Harris and Trump Debate: Sept. 10 Campaign News
Vice President Kamala Harris shook the hand of former President Donald J. Trump as she walked onstage, then spent the next 90 minutes making every effort to burrow under his skin.
transcript
Trump and Harris Clash in a Fiery Presidential Debate
In their first face-to-face meeting, Kamala Harris put Donald Trump on the defensive as the former president tried to tie her to unpopular Biden administration policies.
“Kamala Harris. Let’s have a good debate.” “Nice to see you, have fun.” “Thank you.” “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.” “Your running mate, JD Vance, has said that you would veto if it did come to your desk.” “Well, I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness.” “She copied Biden’s plan. And it’s like four sentences — like, ‘Run, Spot, Run’ — four sentences that are just, ‘Oh, we’ll try and lower taxes.’ She doesn’t have a plan.” “Let’s not go back. We’re not going back. It’s time to turn the page. Let’s turn the page. Turn the page on this same, old, tired rhetoric.”
Follow along with live updates on the Trump and Harris campaigns.
Kamala Harris commanded the first debate against Donald J. Trump, flashing her prosecutorial skills to leverage every chance to get under the former president’s skin in a 90-minute clash of visions and style.
They disagreed fiercely on abortion and the economy, immigration and the war in Ukraine. But throughout the night, Mr. Trump found himself in a defensive crouch, relitigating his record rather than picking apart hers.
The contrast was apparent even on mute. She smiled. He glowered. He spoke more, but she dictated the terms of the evening.
Here are six takeaways from a debate that was a remarkable reversal from June, when Democrats were so despondent they changed candidates afterward:
Harris set traps. Trump leaped into them.
Ms. Harris strode across the room to deliver the first handshake in a presidential debate since 2016. It was the first time she had met Mr. Trump in person, and she was intent on introducing herself: “Kamala Harris,” she said, as he took her hand. “Have fun,” he instructed her.
She sure appeared to. He did not.
Ms. Harris dominated the proceedings from nearly the start. She laid bait. He took it. It began with her needling Mr. Trump that his bored supporters had been leaving his rallies. It continued with her comment that he had inherited riches from his father. And on it went as she invoked his Republican critics, including those who served in his administration.
On the back foot, Mr. Trump repeatedly spun down rhetorical cul-de-sacs.
At one point, Ms. Harris invited viewers to watch a Trump rally for a more unfiltered view of the former president. “You will not hear him talk about your needs,” she said.
He responded not by talking about voter needs but about crowd numbers.
“People don’t leave my rallies,” he pushed back.
He went on to invoke debunked claims on the right that immigrants are eating pets in an Ohio city, which led to fact-checking pushback from David Muir, one of the ABC News moderators.
“Talk about extreme,” Ms. Harris laughed her rival off.
Trump played defense on his record.
Within the first five minutes, Ms. Harris looked into the camera and told viewers what to expect from Mr. Trump: “the same old, tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling.”
He indeed talked less about what he would do in a second term and spent more time trying to clarify his record. He defended his handling of the pandemic, his decision to fire his top military advisers, and even his seven-year-old response to the deadly far-right rally in Charlottesville, Va.
Mr. Trump fumbled a moment where he had hoped to go on offense: the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal. Instead, he found himself defending his decision to invite the Taliban to Camp David in 2019.
Ms. Harris forced Mr. Trump to defend his closeness to authoritarians like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and his past courtship of Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, “a dictator who would eat you for lunch,” she said. She even goaded him by turning an epithet he calls her — “weak” — toward him on national security.
He called her “weak” back.
Ms. Harris looked straight into the camera as she pitched herself as the candidate of the future and forced him to defend the violence on Jan. 6, 2021. “We don’t have to go back,” she said. “Let’s not go back.”
Harris seized the advantage on abortion.
Abortion was one of the biggest missed opportunities for President Biden in his first debate. It was one of Ms. Harris’s strongest moments in hers.
Mr. Trump is keenly aware of his vulnerability on abortion, having appointed the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Yet on Tuesday he danced around the issue of potentially vetoing a national ban.
“As far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor of abortion ban,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”
He even rebutted his own vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, who has previously expressed openness to a national ban. “I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump, 78, sounded his age as he tried to articulate his position on in vitro fertilization: “I have been a leader on fertilization,” he declared.
Ms. Harris, 59, had laced into Mr. Trump. She called his position on abortion “insulting to the women of America” and said she had met women across the country whose health and lives had been endangered by abortion restrictions.
A Harris campaign official said the exchange on abortion, delivered in the first half-hour with viewership at its highest, was one of the night’s best in her team’s testing of voters in swing states.
Trump didn’t hide his disdain of Harris.
