. Keep lying, though.”
Having been on the receiving end of those withering looks from my own mother, I can’t imagine that Trump and his supporters didn’t feel the heat. Even Taylor Swift was convinced! Then again, if you’ve plugged your ears with rebuttals and denials, you might not admit the hit.
The truth, however, is the truth, and I have to give a big thumbs-up to moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, who delivered some early fact-checking rebutting the former president after he insisted that illegal immigrants were stealing and eating people’s pets in Ohio.
I also got a nice fact-checking message from Timothy Young, of Baltimore-based immigrant support nonprofit Global Refuge, that these stories “aren’t just false, they’re deeply harmful. They play into old, racist stereotypes that dehumanize people for political gain, and it’s deeply shameful that we see them persist up to and including in 2024.”
Trump also repeated the refuted lie that any state in the union allows for the murder of full-term babies after birth, and I can’t imagine that any of his debate coaches advised him to lean into that. But there were so many easily disprovable whoppers that a friend sent me that GIF of “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star Kandi Burruss raising her hands exasperatedly to the heavens and intoning, “The lies! The lies!”
What else could you call blatant, in-your-face fibs, like saying that the victim died in the 1989 Central Park attack for which five Black and brown young men were jailed and eventually exonerated? She’s still alive. Or that Trump didn’t care about Harris’ racial identity when he was the one who blatantly said she’d suddenly become Black? Or that even liberals wanted abortion rights to be handed back to the states? That Harris outright hates Israel, and Arabs?
Many media outlets put a lot of weight into the idea that Harris was not only debating Trump, but also his prep person and former presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who got off some zingers against the current VP when they debated during the 2020 presidential campaign. It was pointless, because not only was Harris not debating Gabbard, but Trump, as she stated, was not debating Joe Biden. He’s running against her, and his attempts to try to pin everything Biden did on her didn’t seem to stick.
Living in past alleged glories is clearly not what she’s about, she said, as she sought to define her potential presidency as being about the future, and Trump’s centering on the past and stirring up fears.
Trump also continued to display mainstream ignorance about Black culture when he called her address of the national convention of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc. a “sorority party.” She wasn’t hanging with college students, but with powerful professional adult women who vote. Also that’s not her sorority. But if you don’t care about the truth, it doesn’t matter.
It was also clear to me that if Trump had been coached to remain unruffled and to try to stick to non-divisive topics, he failed. Harris got him to drone on and on about the size of his rallies and how Russia would never have invaded Ukraine if he had been president.
He also kept complimenting Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, and I’m not sure if that’s what undecided voters were looking for.
Again, it seemed clear to me that if you judge a debate’s winner and loser on who remained largely unflappable and landed the most verbal jabs, then Harris took it. But we’re dealing with a lot of split reality here, and if you were inclined to believe Trump’s lies and bluster no matter what, then the debate probably doesn’t matter.
