He Humiliated Himself, Columnists Give Us The Details

Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Alex Brandon/Associated Press

 

Michelle Goldberg, Patrick Healy,Vishakha Darbha

By Michelle Goldberg and Patrick Healy

 

Michelle Goldberg, the Times Opinion columnist, and Patrick Healy, the deputy Opinion editor, discuss the best and worst moments of the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Will Harris’s apparent debate night victory matter to the swing state voters who can make the difference?

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the audio piece. To listen to this piece, click the play button below.

‘I Feel Like She Humiliated Him’: How Trump Lost the Debate

Two Opinion writers break down the Trump-Harris debate.

Patrick Healy: Tonight was a crucial moment in this strange, chaotic, unpredictable presidential race. All eyes had been on Kamala Harris, and given her short time as a candidate, she hasn’t had many of these spontaneous and unscripted moments to really show herself and prove herself to a lot of voters. 

And Michelle, you said before the debate that beyond any specifics on policy, the only thing that really mattered is if Kamala Harris wins it. So how are you feeling about how she did tonight?

Michelle Goldberg: I mean, she won it. I don’t think there’s any question about that.

I was extremely anxious coming into this because the stakes are so incredibly high, and Kamala Harris hasn’t always been the best at speaking extemporaneously. She can sometimes lapse into word salad.

And she was, maybe, a little bit nervous, a little bit shaky at the very beginning. But then she found her footing. She baited Trump and he took the bait every single time. He ranted incoherently. She gave these crisp, concise answers.

She didn’t get hung up on explaining her past positions, but I also don’t think that she came off as evasive. I mean, maybe somebody who was less enraptured of finally seeing somebody take it to Donald Trump would have seen it differently.

One sign of how well she did is that conservatives are apoplectic about the moderators and saying how unfair this was to Trump, when I think the one place where the moderators really did do Kamala Harris a favor was in letting Trump talk so much. I believe he spoke much more than she did, and the more he spoke, the more angry and unhinged he seemed. 

Healy: You’re so right about just from the moment that the debate started, she went on offense. She had that great boss moment at the beginning where she came right over to Trump and shook his hand and introduced herself. She just went on offense so quickly and over and over again, put out that bait. And it’s so strange because Trump and his advisers knew that kind of strategy was coming at them and yet he just fell for it over and over again. Did that surprise you, or is it just Donald Trump can’t help himself?

Goldberg: Can I say something about that moment? This whole debate was very cathartic, I think not just for somebody who watched in horror, the debate that ended Joe Biden’s campaign.

To me it really felt like coming full circle from that debate where Trump stalked Hillary Clinton around the stage and tried to physically intimidate her.

And what Kamala Harris did right from the get go was physically get in Donald Trump’s space. Like, physically seize the initiative. You could see on the split screen, she’s looking at him, he can’t look at her. He’s so discomfited by her.

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And yes, this was no secret, her campaign was saying over and over again, they’re going to bait him, they’re going to try to get under his skin. Maybe I worried a little bit that it wouldn’t work, in part because it was so telegraphed. Could Donald Trump maintain the challenge of seeming normal for 90 minutes? He’s done it sort of at certain points in the past. 

But I think that Donald Trump doesn’t change. And they made a bet, which I think is a good one, on the force of his incredible narcissism overcoming whatever preparation he managed to sit through. Time after time, he had to answer on the Central Park Five, he had to answer on the inheritance that he got from his father. Every time that they were on territory that might have been a little bit more favorable to him, or dangerous to her, she was able to completely sidetrack him by making him defend these really irrelevant points.

Healy: Did Harris take Trump down, Michelle?

Goldberg: Well, what does it mean to take Trump down? I feel like she humiliated him. I feel like there was something very cathartic in having somebody finally say to his face, that you’re a disgrace. There was one moment where she seemed to be kind of searching for the right put down, and finally she just said:

Audio clip of Kamala Harris from debate: And this … former president, ex-president, invited them to Camp David …

Healy: Right, there was that long pause.

Goldberg: I think that as much as anything else, there were a bunch of answers he gave that we’re going to be hearing again and again and again.

We’re going to be hearing again and again and again, that he wouldn’t answer the question of whether he would veto an abortion ban. And he actually disassociated himself from when JD Vance said that he would veto an abortion ban.

We’re going to be hearing a lot, and I think that this was a really key moment, because there’s been so much criticism of Harris for not having a more fleshed-out policy agenda — not that Donald Trump has one, or actually he does have one as Project 2025, but he wants to disavow it — but it is going to be difficult for the Trump campaign to hit Harris for not having a plan when his answer on what his alternative to Obamacare would be is, “I have the concept of a plan.” 

