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      Kamala Harris, unlike Donald Trump, was well prepared for this debate – and won | Rebecca Solnit

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      The Trump-Harris debate was the most unsurprising thing that ever happened, except maybe for the part when, unlike previous debates, the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, pressed Trump to actually answer the question or noted that what he said was extremely not true at all.The former prosecutor and current vice-president Kamala Harris got on stage and spoke in lucid paragraphs that were clearly the result of careful preparation. She shared the stage with the adjudicated rapist who spoke in loose phrases that flapped and looped and circled around and usually reverted to some version of “millions of immigrants who are criminals and terrorists are why this country is in terrible shape worse than anyone thought possible and we are going to have world war three”, a litany of fear and rage and vagueness we’ve heard for eight years.Harris is widely said to have won the debate, by being herself, and being herself included a recurring facial expression of amused incredulity as the convicted felon on stage with her said yet another thing that was extravagantly untrue. One notable aspect of her rhetoric is how centrist it sounds – a bland but presumably strategic affirmation of support for a strong military, more healthcare, the usual Democratic party shout-outs to the middle class and support for Israel but also a two-state solution. She also expertly riled up Trump and let him go, and he went raging and free-associating throughout the 90 minutes. He is said to have lost the debate, also by being himself.His face crumpled into a resentful sulk when his mouth was closed, and it was more than closed at those times – it was clamped shut. But when he opened it, lurid, loopy stuff came out. He actually repeated onstage the grotesquely fearmongering racist untruth that JD Vance and Ted Cruz and other far-right Republicans had been spreading online, declaring: “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.” It’s an internet rumor as preposterous as offensive as untrue – one of the moderators actually interjected that it was untrue – but it was also classic Maga stuff, an incendiary distraction from actual policy and anything else that matters.Trump wasn’t quite as incoherent as in some of his recent public soliloquies, but he did say some very odd stuff, such as when he declared of Biden: “We have a president who doesn’t know he’s alive.” His most interesting slip-up came when the moderators asked him if there was anything he regretted about the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress he instigated. He inveighed and he waffled and he wove around and denied responsibility and tried to shift the conversation to Black Lives Matter protests and came back to blame Nancy Pelosi for what happened. But in one telling moment he said “we” of the insurrectionists and then shifted to say: “this group of people that has been treated so bad”.In other words, Trump was Trump and Harris was Harris, but the debate moderators were far, far better than Dana Bash and Jake Tapper of CNN during the disastrous 27 June debate. They and Harris went after Trump when he said, as he’s been saying since at least 2019 in defense of the anti-abortion position, that mothers and doctors are killing babies at or after birth – in other words that abortion rights are the same thing as infanticide (which, yes, is extremely illegal). “They have abortion in the ninth month,” he claimed. “The baby will be born and we will decide what to do with it, in other words they will execute the baby.” It’s the first time to my knowledge that he’s been told to his face that that’s extremely untrue.But still the questions came from within the bubble of assumptions and priorities that drive mainstream American media right now and drive media critics crazy. For example, a question about Harris’s position on fracking was an attempt to have a gotcha moment and portray her as a flip-flopper, and it came long before the final question, which was an afterthought of a throwaway question about climate.Harris’s answer was disappointingly all over the place – “I am proud that as vice-president over the last four years, we have invested $1tn in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” Trump didn’t answer the climate question at all, and that was that. The fate of the earth for the next 10,000 years or so was brushed aside, but on the other hand the world’s biggest pop star did choose this evening to endorse Harris, signing herself off as “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady”.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      Trump and Harris clash over abortion and immigration in fierce debate – live US election updates

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      US presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went head to head on Tuesday night in their first – and potentially only – debate before voters head to the polls on 5 November.Democratic candidate Harris put her Republican rival Trump on the defensive with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office, his support of abortion restrictions and his myriad legal woes.A former prosecutor, Harris, 59, controlled the debate from the start, getting under her rival’s skin repeatedly and prompting a visibly angry Trump, 78, to deliver a series of falsehood-filled retorts.At one point, she goaded the former president by saying that people often leave his campaign rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”Trump, who has been frustrated by the size of Harris’ own crowds, said, “My rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”He then pivoted to a false claim about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has circulated on social media and was amplified by Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Senator JD Vance.The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.More on that in a moment, but first here are some other key updates:Russia has accused both presidential candidates of using Vladimir Putin’s name as part of a domestic political fights, saying: “we really, really don’t like it”.Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the US was hostile and negative towards Russia, Reuters reports, and the Kremlin hoped that candidates would drop such references to Putin.Last week the White House said Putin should stop commenting on the US election after he said in an apparently teasing comment that he favoured Harris over Trump and that her “infectious” laugh was one of the reasons why.Trump Media & Technology Group shares fell 17% in premarket trading on Wednesday following the combative presidential debate between the former president and Kamala Harris.After the debate, pricing for a Trump victory slipped by 6 cents to 47 cents on online betting site PredictIt, while Harris’s odds climbed to 57 cents from 53 cents.Harris’s candidacy also received a boost after pop star Taylor Swift said she will vote for the Democratic candidate to her 280m on Instagram.Trump is the biggest shareholder in Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the parent of Truth Social app, which is popular among retail traders and is often sensitive to the former president’s chances of winning the 2024 US election, Reuters reports.According to a flash poll by CNN, registered voters who watched Tuesday’s presidential debate broadly agreed that Kamala Harris outperformed Donald Trump.This is based on a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS, that also found that Harris “outpaced both debate watchers’ expectations for her and Joe Biden’s onstage performance against the former president earlier this year”.The CNN snap poll found:

      Watchers said, by 67% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia

      96% of Harris supporters who watched said that their chosen candidate had done a better job

      A smaller 69% of Trump’s supporters thought he had done a better job

      Voters who watched the debate found their views of Harris were improved

      Trump was seen to have an advantage on the economy, immigration and being commander in chief. Harris was more trusted on abortion and protecting democracy
      However, the vast majority who tuned in said the debate had no effect on who they were going to vote for in the November election.Following the debate between Trump and Biden in June, watchers said, 67% to 33%, that Trump outperformed the president.And finally, the fifth key exchange of the night was on the Biden legacy, writes Bland:Donald Trump: Where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s a president.Kamala Harris: You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.This line from Harris, clearly scripted, was nonetheless a useful shorthand for the way she wants the race to be framed: as a chance to move on from the political division that has exhausted Americans for the last eight years, with her as a candidate who is not wedded to every aspect of the Biden record. In her closing statement, she said: “You’ve heard tonight two very different visions for our country: one that is focused on the future and the other that is focused on the past, and an attempt to take us backward. But we’re not going back.’”In his own closing statement, Trump finally did what his team would have wanted him to do throughout – blame Harris relentlessly for everything voters dislike about Biden. “She’s been there for three and a half years,” he said. “They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t she done it?”But by then, it felt like the narrative of the night was irreversibly set. And when Trump rambled into the claim that “we’re going to end up in a third world war, and it will be a war like no other because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry,” it merely seemed like normal service had been resumed.The third key exchange, writes Bland, is on abortion. Namely, the last night’s factcheck on a wild claim that Democrats will execute babies after birth.Donald Trump: Her vice-presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth … and that’s not OK with me.Moderator Linsey Davis: There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.While it’s not exactly a Woodward and Bernstein moment to observe that murdering babies is illegal in America, it was significant that Trump was much more thoroughly factchecked by the debate moderators than he was when he faced Biden. And it was part of a section on abortion rights, up there with the economy as one of the key issues driving this election, which did him few favours.Meanwhile, if you had “baby killers” on your bingo card, you may nonetheless have been caught unawares by Trump’s other truly wild lie of the night: his reference to false claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating their neighbours’ pets. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Harris turned to a visual shorthand she used repeatedly over the course of the debate (above) – cocking her head and looking at Trump with a bemused look on her face and her chin resting on her hand. You will certainly see this memed endlessly in the days ahead.The Spingfield city manager said that there have been no such reports, moderator David Muir noted. “But the people on television say their dog was eaten,” Trump replied. After the debate, Trump and his supporters characterised this kind of exchange as evidence of a “three-on-one” debate, which you can make your own mind up about. Harris, for her part, responded by saying “talk about extreme” and immediately pivoting to her own attack lines – the inverse of Trump’s approach.The fourth key exchange was on healthcare:Linsey Davis: So just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan?Donald Trump: I have concepts of a plan.By coincidence, this is exactly what I told my editor when she asked how close I was to filing about an hour ago. It is also the kind of wafty answer on a matter of substance that is likely to be clipped up and used in Harris attack ads repeatedly over the next few weeks.Trumps “concepts of a plan” refer to how he would replace the Affordable Care Act, the popular Obama era law that mandated the availability of health insurance to low-income families. There were other evasions, too, like his complicated language on abortion, and on whether he had any regrets about January 6. On Ukraine, Trump would not say that he wanted Kyiv to win, instead saying “I want the war to stop” and claiming that he would end it before even taking office by making Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy talk to each other.Archie Bland writes that there are five key exchanges that are likely to dominate the campaign in the days ahead. The first is on the economy, as Kamala Harris promised to lift up the middle class while Donald Trump blamed her for high inflation.Moderator David Muir: When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?Kamala Harris: So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America.Donald Trump: We have inflation like very few people have ever seen before. Probably the worst in our nation’s history.The debate kicked off with a section on the economy, arguably the toughest section of the night for Harris, who must contend with the fact that many voters blame the Biden administration for years of high inflation. While Harris set out more details of her own agenda, from a $6,000 child tax credit to a tax deduction for small businesses, her point that she and Biden were dealing with the Trump legacy of “the worst unemployment since the Great Depression” did not really make an affirmative case for the record of the last four years.Trump did land his points about inflation and the dubious claim that he created “one of the greatest economies in the history of our country” in his first term. But he also got distracted: by Harris calling his plan to raise tariffs a “Trump sales tax”, and by his own digression into a claim that “millions of people [are] pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums”. That was a hint of what was to come.Second, writes Bland, is Harris tempting Trump into going off topic:Kamala Harris: You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. 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. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.Donald Trump: People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back.Can it really be this easy to wind him up? Again and again, Harris chose lines that keyed into Trump’s personal preoccupations – and managed to goad him into responding to them at length instead of focusing on the kinds of issues that matter to voters. This exchange about crowd sizes, during a section of the debate that was supposed to be about immigration, meant that he had less time to talk a subject that is one of the areas where voters have the most doubts about Harris.Similarly, during a section about Harris’ changing position on fracking, he allowed himself to be sidetracked by her claim that he was given $400m by his father. Then there was the sales tax thing; the controversial conservative roadmap for a second Trump term, Project 2025; and the way he let a discussion about the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal turn into one about his invitation to Taliban leaders to come to Camp David for talks.None of these subjects would have been on his campaign managers’ list of the talking points they would have wanted him to hit – and none of them mean very much to swing voters.After a period of undoubted momentum for Kamala Harris, the vice-president came into this debate having stalled somewhat. Recent polls suggest that the race is effectively tied, both nationally and in most of the battleground states that will likely decide the outcome. Because the way voters are distributed gives Republicans an advantage in the electoral college, and because you would usually expect to see Harris’ post-convention bump fade somewhat, polling experts like Nate Silver have recently seen Donald Trump as the favourite to prevail.Many presidential candidates have “won” debates and ultimately lost the race – but there is little doubt that Harris had a good enough night to change those odds in her favour. Trump’s team wanted him to hang the Biden administration’s unpopular policies around her neck, but instead he repeatedly lapsed into rambling and extreme Maga talking points that seem likely to have left many voters nonplussed.The problem is not so much that he revealed himself as an erratic character, which any swing voter surely already knows: the problem is that he gifted Harris, who appeared supremely well-prepared, the chance to present him as the exhausting candidate of the all-too-familiar past – and herself as the optimist with a vision for the future.In the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter, Archie Bland writes that even Fox News said Kamala Harris won last night’s presidential debate. Bland writes:Democrats’ moods can only have been improved by the news, a few minutes after it ended, that Taylor Swift had endorsed Harris, and signed her post “childless cat lady”. And CNN’s snap poll suggested that voters thought Harris won by a margin of 63% to 37% – nearly as big a margin as Trump achieved over Biden last time around. Key to Harris’ success was baiting her opponent into rants on marginal topics, instead of talking about the issues that voters are interested in.But while millions watched, Harris and Trump will reach millions more through the clips that will now be distributed through news and social media. For further reading on the debate, take a look at Gabrielle Canon’s key takeaways and this factcheck on both candidates.Investors were watching for any market impact from the debate between the US presidential candidates, vice-president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports that the yen hit a nine-month high after a Bank of Japan official hinted at more monetary tightening. But, the news agency reports, the Japanese unit was also boosted by bets on a Harris presidency after she was considered to have come out on top in the US presidential debate.According to AFP, The chances of Trump losing also weighed on bitcoin after he had previously vowed to be a “pro-bitcoin president” if elected in November.US presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went head to head on Tuesday night in their first – and potentially only – debate before voters head to the polls on 5 November.Democratic candidate Harris put her Republican rival Trump on the defensive with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office, his support of abortion restrictions and his myriad legal woes.A former prosecutor, Harris, 59, controlled the debate from the start, getting under her rival’s skin repeatedly and prompting a visibly angry Trump, 78, to deliver a series of falsehood-filled retorts.At one point, she goaded the former president by saying that people often leave his campaign rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”Trump, who has been frustrated by the size of Harris’ own crowds, said, “My rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”He then pivoted to a false claim about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has circulated on social media and was amplified by Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Senator JD Vance.The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.More on that in a moment, but first here are some other key updates: More