For much of the debate, Ms. Harris expressed her feelings about Mr. Trump by letting her body language do the talking: putting her hand on her chin, laughing and pursing her lips with a puzzled look.
Mr. Trump, who seemed intent on avoiding looking in Ms. Harris’s direction, expressed his feelings by yelling into the microphone.
Ms. Harris warned that world leaders were “laughing at Donald Trump” and saw him as a “disgrace.” And when she referred to his 2020 election loss as the moment he was “fired by 81 million people,” he grew visibly angry.
When Ms. Harris brought up his criminal convictions, Mr. Trump baselessly accused Democrats — and, by extension, Ms. Harris — of turning the judicial system against him: “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he said. At one point, when Ms. Harris tried to interject over a muted mic, Mr. Trump, well versed in extemporaneous insults, used one of her memorable lines from the 2020 vice-presidential debate against her.
“I’m talking now, if you don’t mind, please,” a visibly annoyed Mr. Trump said. “Does that sound familiar?”
Mr. Trump also fumbled a question about his past comments questioning Ms. Harris’s racial identity. “All I can say is, I read where she was not Black, that she put out. And I’ll say that, and then I read that she was Black. And that’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her,” he said. “That’s up to her.”
She called his use of race to divide Americans “a tragedy.”
Harris missed some opportunities.
One of Mr. Trump’s few memorable lines, even if it came off a bit canned, was when he mocked Ms. Harris for the lack of detail in her agenda.
“She copied Biden’s plan. And it’s like, four sentences,” he said, “Like, ‘Run, Spot, Run.’”
In her response, Ms. Harris bored into Mr. Trump’s agenda rather than her own. It was typical of a debate in which she appeared most at ease talking about Mr. Trump rather than fleshing out her own plans for the presidency.
When asked by the moderators to explain a list of her policy reversals, including her early support for banning fracking and decriminalizing border crossings, Ms. Harris addressed only the first one after promising to discuss them all: “I will not ban fracking,” she said, before turning quickly to Mr. Trump’s upbringing as the son of a real estate developer.
In fact, the only moment Ms. Harris showed any nerves was in the very first answer, when she tried to pack many of her economic plans — a child tax credit, a small-business tax deduction — into a single response.
Trump missed Biden.
One of Mr. Trump’s goals had been to tie Ms. Harris to Mr. Biden’s most unpopular policies, particularly on the economy and immigration, accusing the Biden-Harris administration of allowing “millions” of migrants across the southwestern border.
He failed to do so for most of the night. Instead, he mocked a man he seemed to miss running against. “You’ll wake him up at 4 in the afternoon,” Mr. Trump said at one point of Mr. Biden.
Ms. Harris pressed her rival on his fixation. “It’s important to remind the former president,” she said, “you’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.”
The Trump campaign has cast Ms. Harris in ads as “dangerously liberal.” But on Tuesday he veered within a minute from saying she was mimicking him so much he was considering sending her “a MAGA hat” to calling her a “Marxist.”
It wasn’t until his closing statement that Mr. Trump truly appeared to find his rhythm linking her to Mr. Biden. “She’s going to do all these wonderful things,” he said of her various promises. “Why hasn’t she done it?”
She didn’t have to answer, because the debate was over.
But Mr. Trump wasn’t done. Ever the salesman, he went to the spin room to review his own performance.
“It was the best debate I’ve ever had,” he said.
For most of the 90-minute debate between former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the former president bellowed into the microphone, practically spitting at moments as he took the bait time and again and got knocked off his goals.
Instead of repeatedly tying Ms. Harris to President Biden and forcing her to own their record, Mr. Trump came off as angry and scattered as he painted a dark portrait of an America ravaged by crime, overrun by dangerous undocumented immigrants who eat pets and at risk of falling into the hands of an opponent he falsely called a Marxist.
“Our country is being lost,” Mr. Trump said, timing its latest decline to the moment he left the White House. “We’re a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War III.”
He brought up Springfield, Ohio, and reiterated a debunked claim that his campaign has been pushing that Haitian immigrants there have been eating 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.”
And during a discussion of abortion, Mr. Trump claimed, falsely, that some states with Democratic governors favor being able to “execute” babies after they are born. “In other words, we’ll execute the baby,” he said. No state allows infanticide.
Fear-mongering, and demagoguing on the issue of immigrants, has been Mr. Trump’s preferred speed since he announced his first candidacy for the presidency in June 2015, and he has often found a receptive audience for it. He won his first election in 2016, and lost his second, without dramatically changing his approach; both races were decided in three battleground states by fewer than 100,000 votes. At his inauguration in 2017, he spoke of “American carnage.”
But since he left office, after lies of widespread election fraud costing him the 2020 race and a mob of his supporters attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Mr. Trump’s public comments about the state of the country have grown only darker.
