The two candidates in Tuesday’s presidential debate walked onto the stage with dueling imperatives. Kamala Harris needed to show voters who she is: her character, her record and, most important, her vision. Donald Trump needed to hide the same things about himself. Only one succeeded.
By the Editorial Board
Ms. Harris presented a positive vision for a nation that, despite its flaws, is in remarkably good shape — imploring the country to escape from the viciousness that has defined its recent politics. Mr. Trump, by contrast, depicted a fictional United States that is a “failing nation” teetering on the brink of “World War III” in which crime is soaring and immigrants are violently taking over small towns and eating Americans’ pets. The substance that flowed from this attitude, at once dark and self-aggrandizing, stood in contrast to Ms. Harris’s positive outlook.
True enough, not every plan Ms. Harris has proposed makes sense. But she got the better of Mr. Trump simply by explaining why his policies would be worse. His would explode the debt more than hers. He would double down on tariffs that would stoke inflation on all sorts of goods Americans buy, claiming falsely that foreign countries pay the cost. Mr. Trump pointed out that President Joe Biden maintained some of Mr. Trump’s tariffs — which does not prove that they were good, and certainly is not evidence that ramping up the policy would help the country. Ms. Harris’s opposition to this centerpiece element of Mr. Trump’s economic plan is an encouraging sign.
So was Ms. Harris’s emphasis on lowering housing prices by increasing the supply of new homes — by working with private developers seeking to build. She mentioned this idea, the only long-term solution to unnecessarily high home prices, three times Tuesday night. Mr. Trump presented no realistic housing plan.
Ms. Harris was as comfortable as ever on the matter of abortion, infusing her responses with both substance and humanity when she spoke of young survivors of incest and women suffering miscarriages bleeding out in parking lots. She took a moderate line on immigration, touting a bipartisan Senate bill that would have toughened border security if Mr. Trump hadn’t rallied his GOP congressional allies to kill it. In condemning the slaughter by Hamas as well as the killing of far too many Palestinian civilians by Israel, she walked the tightrope on the war in Gaza. On Ukraine, Ms. Harris once again pledged to stand with democratic allies against creeping authoritarianism around the globe and defended America’s traditional role leading the free world.
Mr. Trump, by contrast, boasted that Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban vouches for him, which is not an endorsement to tout. Mr. Trump managed to control himself … for about a third of the debate. He made sound points on his covid-19 response. Yet these points increasingly became mixed with half-truths and worse. He was alternately on message — abortion bans should have exceptions for “rape, incest and the life of the mother" — and very off.
False accusations of “execution after birth,” or his declaration that people from “insane asylums” are flooding into the country, started cropping up. But they paled in comparison to what came later, when the former president responded to a critique of his speeches during rallies by advancing the theory that undocumented immigrants were eating the pets of citizens in the cities in which they’ve taken refuge. Fact-checked by a moderator, he cited as his source “the people on television.” He accused Ms. Harris, who is Black, of having once been “not Black.” Milder untruths included claiming that he “saved” the Affordable Care Act when really he tried to repeal it. Asked whether he has a replacement, he said, “I have concepts of a plan.”
Tuesday night might be best remembered by Mr. Trump’s outbursts — and indeed, temperament matters, on the debate stage and in the Situation Room. Ms. Harris repeatedly proved on live television that he could be baited: into touting his business school credentials, into defending the quality of his rallies, into praising dictators. These moments matter because his policies flow from them. Immigrants are killing people, so shut down immigration. Other countries pay for tariffs, so ramp them up.
Yet Americans would do well to remember what happened on the other side of the stage. Ms. Harris won on tone and on substance. She presented something not only different from Mr. Trump, but different from Mr. Biden, too: no more squabbling over the last four years or the four before that, no more wallowing in doubt and division. Instead, she focused time after time on charting “a course for the future” — with the nation’s founding values as a lodestar but our eyes on what’s ahead.
This campaign-season poetry will still have to be translated into policy prose. But it speaks more eloquently about the country’s position and potential than Mr. Trump’s darker rhetoric.