Clip of Linsey Davis from the debate: Just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan?

Clip of Donald Trump: I have concepts of a plan. I’m not president right now.

Goldberg: I think that phrase is one that we’re going to hear a lot.

Healy: I feel like she revealed the real Trump in full, just the way that he descended into lies and incoherence and the kind of extremism on issues like abortion that I think turn off so many American voters, including a lot of moderate and independent voters.

At the same time, the strongest moment that I felt Trump had, maybe no surprise, was in his closing statement. Those closing statements are written by a lot of advisers, they’re poll-tested, they’re memorized by candidates. We’ve seen it over and over again. But it’s where he tried to pivot back to argue, “Kamala Harris has been there in the White House for three and a half years. They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and a half years to create jobs. Why hasn’t she done it? Why hasn’t she done it?” That kind of why hasn’t she done it. I’m sure a lot of Donald Trump supporters liked that moment. But was that too late in the debate?

Goldberg: Yeah, I’m sure that they liked it too. But I would imagine that if you were a Donald Trump supporter, which is not necessarily an easy subjectivity for me to imagine my way into — but I would imagine that you had expected him to be hammering that home for an hour and a half.

I feel like you’d be tearing your hair out because there were so many things that she might be vulnerable on that he just couldn’t land any punches, in part, because he thinks in such broad and hyperbolic and kind of neon terms. So rather than zeroing in on specific left-wing positions that she might have taken in the past, he says, “You’re a Marxist.” This sounds ridiculous to people because she’s obviously not a Marxist. Or he says, ”Your dad was a Marxist.” 

I think that was a better moment for him at the end, but I think it just probably reminded his supporters of what they had wanted him to do for the entire debate. And they’re not going to break with him, but I imagine that they feel, at least some of them, kind of demoralized.

Healy: Michelle, what were you watching for in the debate in terms of how you would have defined success? Because I think we have a little bit of a difference of opinion here. Who did Trump and who did Harris need to convince tonight?

Goldberg: This is one of the tragic things about our political system, that they needed to convince a small sliver of the most checked out voters in the states that actually matter. I mean, this is no way to run a democracy, but it is what it is.

I fundamentally don’t believe that people whose minds aren’t made up in this election are waiting to hear a certain policy position. If you’re making up your mind between voting for Kamala Harris and voting for Donald Trump, you are somebody who probably doesn’t care a lot about politics or pay a lot of attention to politics.

Your sources of information are probably not necessarily mainstream sources of information. It’s probably podcasts and social media and things you hear from your friends and strange notions that stick with you. So it’s very difficult if you are one of the odd people that follows politics really intensely to then say what policy positions are going to play with them. 

Nevertheless, I think one of the reasons that Donald Trump was so hulking with Hillary Clinton, and even though I believe that most people felt like she had won that debate, he had looked imposing and made her look rattled. That’s what I think Donald Trump traffics in. He traffics in dominance. And so the fact that he was clearly not the dominant figure on that stage, I could be wrong, but I’ve got to think that leaves an impression with people.

Healy: Michelle, I want to ask another strategy question because I went into the debate with this question on my mind, and I’m coming out of the debate with the question still on my mind, which is: Can Kamala Harris win the election largely, if not totally, on a pure Democratic base turnout. Is it just about energizing Democrats the way that she has over the last several weeks —

Goldberg: But I don’t think that’s what she’s doing.

Healy: — or winning swing voters. You think she’s getting swing voters with these answers?

Goldberg: I think that she is talking a lot about bipartisanship. At the DNC were tons of Republicans, tons of outreach. She’s obviously tacked to the center on fracking, on policing, on the border, certainly, she tried to outflank Trump on the right on China.

I mean, swing voters are idiosyncratic. How many people will be persuaded by this is hard to say. But I certainly don’t think that she’s running a base-only strategy. 

Healy: Michelle, what do you think this debate will be remembered for?

Goldberg: I think it will be remembered for the “concept of a plan.” It will be remembered for the talk of eating pets. It will be remembered for his accusation that Kamala Harris wanted to perform sex-change surgeries on illegal immigrants. I think it will be remembered for Trump refusing to give an answer on whether he would sign a national abortion ban. And I think it will probably be remembered by him saying something along the lines of “I’m leading on fertilization.”

I think he said, “I am a leader on IVF." “I am a leader on fertilization.” He couldn’t even get his own completely unrealistic, spontaneous promises right.