Many of the lines he delivered at the debate were straight from his rally speeches, but they landed somewhat differently on the debate stage — with no live audience at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia — and with millions of people who do not routinely follow his campaign appearances tuning in. And they mostly lacked the accompanying beats Mr. Trump tries to deliver at rallies — the moments when he mentions his own tenure or pivots to a promise to bring prosperity to voters.
Mr. Trump needed to paint Ms. Harris as responsible for the pain that voters have described feeling. Instead, he described a bleak America and talked about himself.
Mr. Trump did occasionally sprinkle in references to his time in office, and he tried to bring the conversation around to the economy and immigration, two issues where his advisers believe, and polls show, that he has an advantage. After struggling at first when pressed about his position on abortion and his role appointing justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, he pushed back in a way his advisers liked by questioning how late into a pregnancy Ms. Harris thought abortions should be allowed (she did not answer). And he pressed hard on the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which precipitated Mr. Biden’s drop in support.
He mocked her for flip-flopping on positions, saying: “Everything that she believed three years ago and four years ago is out the window. She’s going to my philosophy now. In fact, I was going to send her a MAGA hat. She’s gone to my philosophy. But if she ever got elected, she’d change it. And it will be the end of our country.” And then he blew past the stop sign: “She’s a Marxist. Everybody knows she’s a Marxist. Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics. And he taught her well.”
One of his best lines came only when the debate was nearly over, in his closing statement, when he asked why Ms. Harris had not accomplished all of her goals during the three and a half years she has been in office.
That argument had been what Mr. Trump’s advisers had coached him to say in a handful of debate preparation sessions that they had studiously avoided calling debate preparation sessions, preferring to describe them as “policy time.” They had hoped he would look directly at the camera and ask voters if they were better off now than they were four years ago.
Instead, for the most part, Mr. Trump was rattled by Ms. Harris as she took digs at people leaving his rallies early, his inherited wealth and his criminal indictments and legal troubles to describe him as interested only in himself.
He grew visibly angry and, to his advisers’ dismay, shambolic, as he tried to rebut her attacks instead of answering the moderators’ questions or pressing the points he had set out to make. When he did respond to questions posed to him, it also did not go especially well. He again litigated his false claims of widespread election fraud, defended his widely criticized performance during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, refused to rule out signing a national abortion ban and repeated his questioning of Ms. Harris’s racial identity (she is Black).
Ms. Harris, who has been trying to project an optimistic message based on freedom — including reproductive freedom and economic freedom — did not join Mr. Trump in his description of what the country needs.
“The people of our country actually need a leader who engages in solutions, who actually addresses the problems at hand,” Ms. Harris said as she criticized Mr. Trump for his role in killing a bipartisan bill that she said would have addressed border crossings. “But what we have in the former president is someone who would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”
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Elon Musk, the world’s richest person who is expected to put tens of millions of dollars into pro-Trump groups, is not defending Trump’s debate performance. Musk said in a post on X, which he owns, that Harris “exceeded most people’s expectations tonight.” But he reiterated that he backs Trump and echoed Trump's complaint that the debate hosts were unfair.
Erica L. Green reported from the debate in Philadelphia
After former President Donald J. Trump had tried several times during the debate to tie Vice President Kamala Harris to President Biden and his policies, she decided to try to make something abundantly clear.
“You’re not running against Joe Biden,” she told Mr. Trump. “You're running against me.”
Mr. Trump’s aides had hoped he would use the debate to persuade voters that Ms. Harris bore responsibility for the most unpopular aspects of Mr. Biden’s record, which they saw as a potentially potent line of attack at a moment when polls show voters are hungry for change. Mr. Trump repeatedly tried to link her to the president on inflation, immigration and Russia’s war in Ukraine, among other issues, but Ms. Harris largely deflected those attacks as she pressed her case against Mr. Trump.
At one point, as Mr. Trump was speaking about inflation, he tried to make the case again. “Remember this,” he said. “She is Biden.”
“Clearly, I am not Joe Biden,” Ms. Harris responded, “and I am certainly not Donald Trump. And what I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country.”
Sitting vice presidents who run for the top office often face questions about how much they will embrace or reject the administrations they serve. For much of the night, Ms. Harris brushed off salvos from Mr. Trump and questions from the moderators that would have required her to defend or distance herself from the Biden administration’s policies and positions.
Mr. Trump kept trying, though. He called Mr. Biden her “boss” several times, and when speaking about immigration he mentioned “people that she and Biden let into our country.”
But as the debate grew more hostile, Mr. Trump may have unintentionally undermined his efforts to link the two in voters’ minds when he proclaimed, “I’ll give you a little secret: He hates her,” during a digression about the fact that she replaced Mr. Biden as the Democratic nominee after he won the primaries.