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      Who won Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s first-ever debate? Our panel reacts

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      Moustafa Bayoumi: ‘Trump was flailing’For the entirety of this debate, Donald Trump never once uttered Kamala Harris’s name, a sign of enormous disrespect. What he did do was try to shush Harris with a “quiet, please”, silence her with an “I’m talking now. Does that sound familiar?” (an apparent reference to her famous line during the vice-presidential debate four years ago), and brazenly state that President Biden “hates her. He can’t stand her.”Harris smiled confidently at the ludicrous barbs.Meanwhile, Trump reacted to his own statement that he lost the 2020 election “by a whisker” first by stating: “I said that?” and then by saying he was “being sarcastic”. Asked about his ideas for healthcare for Americans, he replied with: “I have concepts of a plan.” Challenged on his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he responded with: “I had nothing to do with that except they asked me to make a speech.”Trump was flailing. Under pressure, he took no responsibility for his past actions and instead threw invective and invented facts as he went along.Harris prevailed. She came out swinging, pointed her attacks on Trump’s record, and presented a future that wasn’t based on fear but on opportunity. She intelligently called Trump “someone who would rather run on a problem rather than fixing the problem”.But her policy positions were also clearly leaning to the right of the Democratic agenda. She called for many more agents patrolling the border (rather than real and comprehensive immigration reform), defended the right to abortion by extreme examples of injury (such as incest) rather than an ordinary woman’s right to choose, and offered no policy change for Palestinians beyond “working round the clock” for a ceasefire. In other words, more of the same.Harris won the debate. Her performance and ideas are better. But many of those ideas, shared by both parties, need rethinking.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
      LaTosha Brown: ‘A steady hand versus reckless impulsiveness’This debate was a defining moment for the American people, as the stark contrast between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was laid bare. From the start, Harris commanded the stage, demonstrating poise, preparation, and a clear vision for the future of the country. She didn’t just introduce herself to Trump – she reintroduced herself to the American public as a strong, competent leader ready to serve as Commander in Chief.In contrast, Trump appeared undisciplined and unhinged, offering a reminder of the chaotic leadership that defined his time in office. His performance highlighted a lack of preparation and an inability to engage thoughtfully on critical issues. While Harris sought to uplift and empower, Trump resorted to divisive rhetoric, further alienating a nation in need of healing.The American people witnessed the difference between a steady hand and reckless impulsiveness. The choice could not be clearer; according to Trump himself, he has no plan. She has a plan and represents a new generation of leadership moving us forward. As the Vice President says: We are not going back.