Healy: Michelle, you have written deeply and powerfully about abortion, abortion rights, and reproductive freedom in this race. If there’s something memorable for me tonight, it was how effectively Harris put the question to all voters in America, which is, “Why would you trust Donald Trump on reproductive rights. Why would you trust him on that?”

Goldberg: I just think we have never heard someone speaking like that about abortion on a national stage.

Healy: Absolutely. Not even Hillary Clinton.

Goldberg: And I think that was probably the moment when the debate kind of changed, where she was so powerful and Donald Trump kept repeating this lie. 

I’m curious how you think this lands because she never even pointed out that this was a lie and maybe she didn’t have to, because I think people know that no, everybody didn’t want Roe v. Wade overturned. No, Democrats didn’t want Roe v. Wade overturned.

Healy: Those abortion answers were her best moments and his worst moments. She was talking about real people having real tragedies that whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, you probably know some people who have really struggled with reproduction, fertility, tragic miscarriages, or health issues if you live in states with, as she said, the Trump bans.

And Trump is talking about how, first he said West Virginia, then he said Virginia, where live babies are being put to death, which is just a total lie.

Goldberg: It’s a total lie and I feel like if you followed his rhetoric for a long time, you can trace the germ of it in something that the former Virginia governor said and then it was amplified into this kind of right wing urban legend. If you’re conversant in that stuff, you know what he was talking about. But like, it’s just crazy.

Healy: It crystallized it for me. If Kamala Harris spends the last four weeks of this campaign basically arguing over and over again, “You can’t trust Donald Trump. You can’t trust him on abortion rights. You can’t trust him on the economy. You can’t trust him with Vladimir Putin. You can’t trust him on the Gaza Israel war. You can’t trust him on crime. You can’t trust him on tariffs, on China, on Ukraine.”  There is some power in that argument. 

I think we started seeing some of the seeds of it in this debate tonight, where I think for a lot of Democrats, a lot of undecided voters, Independents, late breaking voters, they want to trust that their president has their interests on their side. And boy, after nine years of Donald Trump, it’s a pretty powerful argument to say, “You can’t trust the guy.”

Goldberg: I don’t know. Do you think that argument lands with the kind of people that have been in your focus groups?

Healy: We just did a focus group of Pennsylvania moderate voters who I think are looking for reasons to vote for Harris. They want a kind of permission to not vote for Donald Trump. They want to turn the page on Donald Trump. They repeated that rhetoric to me the other night when we were talking. And yet they still weren’t sold on Kamala Harris. I think she’s more likely to become president after this debate than she was going into it.

But let me ask you this: Kamala Harris is widely being declared the victor in this debate. But what would you say to people who feel they still don’t know enough about where she stands?

Goldberg: So it’s 11:44 p.m. as we’re saying this. Maybe I need a better night’s sleep because I just am like — there’s that David Sedaris joke about, somebody offers you like a maggot infested dead rat or chicken, and you ask how the chicken is cooked. People who feel like they don’t know enough of where she stands — it’s very hard for me to empathize with somebody who doesn’t know enough of where she stands to not surrender American democracy to this madman who has been not circumspect about his desire to end it. 

Nevertheless, I understand those people are out there. And I would first of all say, watch the debate and hopefully she will continue in the next few weeks to give those people more and more ways to hopefully get to yes.

Healy: Michelle, right after the debate, Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris and she signed —

Goldberg: Wait, are you kidding? Are you serious?

Healy: No. She signed the post, “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.” There’s a great image.

Goldberg: Wait, this happened? And I missed this?

Healy: It happened I think as we were taping.

Goldberg: That is just like the cherry on the top of the sundae. Can this night get better? I don’t know.

Healy: I think we knew it was coming, right? But it is perfectly timed. What does the Taylor Swift endorsement mean, do you think?  

Goldberg: I think it’s big. You are now going to have a bunch of these Swifties who get really deep into politics, who get really deep into Kamala Harris, who are not just voting, but registering other people to vote. I can’t think of a more influential endorsement in the entire country.

Healy: I think you’re right and the swing voters, the undecided voters, the people who aren’t paying close attention to the news, they do pay a lot of attention to Taylor Swift or at least know a couple of her songs. These are the kind of things that breakthrough.

We don’t see a lot of debates where a candidate does herself a world of good and her opponent a world of hurt. There still may be questions about who Kamala Harris is, but there’s no question going into this debate and coming out of it, she’s just standing a lot stronger.

Goldberg: Yeah, absolutely. And I’m sleeping a lot better.