The Biden policy that Ms. Harris defended most directly may have been his decision to leave Afghanistan. Mr. Trump has repeatedly criticized the chaotic withdrawal as he has sought to sow doubts about Ms. Harris’s foreign policy experience.
“I agreed with President Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan,” Ms. Harris said. “Four presidents said they would, and Joe Biden did. And as a result, America’s taxpayers are not paying the $300 million a day we were paying for that endless war, and as of today, there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone, in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.”
Since Mr. Biden dropped out of the race, Ms. Harris has been steadfast in her defense of him. But she headed into the debate with the crucial task of not only introducing herself to the American public but also pitching herself as a change agent for the next four years without discounting what she and Mr. Biden have done in the last three and a half.
Mr. Trump, who got the last word of the debate, asked in his closing argument why Ms. Harris had not already carried out her policy proposals — another strategy his aides had been hinting at for weeks, but one that inflates the role of a vice president.
After the debate, Mr. Biden weighed in on his vice president’s performance.
“America got to see tonight the leader I’ve been proud to work alongside for three and a half years,” Mr. Biden wrote on X after the debate. “Wasn’t even close. VP Harris proved she’s the best choice to lead our nation forward. We’re not going back.”
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Andrew Duehren and Michael Gold contributed reporting.
Here’s a new milestone that was reached tonight. Over $1 billion has been raised on ActBlue, the Democratic fund-raising platform, since the hour that President Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris on July 21, according to The Times’s review of the platform’s figures.
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In the 105-minute titanic showdown between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday in Philadelphia, there were pointed barbs, missed opportunities and puzzling tangents — and a worrying number of animal mentions.
Here is a look back at the moments we’re still marveling over.
Unlikeliest flex that would have been inconceivable until recently. Ms. Harris, the Democratic nominee, bragging about “having the endorsement of former Vice President Dick Cheney and Congress member Liz Cheney.”
Foggiest notion of an idea. Mr. Trump, responding to a question about what he would do about Obamacare: “I have concepts of a plan.”
Best Ivy League brag. Mr. Trump, while discussing his economic plan, mentioned his studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “Look, I went to the Wharton School of finance and many of those professors — the top professors — think my plan is a brilliant plan.”
Most niche swing-state electorate shout out. Ms. Harris, urging Mr. Trump to “tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania” how he would address the European territorial ambitions of Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.
Loudest record scratch. Ms. Harris, taking some viewers by surprise, said, “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners.” (She has previously said that she owns a gun for personal safety.)
transcript
This business about taking everyone’s guns away. Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.
Most questionable character reference. Mr. Trump, citing the support of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary, “one of the most respected men.”
Most likely-to-go-viral body language. Ms. Harris, theatrically putting her hand to her chin, eyebrows raised, after Mr. Trump said: “Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics. And he taught her well.”
Most meta moment. Mr. Trump, alluding to Ms. Harris’s past reaction to being interrupted, in response to Ms. Harris interrupting him: “Wait a minute. I’m talking now, if you don’t mind, please. Does that sound familiar?”
transcript
She gave up at least 12, and probably 14 or 15 different policies, like she was big on defund the police. In Minnesota, she went out. Wait a minute. I’m talking now. If you don’t mind. Please, does that sound familiar?
Hardest pivot. Ms. Harris, trying to explain her policy flip-flops, began by talking about her position on fracking and quickly redirected — to her middle-class upbringing, Mr. Trump’s bankruptcies and her track record of “protecting seniors from scams.”
Craziest fact check. Linsey Davis, one of the moderators from ABC, punctuating Mr. Trump’s answer on abortion and purported “execution” of newborn babies with a straight-faced response: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
Most inspired reference to a children’s book. Mr. Trump, as part of a back-and-forth over the economy, defending his plans and saying Ms. Harris doesn’t have one. “She copied Biden’s plan. And it’s like four sentences — like, ‘Run, Spot, Run’ — four sentences that are just, ‘Oh, we’ll try and lower taxes.’” This appeared to be a reference to the 1930s children’s book series, “Read with Dick and Jane.” Spot was their dog.
transcript
She doesn’t have a plan. She copied Biden’s plan. And it’s like four sentences like, “Run spot run.” Four sentences that are just, “Oh we’ll try and lower taxes.” She doesn’t have a plan.
No, really, Spot — you should run. Mr. Trump, elaborating on the threats he says immigrants pose, referred to a debunked social media rumor that immigrants were eating pets in an Ohio town. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Most shameless historical revisionism. Mr. Trump, talking about the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021: “I had nothing to do with that other than they asked me to make a speech.”