      LaTosha Brown is the co-founder of Black Voters Matter
      Ben Davis: ‘Harris didn’t sketch out much of a governing agenda’This debate will not be anywhere near as consequential as the last one, between Biden and Trump, which reoriented an election overnight. It remains to be seen how much a debate like this can move voters. That said, Kamala Harris won easily. Trump was at his most narcissistic, impulsive and racist, lashing out incoherently.In the past, while he was, of course, narcissistic, impulsive and racist, he was at least relentlessly on message, setting the tempo of the debate with attacks and forcing his opponents to adopt his framing. With this debate, he was on the defensive and seemed angry and confused throughout. Much of the credit for this goes to Harris, who clearly prepared well and expertly baited Trump into his worst areas. Every time the question was about an issue where Trump has a polling advantage over Harris, like the economy, foreign policy and the Biden administration’s record, she would sneak in a line about him and his past that he couldn’t help but chase.His most memorable lines were mostly notable for being bizarre and nonsensical. All in all, Trump showed who he was: a rightwing authoritarian, and a confused and incompetent one at that.This was a deeply sad debate. Harris didn’t sketch out much in the way of a governing agenda, and the aspects she did expound on, like her policies on the border, fracking and Israel, were bad, politically and morally. Instead of a debate about policy and plans, what we saw was a debate about Trump, with Harris dancing around her own record and policies to skillfully prosecute the case against Trump instead. It’s a dark time for the country when the choice we are presented is a referendum on a dangerous narcissist. Hopefully, Americans will choose not to put Trump back in the White House, but no matter how bad his performance, he still has a serious chance of winning.

      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC
      Lloyd Green: ‘Harris won the evening’Kamala Harris won the evening and the debate. By the end, the betting markets had shifted back to a coin-toss. Trump no longer led. The vice-president stayed on offense. He flailed and scowled all night. Trump garnered the majority of speaking time, but it did him no favor.The former president attacked Harris over immigration and inflation. He labeled her a Marxist, and bragged about the size of his rallies. He paid tribute to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and accused immigrants of chowing down on Fido: “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”Harris chivied Trump on abortion and democracy and lambasted him over China and Covid. “He actually thanked President Xi for what he did during Covid,” she said. “When we know that Xi was responsible for not giving us transparency about the origins of Covid.”Harris played prosecutor, Trump self-pitying victim. She reminded him of his rap-sheet, January 6, and his affinity for the Proud Boys: “‘Stand back and stand by.’”The election is a footrace. Trump and Harris appear tied in Pennsylvania while the Democrats hold narrow leads in Michigan and Wisconsin. Post-convention excitement recedes. The attempt on Trump’s life is history. Brat summer has yielded to political trench warfare. Election day is less than two months away, in politics an eternity.

      Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
      Arwa Mahdawi: ‘The real stars were the moderators’Have you ever wondered whether men might be too emotional to be president? Because Donald Trump was extremely emotional on Tuesday night. And by “emotional”, I mean unhinged.In contrast, Kamala Harris was in full-on prosecutor mode and pushed all the convicted felon’s buttons. She mocked the size of Trump’s rallies – a sore spot – and he immediately unraveled. Lacking serious policy points, he clutched at bigoted straws. He referenced a wild and unsubstantiated rumor about immigrants eating dogs. He said: “Prices are quadrupling and doubling!” And he called Harris a “communist”.After a slightly shaky start, Harris dominated the debate. Her responses about abortion were a particular high point. Many of us watching were weeping with relief it wasn’t Joe Biden at the podium, stumbling over sentences about one of the most important issues on the ballot.Harris wasn’t the only star. Though they got a little more lenient towards the end, ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis did a brilliant job fact-checking in real time, calling Trump out on his lies about Democrats wanting to execute babies after they’re born. I hope CNN’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, who did a horrendous job “moderating” the June debate between Trump and Biden, were taking notes.I would have been mostly thrilled by Harris’s performance had it not been for her pathetic and disrespectful response on the carnage in Gaza. She gave no indication of how she would de-escalate the destruction of Gaza, just kept paying empty lip service to a ceasefire. It’s been 11 months; if Biden-Harris seriously wanted a ceasefire, there would be one by now. It’s clear that, when it comes to Gaza, Harris is a new and wholly unimproved version of Biden.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
      Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Harris was at her best portraying Trump as an out-of-touch elite’Joe Biden set a very low bar – the president’s June debate performance was so disastrous that it catapulted him out of the race and Kamala Harris into his seat. All Harris had to do on Tuesday night to be celebrated by the media was to occupy it and string together sentences generally recognized as English. She managed to do that.However, her success was muted. Harris was at her best when she was able to portray Trump as an out-of-touch elite who doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, including his base. Yet rather than continuing that line of thought and painting him as part of a wider establishment pursuing policies against the interests of working people, she undermined her position by celebrating the endorsements of figures like Dick Cheney and John McCain and the “sacred grounds” of Camp David.Trump’s 2016 version of populism focused heavily on the economic grievances facing American workers. His 2024 version is far more unhinged – lies about the election, lies about immigrants eating pets, lies about abortion laws, lies too many to recount. That makes it very easy to take the safe route and draw contrasts between a competent establishment politician and a dangerous would-be tyrant. But I worry that without speaking to justified anger in the country, Harris is setting herself up to be Hillary Clinton 2.0.

      Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More

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      Harris delivered a ‘masterclass’ debate. Will it change the race?

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      The debate began on her terms. The vice-president of the United States walked across the stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, stretched out her hand and introduced herself“: “Kamala Harris.”It was, incredibly, the first time Harris had ever met Donald Trump, whose election to the White House in 2016 coincided with her election to the Senate. Since then, they have circled each other, Harris carving out a reputation in the Senate for grilling Trump administration officials. Four years later, she helped defeat Trump as Joe Biden’s running mate.Then, for more than 90-minutes on Tuesday night, Harris put Trump on the defensive, taunting him about the size of his crowds and pressing him over his shifting positions on abortion. It clearly rattled the former president, who took the bait again and again.“Donald Trump actually has no plan for you, because he is more interested in defending himself than he has been looking out for you,” Harris said, in what amounted to the former prosecutor’s opening argument to the American people.With the race on a knife’s edge, and Trump’s support relatively stable despite his 34 felony convictions, an assassination attempt and the replacement of his Democratic opponent, Harris could hardly afford a shaky performance, much less a defeat. In the end, she delivered what fellow Californian, the governor Gavin Newsom, described as a “masterclass”.“She kept looking in the camera, talking about you, talking about me, talking about the American people, talking about the issues they care about, and he was talking about dogs, and he was talking about crowd sizes and his grievances and his little pity party and his victim mindset,” he said. “It was a terrible night for him, but it was, most importantly, a great night for the American people.”During the debate, Trump wouldn’t commit to vetoing a national abortion ban, arguing the question was meritless because neither party would conceivably win the 60 votes needed to pass such legislation in the Senate. He declined to say he lost the last election, or that he regretted any of his actions on January 6, when he delivered an incendiary speech before his supporters stormed the US Capitol.Trump attempted to press his strengths, turning nearly every question back to the issue of the immigration. “She’s been so bad, it’s ridiculous,” he claimed at one point. But in the spin room following the debate, even his strongest supporters conceded Harris had delivered a decent performance.“We heard a lot of words better delivered than usual, I will admit, from Kamala Harris,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential hopeful turned Trump surrogate. “But actions speak louder than words.”Trump certainly landed some punches, and even a few laughs. He claimed Harris had adopted “my philosophy now” on the economy. “I was going to send her a Maga hat,” he quipped, as Harris threw her head back and laughed.Navigating rounds of testy exchanges, Harris sought to outline her policies while embracing the mantle of change, telling viewers that Trump would rely on “the same old, tired playbook: a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling”.“Let’s turn the page on this. Let’s not go back,” she said.Trump in turn sought to cast Harris as a carbon copy of the unpopular president, an attack line his surrogates had previewed in the spin room before the debate. At one point, Trump accused Harris of ripping off Biden’s economic plan.“It’s like, four sentences, like: ‘Run, Spot, run,’” he said.Trump also challenged Harris on abortion, trying to pin her down on whether she would approve legislation that allowed women to end a pregnancy into the third trimester. Deflecting the attack that she was a “Marxist” who supports far-left climate policies, Harris repeated that she would not ban fracking and touted the Biden administration’s energy agenda, prompting some liberal climate activists to decry the event as a “missed opportunity”.“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, the communications director of the Sunrise Movement, a climate advocacy group.But Trump ended the evening aggrieved by his treatment at the hands of the ABC News hosts, David Muir and Linsey Davis.“It was obviously three-on-one,” Trump told reporters in an appearance in the spin room after the debate, repeating the claim made by his surrogates that the moderators had treated him unfairly.In a departure from past presidential debates, the moderators played a fact-checking role in addition to asking questions, which infuriated Trump and his supporters. Davis pushed back on his claim that Democrats supported abortions after birth, which is illegal in all 50 states, while Muir refuted the false claim raised by Trump that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating pets.The significance of the debate, perhaps the candidates’ single biggest audience before election day, was underlined by Biden’s disastrous performance in June. But a good performance – or, perhaps more relevant in today’s fractured media environment, a viral moment – does not necessarily spell victory in November.The national mood remains sour. A strong majority – 61% – of voters say they want the next president to bring a “major change” to the country, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. Only 40% of voter say the vice-president represented “change” compared with 61% who said the former president did.And in 2016, Hillary Clinton was deemed the winner of all three of her debates against Trump, and he still won. It remains unclear whether there will be another debate between Harris and Trump.Speaking at Cherry Street Pier, a short distance from the debate site, Harris told a crowd that she and her running mate, Tim Walz, were still the “underdogs” in the race for the White House. But they ended the evening on a high note.“Tonight highlighted for the American people what’s at stake,” Harris said. “Hard work is good work and we will win.”As she finished her remarks, The Man by Taylor Swift blared at the venue just moments after the pop star, one of the music industry’s most celebrated cultural icons, announced her endorsement of the vice president.“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.” More

