HOW TO BEAT A BULLY
On Tuesday night, in front of close to 60 million Americans who watched the debate, Kamala Harris gave a master class on how to get a narcissistic bully to fall apart. She finally accomplished what I have been hoping someone would do for 9 long years. She used Trump’s psychological Achilles Heel, his narcissism (vanity), against him. In the process, Harris got Trump to expose himself as the weird, self-centered, racist, misogynistic, anti-democratic, far right conspiracy swamp believing wannabe dictator that he is. Also, he’s a weenie. After the first half hour of this psychological jujitsu match he was losing, Trump looked miserable, hunched over, and defeated. For good reason.
From the beginning of the debate, Harris took control. In the first few moments after coming on stage, Trump tried to evade a handshake with her, but Harris pursued him and forced the handshake she wanted to get, then walked over to her podium. It was a power move. She won the first encounter, and she set up the frame for the rest of the debate. Harris defined herself as the alpha female who can laugh, be tough and force her will on a supposed alpha male. It was immediately clear she would do just fine against Putin, Che or Kim Jung Un.
BODY LANGUAGE
Watching the body language was one of the biggest tells of the debate. Try it. Just turn off the sound and watch their faces and body language. As the debate progressed, Trump slumped more, looking at times angry, belligerent and upset. Harris, on the other hand, was animated, often smiling and reactive. When making her points about Trump, she looked directly at him with a laser-like focus and then turned to the camera where she looked directly at the audience and spoke to the American people. She goaded Trump on and then watched him flounder, bemused by his flailing retorts. When Trump claimed without evidence that immigrants are eating people’s pets, Harris openly laughed at him — a stark contrast to the grave tone he’d taken. Harris at times looked at Trump with what seemed to be pity. Trump, for his part, could not bring himself to look at her at all. He was like a dog, crouched down in the presence of a more dominant dog.
How exactly did she do it? Her playbook was to go at Trump’s self-esteem with direct insults. She trolled him to his face. Her insults acted as bait, affronting narcissist Trump and getting a rise every time. She tormented him directly telling him he was “weak” and a “loser” who was “fired by 81 million Americans” in the last election and “clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that”, is laughed at by our allies who she has met and who have taken her aside to talk about him, military leaders say he is a disgrace, and he is condemned by his own former cabinet members. At one point Trump resorted to a claim from Viktor Orban to make himself feel better. (Orban is the Hungarian dictator who has thrown away his country’s democracy and damaged that country’s economy in the process.) Orban, he claimed, had told him that everyone in the world thought he was great. Harris took that and ran with it, pointing out that Trump was someone who dictators and autocrats are “rooting for… to be president again because… they can manipulate you with flattery and favors”. And then, she stabbed him with these words: “Putin”, she said, would “eat you for lunch.”
THE START OF TRUMP’S DEVOLUTION
What sent Trump down the rabbit hole in the beginning of the debate was her taunt about his rallies. Harris invited the audience to go to a Trump rally where, she said, they will hear Trump talk about Hannibal Lector and windmills causing cancer. “What you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams, and your desires.” That triggered Trump to lay it on thick saying that he has the “biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics” and claim (falsely) that people were being paid to show up for Harris’ rallies.
When she insulted him, he responded by rambling on and on in a bumble of self-defense, often falling back to his favorite talking point about immigrants, old grievances, claiming that what she said wasn’t true, but not backing it up with anything other than his own declaratory statements. Trump kept returning to the immigration issue like a broken record, saying that migrants were behind a nonexistent spike in crime. After that, Harris attacked Trump himself for being a one man crime wave. “I think this is so rich. Coming from someone who has been prosecuted for national security crimes, economic crimes, election interference, has been found liable for sexual assault, and his next big court appearance is in November at his own criminal sentencing.”
In the worst four minutes of his debate performance, Trump talked about cats and dogs being eaten by immigrants in Ohio- a false story being perpetuated by rightwing racists to stir up hatred for Haitian immigrants to get people fearful and therefor eager to elect a strongman. He sounded demented and crazy. One of the moderators, David Muir, commented that he had checked with the city manager and there was no evidence of pets being stolen and eaten in Ohio. But Trump continued to insist. He believed this nonsense from something he saw on TV. Even some of his own supporters have commented that they wished he hadn’t talked about that cuckoo stuff. You have to wonder how many Americans decided right then and there who they should trust with the nuclear codes.
Harris also pinned the immigration problem squarely on Trump because he refused to sign the tough border bill put together by the hardest hard line conservatives in the Senate. Trump “killed the bill” she said to have something to run on. He wanted to keep the problem at the border for his own benefit.