Most hit-’em-where-it-hurts. Ms. Harris, needling Mr. Trump over his fixation with crowd sizes: “What you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
Wildest sounding attack line that was basically true. Mr. Trump, saying Ms. Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” He was likely referring to a CNN report that showed that, in 2019, Ms. Harris told the American Civil Liberties Union that she supported providing gender transition surgery to detained migrants.
Most concerned about President Biden’s whereabouts. Mr. Trump, worried that Mr. Biden “spends all his time on the beach,” and later instructing Ms. Harris to “get him out of bed.”
Most semantic. The moderator David Muir, saying, “I didn’t detect the sarcasm,” when pushing back on Mr. Trump’s claim that he had been merely speaking “sarcastically” when he admitted to losing the 2020 election.
Friendliest shout-out to another network. Mr. Trump, praising three Fox News hosts and their coverage of his response to the violence in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017: “Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse,” — referring to Jesse Watters — “all of these people, they covered it.”
Proudest son moment. Mr. Trump, parrying an attack from Ms. Harris that he is a serially bankrupt nepo-baby: “My father was a Brooklyn builder. Brooklyn. Queens. And a great father. And I learned a lot from him.”
Most likely to be re-gifted. Mr. Trump, offering free merchandise to Ms. Harris: “I was going to send her a MAGA hat.”
In the first, and perhaps only, presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump, the two candidates verbally sparred in often deeply personal terms, with policy arguments largely being overshadowed by fiery exchanges over character and crowd size.
Political pundits, analysts and commentators noted that Mr. Trump had often found himself on the defensive on issues such as abortion while allowing himself to be baited by Ms. Harris and veering off message. The vice president belittled the attendance at Mr. Trump’s rallies and suggested that American military leaders view him as a “disgrace,” while Mr. Trump often responded angrily, declaring that she had no policies of her own and was the “worst vice president in the history of our country.”
After the debate, many Democratic strategists and officials cheered Ms. Harris’s performance, while Republicans complained about the tenor of the questions from the moderators and acknowledged Mr. Trump’s missed opportunities to unleash focused attack lines.
Here is a sampling of the reaction.
“She was exquisitely well prepared, she laid traps, and he chased every rabbit down every hole instead of talking about the things that he should have been talking about. This is the difference between someone who is well prepared and someone who is unprepared,” former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican who led Mr. Trump’s 2016 transition team, said on ABC.
“Harris repeatedly baited him into going off topic or doubling down on his most unpopular positions. She cleared the bar in terms of telling her personal story, going deep enough on policy, but also showing she has the chops to go toe to toe with anyone,” said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist and a former adviser to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
“I think that Kamala Harris exceeded the very low expectations that were purposely set for her,” Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur and former 2024 Republican presidential candidate, said on Fox News.
“When the debate focused on the border and economy, Trump had the upper hand, but too often he took the bait from the V.P., giving her a pass. While the vice president clearly got under President Trump’s skin, she offered little beyond platitudes,” said Lance Trover, a Republican strategist who served as press secretary to Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota.
“Perhaps men are too emotional to be President,” said Justin Wolfers, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan.
“Harris started somewhat hesitantly, perhaps because Trump’s attacking style and factless presentation are quite different from the courtroom or the Senate floor. However, she rounded into form starting with her answer on reproductive rights,” said John Cameron Turner, the Kenneth M. Strange director of debate at Dartmouth College.
“Trump did not win the debate but I think he won the election with an assist to ABC because it was so in the tank for Harris that it was repulsive. Voters did see Harris dodge every question that was even slightly difficult and tried to erase her record and Biden’s,” said Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio host.
“Trump was poorly prepared and unfocused, left many points on the field, and missed numerous opportunities to press a case against her (which ABC was clearly not clamoring to highlight). He took a lot of bait. He got a few good shots and points in, but whiffed on a lot of chances,” said Guy Benson, political editor of the conservative website Townhall.com.
“Trump continues to highlight tariffs as the solution to a range of problems, failing to recognize that it would worsen inflation and not generate revenues from China. Harris was effective in turning the discussion about China against Trump by arguing that he had not been tough on the broader issues, including protecting U.S. manufacturing from Chinese competition in high-tech industries,” said Eswar Prasad, the former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division.
“Harris played the long game in tonight’s debate, letting former President Trump reference his relationships with Viktor Orban, Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin and present internet-meme conspiracies around Haitian immigrants ‘eating dogs and cats’ in Springfield, Ohio, for a full 56 minutes before asserting that Trump doesn’t have the ‘temperament’ to be president,” said Henrietta Treyz, managing partner and director of economic policy research at the consulting firm Veda Partners.
“I think the former president has had better debates. I think there were a number of missed opportunities there in which he could have put her campaign away, such as on the economy. All he had to do was lay out the increases in prices for gas, groceries and mortgages. I think this gives her life,” said Sam DeMarco III, a councilman at large in Allegheny County, Pa., and the county’s Republican Party chairman.
