Kamala Harris rattled Donald Trump at their White House debate, turning the tables on the former president following Joe Biden’s humiliating withdrawal from the race for November’s election.
After the 90-minute showdown in Philadelphia, one instant poll for CNN said 63 percent of viewers scored a win for the vice president, compared to 37 percent for her Republican rival.
It was a mirror image from a snap survey after Biden and Trump debated in late June, when the 81-year-old president’s stumbling performance left Democrats in despair and led to him bowing out in favour of Harris.
Instead, it is now Trump at 78 who faces questions about his advancing years.
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For many observers, his performance on Tuesday night resembled an angry old man going up against a younger and history-making candidate in the biracial Harris, 59, who is bidding to be America’s first woman president.
He alleged without evidence that Haitian immigrants are eating the cats and dogs of residents in Springfield, Ohio, the home state of his running mate JD Vance, who himself has backtracked from the claim circulating on social media.
“They’re eating the pets of the people who live there,” Trump shouted during the ABC debate, as Harris laughed disbelievingly. “She’s destroying this country… we’ll end up being Venezuela on steroids.”
Harris said “talk about extreme”, attacking Trump over his many racist remarks including one against herself. She noted she has won the endorsements of 200 Republicans including most recently that of the hardline former vice president Dick Cheney.
The biggest endorsement yet materialised just after the debate concluded. Taylor Swift signed off an Instagram post backing Harris with the words “Childless Cat Lady”, in a pointed reference to a much-criticised attack on the Democrat by Vance.
Harris exploited her experience as a courtroom prosecutor to press her case against Trump as unfit for office, highlighting his criminal convictions and his opposition to federal protection for abortion rights.
“Frankly, the American people are exhausted with this same old, tired playbook,” she said. “It is important that we move forward,” Harris stressed, as Trump seethed over crime rates and immigration, while insisting that his rally crowds were bigger than hers.
Recalling her opponent’s baseless claims that he was cheated of victory by Biden in 2020, she said: “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people… clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that.
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“But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election.”
Trump angrily pushed back against Democratic claims that he is a danger to the Constitution, denying anew that he incited an insurrectionist mob to storm Congress in January 2021 and claiming that he had been shot in democracy’s defence when a would-be assassin opened fire on him at a rally in Pennsylvania.
He said: “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me. They talk about democracy, I’m a threat to democracy – they’re a threat to democracy.”
Trump recently conceded for the first time that he lost “by a whisker” four years ago, but last night insisted that he was talking sarcastically. The polls are tight, with national and battleground state surveys giving Harris a narrow lead.
A clear point of difference emerged last night on foreign policy, with Trump again attacking Nato allies in Europe for failing to pay their fair share.
Asked if he wanted Ukraine to win its war against Russia, he side-stepped by responding: “I want the war to stop. I want to save lives.” Harris said: “World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.”
She accused her adversary of being prey to the flattery of US enemies such as Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, claiming that the Russian leader would “eat you for lunch” and saying: “If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.”
In the debate’s most powerful passage, the vice president underlined that the right of American women to control their own bodies was at stake on November 5, after Trump-appointed judges on the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade ruling on abortion.
As a result, Harris said, women suffering miscarriages were “bleeding out” and dying in hospital car parks because doctors were too afraid of prosecution to treat them. Girls made pregnant by rapist relatives were having to bear the child.
“I pledge to you, when Congress passes a bill to put back in place the protections of Roe v Wade as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law,” she said.
Trump insisted that he did not favour a nationwide ban on abortion, and did believe in exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. But the debate now rightly rested with individual states, he stressed. “It’s the vote of the people. Now it’s not tied up in the federal government.”
Trump’s allies accused the ABC moderators of failing to press home questioning about Harris’s policy U-turns on issues such as immigration, fracking in Pennsylvania and certain gun rights.
“My values have not changed,” she insisted, while revealing that both she and her running mate Tim Walz own guns themselves and defending the Biden administration’s record on the economy, which Trump claimed was “terrible”.
But most pundits also gave Harris a win for the debate.
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Marc Short, who was chief of staff to Trump’s vice president Mike Pence, said: “Trump missed an opportunity to stay focused prosecuting the case against Biden-Harris on the economy and border, and instead took her bait and chased down rabbit holes on election denialism and immigrants eating our pets.
“Harris passed the test of looking presidential and Trump didn’t expose her historically radical positions,” he said.
Both campaigns said they were open to a second debate. For now, the only further TV clash in the works will see Walz and Vance face off in New York on October 1.
