Five key takeaways from the debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris: on hoaxes, attacks and the role of moderators

Vice President Kamala Harris arrived on the set of the presidential debate held Tuesday in Philadelphia with a clear objective: to irritate her opponent, former President Donald Trump. She achieved this with the same attack strategy that her campaign has been using since it became clear in late July that she would be the Democratic Party’s candidate for president of the United States after Joe Biden refused to seek re-election.

The stated aim was also to make herself a little better known to the American public and, in the process, to make the main points of her programme clear to them. In this respect, she was not as effective as when it came to getting on Trump’s nerves, who repeatedly took her bait and lost his cool as time went on: a little over 100 minutes in total of a face-to-face meeting which, if one looks at the history of presidential debates, is not clear that it will have a decisive effect on the ballot box.

From the Democratic strategy to Trump’s lies, these are the key points of a debate that could be the only one between the two rivals before the meeting on November 5.

Kamala Harris went on the attack from the start

The American vice president had apparently prepared her first coup when, before the debate began, she walked determinedly to meet Donald Trump to shake his hand in the space that ABC News had reserved for him on the left of the image, to clear up all doubts about whether or not such a greeting would take place, and to introduce herself: “I am Kamala Harris,” she said, perhaps to make it clear how to say her first name correctly (and given that her rival had made fun of her pronunciation in recent weeks). “Have a nice time,” he told her. It was the first time they had met in person. Once the initial courtesy had been overcome, which seemed to take him by surprise, Trump did not say his opponent’s name even once during the evening.

Harris then repeatedly attacked the former president, making him look uncomfortable and at times impatient, raising his voice. Perhaps the most awkward moment was when she successfully set him up to talk about one of his more laughable obsessions: turnout numbers at his rallies. Trump had his moments, though, such as when Harris interrupted him and he asked her not to, drawing a parallel between that moment and the line (“I’m speaking”) she uttered when she faced Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence in 2020.

Joe Biden, so far, so close

It is one of the most uncomfortable contortions of candidate Harris: presenting herself as someone who represents change, and at the same time, defending the person who has been her boss for the last three and a half years, President Joe Biden. Trump reproached her in his final speech for promising things that she had not been able to carry out in her time as second in command in the White House. The Democrat reminded him at one point that the person she is facing in the elections is her, and not Biden. “I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump. I represent a new generation, a different way of doing politics,” Harris said. Never was it more evident than on Tuesday that beating Biden, an unpopular president and a candidate too old, was an easier task for Trump than beating the person who aspires to become the first woman to occupy the Oval Office.

The moderators exceeded expectations

Not just the others’, but apparently their own as well. Before the face-to-face, ABC News had promised that its journalists, David Muir and Linsey Davis, would “let the conversation flow,” and that their job was not to interrupt the candidates’ arguments with facts. In fact, they did do that, especially with Trump, when he spread falsehoods and half-truths.

The Republican candidate lost patience with them on several occasions, and his supporters complained on social media about what they interpreted as a biased job by the journalists. Megyn Kelly, a right-wing American media personality, summed up this frustration on X with the following phrase: “Why do the moderators need Kamala Harris?” The message implied that the objective of the network was to attack the former president. The truth is that the Trump campaign had accepted, albeit reluctantly, the rules of the debate, and the fact that it was held on that particular station. It is also true that the moderators hardly contradicted the Democratic candidate, who, without a doubt, was less truthful than her rival.

A busy night for fact-checkers

The hoax hunters ―fact checkersin local slang, they had their hands full. Especially with Trump, who, true to form, kept them busy. He said that undocumented Haitian immigrants arriving in a town in Ohio called Springfield are “eating the pets” of the neighbors (despite the scandal that this claim has generated in recent days, there is no evidence that such a thing is true); he lied about the numbers at the border and claimed that there are (Democratic) places in the United States where abortion is allowed after birth (ignoring the fact that if that were true, they would not be abortions, but murders).

Harris, for her part, insisted on linking her opponent’s campaign to the extremist action plan known as Project 2025, despite the fact that he has explicitly distanced himself from it. She also inflated figures and recalled some words by the Republican candidate that were twisted at the time. It was when, during a rally, he spoke of “a bloodbath” if he did not win the elections. In reality, and despite the fact that one can question the appropriateness of choosing such violent language, he was referring to the effects on the economy.

Two very different verbal communications

Trump stared stubbornly ahead throughout the face-to-face, as if refusing to admit that there was a person, with whom he had also come to debate, to his left. Harris, for her part, displayed a wide repertoire of gestures: she made faces of disgust and surprise, she laughed, she appeared impatient and she shook her head ostensibly. This attitude was a bit excessive at first, but she was contained as the minutes passed. The contrast between this display by the vice president and Biden’s behavior in his June 27 debate against Trump, a disastrous performance that precipitated the withdrawal of his reelection campaign, could not have been more evident.