“A lot of Trump’s supporters are tuning in tonight to see the mask fall off. The man who marketed himself as strong and in command is flailing, getting rattled, and looks small when challenged. There will be some genuinely surprised & disappointed Trump supporters after tonight’s performance,” said Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as White House communications director during the Trump administration.
“Wasn’t even close. VP Harris proved she’s the best choice to lead our nation forward,” said President Biden.
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Mr. Trump said he would spin the reporters himself.
Though his campaign had dispatched advisers and spokeswomen, close congressional allies and even his running mate to the debate “spin room,” where journalists mix with such surrogates, former President Donald J. Trump bucked tradition. He walked into the room full of reporters less than an hour after the end of his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night and insisted that he’d delivered a winning performance.
“It was the best debate I’ve ever had,” said Mr. Trump, whose matchup against President Biden in June ultimately led Mr. Biden to drop out of the race.
His entrance sucked the air out of a room that had been buzzing with both his surrogates and those from the Harris campaign. He was immediately swarmed by cameras and phones, taking attention away from the Democrats there.
Facing a barrage of shouted questions, he largely stuck to the same points, like insisting that ABC News and the moderators had been unfair.
Still, there were signs that his confidence had been rattled. Mr. Trump had for weeks been goading Ms. Harris to agree to multiple debates. After the debate, her campaign said in a post on X that she was ready for a second one and asked, “Is Donald Trump?”
But Mr. Trump, when asked about her campaign’s sudden eagerness for a rematch, sounded more hesitant. “She wants a second debate because she lost tonight very badly,” he insisted.
Later, after he’d marched around the perimeter of the room to do an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Mr. Trump cast more doubt on his commitment to another debate.
“I have to think about it,” Mr. Trump said, adding that he thought Ms. Harris lost their debate. “When you’re a prize fighter and you lose, you immediately want a new fight.”
Democrats have raised about $24.2 million on ActBlue, the progressive fund-raising platform, in a three-hour period after the debate began at 9 p.m. Eastern, according to our New York Times tracker.
In total on Tuesday, ActBlue processed $36.1 million in donations for Democrats — the highest daily total since the day that Harris announced that she had chosen Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate.
The man who was originally scheduled to be the Democrat on stage tonight just weighed in, saying that the contest “wasn’t even close” in a post on X. “America got to see tonight the leader I’ve been proud to work alongside for three and a half years,” President Biden wrote. “VP Harris proved she’s the best choice to lead our nation forward. We’re not going back.”
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She looked faux-fascinated, as if coaxing him into thinking he was onto something — nodding, head-tilting, performatively squinting, smiling a little, then a little more — a reel of soon-to-be memes, screaming silent bemusement with a hand on her chin.
He looked miserable.
The initial question, at least, should have been fertile terrain for former President Donald J. Trump: a prompt for Vice President Kamala Harris about immigration, a vulnerability for her, and how she might diverge on the subject from her boss, whose policies on the border have often come under withering criticism.
But by the time Mr. Trump got to talking, he had something else on his mind: rally attendance.
Also cats.
It can be said that Ms. Harris was well prepared in leading him astray. After blaming Mr. Trump for helping to tank a congressional border bill, Ms. Harris unboxed an attack line that seemed handcrafted by a team of Trumpologists to enrage him, distracting him with his own vanity.
“I’m going to actually do something really unusual,” she said, addressing the audience at home. “I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies. Because it’s a really interesting thing to watch.”
Smirking, provoking, Ms. Harris ticked through some common Trump digressions, like windmills and the fictional killer Hannibal Lecter. Mr. Trump’s eyes narrowed, and his head cocked to the left.
“And what you will also notice,” she said, as Mr. Trump bobbed a bit, pendulum-like, “is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”
On those two nouns, Mr. Trump’s eyes shot up. Ms. Harris completed her thought: “The one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”
And then, Mr. Trump talked about Mr. Trump.
The former president, a merry anarchist of a debater since his first campaign, can generally be relied upon to touch every stove, sound every air horn. This is a man who once stared into an eclipse.
Yet in an evening rife with missed opportunities and curious rabbit holes for Mr. Trump, this was the exchange where he seemed to lose his way — the temptation he could not resist, no matter how many allies might have hoped he could hear their pleas to double back.
As an ABC moderator, David Muir, strained to redirect the conversation, asking Mr. Trump about the immigration bill that Ms. Harris had brought up, he was not interested.
“First, let me respond as to the rallies …”
Soon, Ms. Harris’s right hand returned to her chin.