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      Harris’s powerful abortion stance and Trump’s fact-checks: key takeaways from the debate

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      The presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went head to head on Tuesday night in their first – and potentially only – debate before voters head to the polls on 5 November. The candidates went into the event virtually tied in the polls with just weeks to convince a small but mighty minority of unsure voters on how to cast their ballot.After weeks of arguments over the format and rules, the debate aired live on ABC from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a key swing state, with no audience in attendance and each candidate’s microphone muted while their opponent spoke.This was the second presidential debate this year for Trump, who also went up against Joe Biden in June. The latter’s devastating performance triggered an upheaval within the Democratic party that would ultimately push Biden to step down and position Harris to head the ticket, an outcome Trump both takes credit for and complains about at his rallies.With just 55 days until votes are tallied, Harris strived to highlight that she has a plan, and clearly responded to criticisms that she hasn’t shared enough details with voters about her platform and priorities. With focused rhetoric on planning for the future, building the middle class, and reframing her record on everything from immigration to climate, Harris was able to show voters how she hopes to lead.Analysts, meanwhile, were watching Trump’s demeanor and clarity. The former president repeated frequent rhetoric from his rallies – including widely disputed claims about abortion, crime, and his belief that he won the 2020 election – but shared little about how he would address key problems Americans are facing.Beyond their differences in policy positions, the candidates also displayed diverging visions of the country. Trump promised his base to restore what he sees as the glory of the past, and Harris heralded the hope of a brighter future.Here are the highlights:1. Trump repeatedly spewed misinformationThroughout the debate Trump spread misinformation to make his points, repeating already debunked rhetoric on everything from the results of the 2020 election to his involvement in Project 2025 – a conservative-backed plan to change the US government from the inside out. The former president distanced himself from the January 6 attack on the Capitol, saying he was there only to make a speech, and blamed then House majority leader Nancy Pelosi for not beefing up security. He also incorrectly said crime rates had risen in the US when they have in fact fallen.2. … and was frequently fact-checked by the moderatorsABC’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, were largely praised for delivering a strong performance. They effectively rerouted discussions back to the questions they had asked on key topics including the economy, immigration, abortion rights and the peaceful transfer of power, and made important clarifying fact-check statements when they were warranted.Muir and Davis are veteran journalists who have collectively spent decades helping the American public navigate presidential positions. Feedback for their performance stands in contrast to the CNN debate in June, when moderators frequently missed opportunities to fact check Trump and Joe Biden.3. Harris defended Democrats’ position on reproductive rightsWhen challenged on his changing take on access to abortion care, Trump made some alarming – and easily refuted – claims that Democrats supported executing babies after they are born. He also took credit for overturning of Roe v Wade, a decision made by the supreme court after he appointed three members to make a conservative majority, that was unpopular with the majority of Americans. Trump did clarify his position though, that he believes in exceptions for rape, incest and threats to the mother’s life.Harris called his stances “insulting to the women of America”, and countered his statements that he delivered on a promise to bring the issue back to the states by saying “the people of American have voted for freedom”. She highlighted the difficult realities faced by women in states with abortion bans and would-be mothers who would struggle to access IVF care.4. The candidates both touted their work to improve the economyHarris was quick to tout her “opportunity economy”, a plan that includes tax reductions for those starting small businesses, relief for new parents and first-time homebuyers, and a crackdown on corporate price-gouging. “I am the only person on this stage that is about lifting up the middle class,” Harris said, noting her upbringing in a middle-class household.Trump, meanwhile, claimed that he oversaw the “best economy”, even with the downturn caused by the Covid pandemic, and accused his opponent of increasing costs on American families. “People can’t go out and buy cereal, or bacon, or anything else,” he said.Inflation did spike under the Biden-Harris administration, but it has fallen just as quickly. As of August, the US inflation rate settled at 2.9%, below the nearly 3.3% average.Trump also touted his stance on tariffs, which he plans to prioritize if he regains the White House.5. Trump spouted salacious and sometimes racist claims about immigrantsThroughout the debate, Trump pivoted his talking points to immigration, spouting salacious claims about criminals being welcomed into the country and towns where pets are eaten by incoming immigrants.While debate moderators attempted to counter the claims, challenging Trump on the validity and also on how he would execute the deportation of millions as he’s promised to do, Harris took the offensive. Highlighting her record as “the only person on the stage who has prosecuted transnational organizations”, she also accused her opponent of calling on the GOP to oppose legislation to bolster the border.“He preferred to run on a problem rather than fixing a problem,” she said.6. The candidates sparred over Ukraine and how they would handle the warHarris said that if Trump were currently in office, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, would have taken Kyiv, saying Putin would “eat you for lunch”.“I believe the reason that Donald Trump says that this war would be over within 24 hours is because he would just give it up,” Harris also said.When Trump was asked by Muir how he would end the war – and specifically if he wanted Ukraine to win – the former president did not offer a clear answer.“I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly. People being killed by the millions,” he said. When pressed again on if it is in the US best interest for Ukraine to win he doubled down. “I think it’s the US best interest to get this war finished and just get it done, all right, negotiate a deal, because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed.”7. Harris baited Trump by attacking him where it hurtsAs moderators pushed Harris to respond to criticisms she and Biden have faced over border policy, the vice-president expertly derailed her opponent’s rhetoric on what is perhaps his favorite issue to discuss by deriding his performances at rallies.She invited voters to view the speeches for themselves, saying that attenders can be seen leaving out of exhaustion and boredom, and characterized the events as a platform for Trump’s complaints and not plans that put the American people first.The jab landed well. An offended and flustered Trump jumped on the chance to defend attendance at his rallies, claiming Harris pays attendees at her own campaign events, and then pivoted to insults that failed to hit their mark. He accused Harris of planning to turn the country into “Venezuela on steroids”, and called the US a “failing nation”, before resurfacing false claims that immigrants were eating people’s pets.Read more about the 2024 US election:

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      Harris targets Trump for falsehoods on abortion and immigration in fiery debate

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      Kamala Harris and Donald Trump sparred on Tuesday in a contentious presidential debate that repeatedly went off the rails, as Trump pursued bizarre and often falsehood-ridden tangents about crowd sizes, immigration policy and abortion access.The Philadelphia debate marked arguably the most significant opportunity for both Harris and Trump since Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race in July, and the event began cordially enough. Harris crossed over to Trump’s podium to shake his hand and introduce herself, an acknowledgement that the two presidential nominees had never met face to face before Tuesday night.But the cordiality did not last long. After delivering some boilerplate attack lines about the high inflation seen earlier in Biden’s presidency, Trump pivoted to mocking Harris as a “Marxist” and peddling baseless claims that Democrats want to “execute the baby” by allowing abortions in the ninth month of pregnancy.That false claim was corrected by both Harris and the ABC News anchor Linsey Davis, who joined her fellow moderator David Muir in fact-checking some of Trump’s statements throughout the evening. Harris then segued into a stinging rebuke of Trump’s record on abortion, criticizing him for nominating three of the supreme court justices who ruled to overturn Roe v Wade in 2022.“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 said. “And 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 in to law.”Despite broad public support for Roe v Wade, Trump boasted about his role in reversing it and applauded the supreme court’s “great courage” in issuing its ruling, while he dodged repeated questions about whether he would veto a national abortion ban as president.Trump seemed to trip over himself even when moderators offered questions on his strongest issues, such as immigration. When asked about Biden’s handling of the US-Mexico border, Harris pivoted to discussing Trump’s campaign rallies.“I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said. “You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about [how] windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”The tangent appeared to be a blatant attempt by Harris to bait Trump into squabbling over attendance at his rallies instead of discussing immigration policy – and it worked. Trump began attacking Harris with baseless accusations that her campaign was paying people to attend her rallies while celebrating his own events as “the most incredible rallies in the history of politics”.Then, rather than highlighting his immigration proposals, Trump chose to spread debunked claims that Haitian migrants in an Ohio city have started capturing and eating their neighbors’ pets.“They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”The outburst instantly became a source of mockery on social media, as Democrats celebrated Trump for “doubling down on the crazy uncle vibe”, in the words of the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg.Even as moments of the debate bordered on absurdity, other exchanges regarding foreign policy and the January 6 insurrection felt heavy with meaning. Pressed on his false claims regarding widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Trump again refused to acknowledge his defeat, prompting a stark warning from Harris.“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so, let’s be clear about that. And, clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that,” Harris said. “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.”On foreign policy, Harris fielded difficult questions on the war in Gaza, as she expressed her support for Israel’s “right to defend itself” while calling for “security, self determination and the dignity they so rightly deserve” for Palestinians.Asked about his own stance on the war, Trump reiterated his bombastic claims that his presence in the White House would have prevented the wars in both Gaza and Ukraine.“If I were president, it would have never started,” Trump said. “If I were president, Russia would have never, ever. I know Putin very well. He would have never –and there was no threat of it either, by the way, for four years – have gone into Ukraine.”And yet, when asked directly whether he wanted Ukraine to win its war against Russia, Trump deflected.“I want the war to stop,” Trump said. “I think it’s the US’s best interest to get this war finished and just get it done, all right? Negotiate a deal because we have to stop all of these human lives from being destroyed.”The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.Read more about the 2024 US election:

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      The bar was low for him, but Donald Trump still didn’t manage to clear it | Moira Donegan

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      The bar was set low for him, but Donald Trump still didn’t manage to clear it. The former president has faced growing concerns from within his party that he no longer has the stamina, stylistic novelty or mental acuity to defeat Kamala Harris, even as polls narrow in the final weeks before November’s election. He did little to dissuade those fears on Tuesday, when he delivered a rambling, incoherent, lie-filled exposition of his own grievances in his first debate matchup against Kamala Harris – a crucial moment in the presidential contest that proved to be a disastrous humiliation for him.Harris, after a beat or two of appearing nervous as the debate began, set about a methodical attack on Trump that repeatedly named him selfish, dishonest and weak. She goaded him with attacks on his ego and his potency – including a transparent but wildly effective remark about people leaving his rallies early from exhaustion – that caused him to explode into paroxysms of nonsensical woundedness. Trump, who initially had tried to land attacks on inflation, was soon reduced to racist ramblings, tangential defenses of his past remarks and records, attacks on Joe Biden, who is not running against him, and old lies about infanticide, fantasies about “world war three”, weird comparisons of the United States to Venezuela, a morbidly racist fantasy about immigrants killing and eating white people’s household pets, “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prisons”, and his false claims to have won the 2020 election.Trump has had bad debate performances before – including against Hillary Clinton, whom he ultimately defeated in 2016. But there is reason to suspect that his performance on Tuesday may genuinely harm his re-election chances in ways that will be difficult to recover from in the dwindling number of days before voters cast their ballots. The debate, the first since Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, was widely anticipated to be a contest over who could best define the Democratic nominee, a figure many mainstream voters say that they do not know much about.But Trump failed to convincingly land attacks on Harris, and instead he spent much of the night arguing on the turf that his opponent chose for him. There was no bait she offered him that he didn’t take. He kept re-litigating his past remarks, exploring grievances against former enemies living and dead, claiming to have been wronged by vast forces beyond public accounting, and indulging in references to elaborate conspiracy theories about his own righteousness and the nefariousness of his enemies.It is not a version of Trump that has appealed to voters in the past. In 2020, in his first debate against Joe Biden, Trump’s aggressive, frantic, shouting performance led the then candidate Biden to say with exasperation: “Will you shut up, man?” It was a moment of vicarious release for the American audience, who were able to see their own exhausted frustration with Trump channeled through an on-screen proxy. In a less spontaneous, more intentional performance on Tuesday, Harris repeatedly cast Trump as a tiresome relic of an unappealing past – and herself as a refreshing break that can carry the country into the future.Harris has been criticized by some in her own party for having an insufficiently clear policy agenda, but this is more the argument for her candidacy than any white paper her staff may issue: she wants to meaningfully break from the Trump era – not in a transitional period or interregnum, as Biden did, but by ushering in a new generation of political leadership that can leave Trump more decisively behind.Her debate performance was meant to convey the message that Trump’s imbecilic cruelty was not so formidable, not so scary, not so inevitable as Americans have resigned themselves to thinking it was – that it was laughable, small – and that it could be defeated.Harris’s attacks hit Trump where it hurt: in his manhood. She repeatedly referred to American military leaders who had worked with Trump, whom she said had described him to her as “a disgrace”. She recast his affinity for strongmen dictators around the world as less a fellowship than as a naïve, even childlike fandom, suggesting his respect for them is not reciprocated and that Vladimir Putin “would eat [him] for lunch”.A friend I watched the debate with, an expert in psychoanalysis, described Harris’s tactics as a “symbolic castration”. Trump reacted almost as if it were the real thing. He bellowed and ranted with offense, his anger giving credence to Harris’s depiction of him as thin-skinned and weak.Perhaps the highlight of the night came in Harris’s response to the debate’s second question, about abortion rights. Trump, whose position on abortion changes about as frequently as the tides, claimed his contribution to the end of Roe v Wade was only fulfilling “what the people wanted”. Harris responded with an eloquent, impassioned litany of the material deprivations and indignities forced upon those who seek abortions – from women who struggle to afford the children they already have to those who have been victims of rape.“They don’t want that,” Harris said of this state of affairs. “That is immoral,” she said of the laws she calls “Trump abortion bans”: a moving reversal of the anti-choice movement’s historical claim to the moral high ground. The moment was a potent reminder of her strengths as a candidate over Joe Biden, whose answer on abortion in the June debate was barely coherent but thoroughly degrading to American women. Finally, it seems, the Democrats are willing to embrace their strongest issue, and American women’s interests might be represented on the national stage with something like the gravity and respect that they deserve.Early in the night, in a rare moment of lucidity and honesty, Trump spoke of his own policy plans. “I’m an open book,” he said. “Everyone knows what I’m going to do.” And it was true, though perhaps not in the way he meant it. Trump is, by now, a thoroughly familiar and predictable character, one you can always rely on to pursue narcissistic gratification and vulgar self-interest. If he’s an open book, Americans already know the ending. The Harris campaign is betting that they want to hear a different story.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More