THE LAST STRAW
When it came to January 6th, Trump refused to admit once again that he had lost the election and claimed he “didn’t have anything to do” with the insurrection. “I had nothing to do with that, other than they asked me to make a speech.” He blamed Nancy Pelosi for failing to call in protection at the Capitol. That was a lame response given that he was the president and was obviously responsible for failing to call off his supporters even as many of his family members and lawmakers were begging him to do so when the insurrectionists were attacking the capitol. Thanks to the testimony given under oath by his own daughter and others who were at the White House and testified at the House Select Committee hearing, we know for a fact that he sat by for close to 2 hours watching the insurrection on TV, amazed and delighted that “his people” were fighting for him and refusing pleas to tell them to stop. The mob dispersed only when he told them to. Many formerly undecided voters who heard him say that in the debate reported that that was the last straw for them. They would vote for Harris.
Harris also drove the point home by citing the former military men in Trump’s administration who have warned Americans not to vote for him.
WE COULD TURN THE PAGE, LOOK TO THE FUTURE
Harris talked more than once about how Americans are more alike than different and that we could turn the page and get past this period in our history (Trump) by electing her and Governor Walz. She talked about her own middle-class upbringing and then, deftly, slipped in another Trump trigger “I grew up a middle-class kid raised by a hard-working mother who worked and saved and was able to buy our first home when I was a teenager. The values I bring to the importance of homeownership, knowing not everybody got handed $400 million on a silver platter and then filed bankruptcy six times, is a value that I bring to my work.” That sent Trump off on a rant about how his dad didn’t really give him, little Richie Rich, that much money.
Harris had a great night. 92% of uncommitted voters said she won the debate. Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala right after the debate ended, telling her millions of fans the Trump campaign’s use of AI to claim Swift supported him required that she be truthful about who she will really be voting for. After that over 400,000 people clicked on the register to vote link she gave her fans.
Pollster Tom Bonier has been following registration numbers and said that there has been a massive increase in voter registrations after Swift’s endorsement of Harris. “This intensity and enthusiasm is really unprecedented at this point. It’s even bigger than what we saw after the Dobbs decision in 2022.”
Dick and Liz Cheney announced they will be voting for Harris. And Harris’ head of communications, Brian Fallon, threw down the challenge on X moments after the debate ended: “That was fun,” he said. “Let’s do it again in October.” Fat chance of that now that Trump has been beaten by Harris. True to form, Trump claims he won the debate. Another big lie he will cling to. Trump is a chicken. He is afraid of Harris.
POLLING SURPRISE MAY BE COMING
Even if the national polls of likely voters do not reflect much of a shift, her debate performance consolidated the Democratic base and won over many Independents based on focus group responses. The polls are not going to reflect some of her most ardent supporters because they are newly registered voters who are excited by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Tom Bonier, a pollster who has been more accurate than Nate Silver recently, is reporting an unprecedented number of Black and Hispanic women and younger people registering for the first time across the country. These are numbers Bonier has not seen before. This is consistent with the energy the Democrats are seeing in their huge donation and funding hauls from new voters and the massive numbers of new volunteers who want to help her campaign. Newly registered voters are not considered “likely voters”, however, and are not usually part of the electorate that gets polled.
For the first time, women are are also telling pollsters that their number one topic of concern is abortion instead of the economy. Harris is one of the most powerful, trusted voices on this issue. In 2016 Trump excited many uneducated white men who had never voted before to show up in huge numbers resulting in Trump’s surprising win over Hillary Clinton. This election could have a surprising hidden electorate consisting of women of color, women of childbearing age, and younger people who will rise up to vote for Harris.
ABORTION IS KAMALA’S SUPER POWER
The best moments of the night for Harris came when she talked about abortion. She skewered Trump for handpicking the three justices he put on the Supreme Court that have ruined so many women’s lives and forced them to have to travel across the country to get the basic lifesaving healthcare they need. Trump claimed EVERYONE wanted the states to be making the decisions on abortion. Harris jammed that down his throat by giving illustrations of horrible medical situations for pregnant women and repeating that this was NOT at all what everyone wanted. She labels the abortion bans across our country “Donald Trump abortion bans.”
Trump also insisted more than one time that after babies were born people who were ok with abortion would kill unwanted newborns. That prompted the other moderator, Lindsey Davis, to fact him, stating: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill the baby after it’s born.” This was the first debate where moderators finally!! fact checked Trump twice in real time. Despite that, Daniel Dale reported that Trump lied 30 times in this debate.
Harris said that as president if congress passed it she would sign a bill to reinstate Roe v Wade. Trump countered that she would never be able to get it done because of the divided Congress. But if the Dems gets a trifecta in this election- House, Senate and White House– Bernie Sanders has finally agreed with Chuck Schumer for the first time not to oppose a filibuster carve out for reproductive rights. Other Democrats in the Senate will want to find a way to reinstate this right. In other words, the Senate will likely create a carve out to the filibuster in order to pass an abortion bill that would reinstate Roe with a simple majority vote. That is huge. To get this done the Dems will need to win the White House, gain the House and keep the Senate.
No matter what else is happens, though, Kamala Harris has found the secret to bringing down this narcissistic bully: insult him, expose him and shame him to his face using the truth. He will decompensate before your eyes and people will see him for who he is.