When Mr. Trump was done litigating his rally crowds (“We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics”) and conspiracy-casting about hers (“People don’t go to her rallies — there’s no reason to go — and the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there”), he turned to a widely debunked yarn about Haitian immigrants in Ohio abducting and feasting on their neighbors’ pets.
“They’re eating the dogs!” he said. “The people that came in — they’re eating the cats!”
Ms. Harris threw her head back. She clasped her hands. Mr. Muir refuted the claims as Mr. Trump glowered.
“I’ve seen people on television!” he protested. “People on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food!’”
Ms. Harris shook her head, projecting the deep concern of a disappointed relative. She laughed for a moment.
“Talk about extreme,” she said, a bit risk-averse after already getting what she had wanted. A different candidate — Bill Clinton, Mr. Trump — might have let fly a ferocious zinger, unrehearsed and unmerciful. She let it rest.
But she did have something else to add, culled again from her roster of buzz-phrases that make Mr. Trump see matador red.
Might viewers like to know, she wondered, about the Republicans who have endorsed her campaign? Republicans like Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman and relentless Trump nemesis?
Mr. Trump yanked his head skyward. Now he was pretending to laugh, unconvincingly.
Left with little to praise about former President Donald J. Trump’s underwhelming debate performance, Fox News hosts quickly focused their ire on ABC News, accusing the network and its debate moderators of skewing their questions to Vice President Kamala Harris’s advantage.
Martha MacCallum, who co-anchored Fox’s post-debate coverage on Tuesday night, opened by declaring that Ms. Harris had been given a free pass by the ABC moderators and “was really never held to the fire.”
“That falls on ABC,” Ms. MacCallum added, to much agreement from her colleagues around the table. “I think there were moments when it felt like they were helping her out.”
Sean Hannity called ABC News “the biggest loser in the debate.”
And Laura Ingraham insisted that it was ABC’s intent all along to boost the vice president. “ABC’s goal tonight was to help Kamala Harris,” she said. “And ABC did help Kamala Harris.”
Ms. Ingraham also offered a gentle criticism of the former president. “Did Donald Trump miss a few opportunities?” she asked. “Absolutely.”
Only Brit Hume, one of Fox’s longest-serving on-air personalities, went beyond simply acknowledging Mr. Trump’s uneven performance. “Make no mistake about it,” he said. “Trump had a bad night.”
Still, Fox News was not the only network whose anchors were unsubtle about their view of the debate. Over on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow told viewers that her colleagues were so thrilled with Ms. Harris’s performance that they were debating whether she might have had “the best televised presidential debate performance ever.”
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In late July, Donald J. Trump said at a gathering of Black journalists in Chicago that “all of a sudden,” Vice President Kamala Harris had “made a turn and she became a Black person.”
On Tuesday, standing feet from Ms. Harris on the debate stage, Mr. Trump said “whatever she wants to be is OK with me.”
But his attempt to take back his racial attack didn’t stick. Minutes later, when pressed by moderators to further explain the remark, he went on to say that “all I can say is, I read where she was not Black, that she put out.” He continued: “And I’ll say that, and then I read that she was Black. And that’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her.”
Mr. Trump’s initial remarks this summer were a flashpoint for the Trump campaign. The former president was slammed with criticism, jeopardizing an opportunity to make gains amid a Black electorate that had been softening in its support for Democrats. Ms. Harris has since made strides with Black voters.
On Tuesday, she used her response to make an extended appeal for less divisive politics. She said it was a “tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has, consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people.” She cited Mr. Trump’s harsh comments about the Central Park Five, the five Black and Latino men who were wrongly convicted of the rape of a jogger in New York City, and the lie that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United States.
“I think the American people want better than that,” Ms. Harris said.
Ms. Harris’s father was born in Jamaica, and her mother was born in India. She has long embraced both her Black and South Asian identity. Ms. Haris attended Howard University, a historically Black institution. While she was a United States senator, her official biography described her as “the second African-American woman and first South Asian-American senator in history.” Her White House biography says she is “the first woman, the first Black American, and the first South Asian American to be elected to this position.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, accompanied by Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman, stopped by a watch party at Cherry Street Pier in Philadelphia to greet supporters, after the debate.
"Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate," her campaign said on X. "Is Donald Trump?" Trump indicated he would "think about that" but said "she wants a second debate because she lost tonight very badly."
Trump then repeated that assertion in a post-debate appearance on Fox News, talking with Sean Hannity. “When you’re a prize fighter and you lose, you immediately want a new fight," he said of Harris.
Before Trump came into the spin room, his advisers insisted that he had already committed to a proposed debate with NBC on Sep. 25. But Trump — who has been goading Harris for weeks about a second debate — adopted more of a “well, we’ll see” approach tonight.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTTrump came into the spin room, flocked by advisers, about an hour after the debate ended and was immediately swarmed by press, taking attention away from the dozen or so Harris surrogates in the room. He insisted repeatedly that this was his best debate performance — better than the one that ultimately led Biden to exit the race.
