How Harris caught an idiot

Vice President Kamala Harris took the stage at the ABC News debate with a mission: to trigger a Trump collapse.

She succeeded.

Former President Donald Trump also had a mission: to keep himself under control. He failed.

Trump repeatedly lost his composure. Goaded on by predictable provocations, he was defeated again and again.

Trump was pushed into choppy-sentence monologues — and even a full-blown attack on the 2020 election results. Repeating crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, he was backwards, personal, emotional, defensive and frequently incomprehensible.

Harris hit one sore spot after another: Trump's bankruptcies, the contempt of the generals who had served with him, the boredom and early departures of the crowds at his ever-shrinking rallies. Each blow was followed by a Ouch. Trump's counterattacks failed. Harris met them with a sneer and cool amusement. The debate was often a battle of the eyelids: Harris opened them wide, Trump squinted and narrowed them.

Harris' debate preparation seemed to be as much about psychology as it was about politics. She egged Trump on, lured him, baited him – and it worked every time.

Trump left the stage, leaving voters still unsure whether or not he would sign a national abortion ban. He left them with the certainty that he did not want Ukraine to win its defensive war. He accused Harris of hating Israel, but then did not bother to say a word himself in support of the Jewish state's defensive war against Hamas terror. In his confusion and reactivity, he seemed to have forgotten any debate strategy he might have had.

Something that probably struck every woman who watched the debate: Trump couldn't bring himself to say the name of the sitting vice president, his presidential opponent. To him, Harris was just a pronoun: a nameless, identity-less “she,” “her,” “you.” Narcissists are said to cope with ego injuries by not acknowledging the existence of the person who hurt them. If that's true, it might explain Trump's behavior. Harris hurt his feelings, and Trump responded by closing his eyes and pretending Harris didn't have an existence of her own, independent of President Joe Biden, whose name Trump could somehow pronounce.

Pushed, harried and humiliated, Trump lost his footing and control. He never got a chance to make his own case. If any viewer had nostalgic memories of the early Trump economy before it collapsed in his final year in office, then that viewer must have been disappointed. If any viewer wanted a conservative political message, any conservative political message, then that viewer must have been disappointed. Asked if he had developed a health care plan after a decade in politics, Trump could only reply that he had “concepts for a plan.”

Almost from the start, Harris was in control. She had better moments and worse, but she was human where Trump was wild. She had warm words for political opponents like John McCain and Dick Cheney; Trump had warm words for none other than Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian leader whom Trump praised for praising Trump. It was a beating by any means necessary, and no less a beating because Trump brought so much of it on himself.

At the very least, this performance will put an end to Trump's claim that Harris is a mindless nonentity unfit for debate. Harris faced Trump face-to-face in front of tens of millions of witnesses. She dominated and crushed him, using above all her self-control and her astute knowledge of the former president's psychological, moral and intellectual weaknesses.

Will it matter that Harris won so clearly? How could it not matter? But perhaps more important is that Trump lost so miserably to a rival for whom he had not a syllable of respect.