Asked why he came to the spin room if he thinks he did so well, he replied simply that he was asked.
The host Rachel Maddow on MSNBC read Taylor Swift’s Instagram endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in its entirety to her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, who was on video link from Mesa, Ariz., where he has been campaigning. Walz put a hand on his chest and smiled wide as he took in the news. “I am incredibly grateful, first of all, to Taylor Swift. I say that also as a cat owner — a fellow cat owner,” he said, calling her message “eloquent” and “clear” and urging Swifties to “get on over” to Harris’s website.
BREAKING: Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris for president.
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) September 11, 2024
Tim Walz reacts to the news LIVE on MSNBC pic.twitter.com/wACc6WzQ3k
Late during the presidential debate on Tuesday, Vice President Kamala Harris asserted something that might have surprised some viewers: She owns a gun.
Ms. Harris’s statement came in response to an accusation from former President Donald J. Trump that “she has a plan to confiscate everybody’s gun.”
Ms. Harris pointed to her record of gun ownership, as well as that of her vice-presidential nominee, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota.
“This business about taking everyone’s guns away — Tim Walz and I are both gun owners,” she said. “We’re not taking anybody’s guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.”
transcript
This business about taking everyone’s guns away. Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.
This is not the first time that Ms. Harris has spoken of owning a gun, a cultural signifier that over the years has more often been associated with Republicans than Democrats. When she was running for president in the 2020 Democratic primary, Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor, said that she kept a gun for safety.
“I am a gun owner, and I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do — for personal safety,” she told reporters in Iowa in 2019. “I was a career prosecutor.”
By invoking their gun ownership, Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz have tried to refute the contention that one either supports an interpretation of the Second Amendment that does not restrict guns in the United States or advocates the wholesale confiscation of them. Both Democrats have called for some restrictions on who can own a gun and how they can be purchased, often re-upping those pleas after mass shootings.
Mr. Trump also owns guns, though the New York Police Department sought to revoke his concealed carry permit after he was convicted of 34 felonies in May.
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Kamala Harris showed the benefits of preparing for a debate: In contrast to Trump, she came in with a list of themes and attacks. She got under Trump’s skin, and kept returning to the central theme of moving forward, turning the page, and generational change. She also showed how she was going to deal with Trump's attempts to tie her to Biden: Ignore him, respectfully.
When it comes to the worldviews of these two candidates, here’s what we learned tonight: Trump has doubled-down on his admiration of authoritarians, starting with Viktor Orban of Hungary, and his conviction that deals can be struck — with no regard to principles like national soverignty or democracy. And Harris hewed close to the Biden view, losing an opportunity to talk about how she might handle the lit-matches around the globe. Missing from both: A long-term vision for handling an increasingly aggressive China or a Russia that may act as a disruptor for decades.
Reporting from Philadelphia
The cat in Swift’s endorsement post is Benjamin Button, her Ragdoll.
Look what they made her do.
Taylor Swift, who is one of America’s most celebrated pop-culture icons and has an enormous following across the world, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris late Tuesday after Ms. Harris’s debate against former President Donald J. Trump.
The endorsement by Ms. Swift, delivered minutes after Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump had stepped off the debate stage in Philadelphia, offers Ms. Harris an unrivaled celebrity backer and a tremendous shot of adrenaline to her campaign, especially with the younger voters she has been trying to attract.
“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Ms. Swift wrote on Instagram to her 283 million followers. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them."
She signed her post as “Childless Cat Lady,” a reference to comments made by Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, about women without children. The photo that accompanied her post showed her holding a furry feline, Benjamin Button, her pet Ragdoll.
Ms. Swift’s endorsement was much anticipated among Democrats. The singer has expressed regret for not having done more to speak out about her opposition to Mr. Trump during his first run in 2016. Since then, she has embraced a more political posture while speaking out on issues such as abortion access. But the precise timing of Tuesday’s endorsement was something of a surprise: Ms. Swift endorsed Joe Biden on Oct. 7, 2020, closer to the election.
The impact of Ms. Swift’s endorsement may be hard to quantify, but her ability to get supporters to register to vote came into sharp relief just last year. In a brief post on her Instagram account in 2023, Ms. Swift encouraged her 272 million supporters at the time to vote and included a link to the website Vote.org.
The site later reported 35,252 new registrations that day, a significant jump compared with the previous year, and an especially significant spike in a nonelection year.
On Tuesday, Ms. Swift included a similar link to Vote.gov in her Instagram story.
In her post endorsing Ms. Harris, Ms. Swift also referred to her “fears” about artificial intelligence. She pointed to content generated by the technology that had falsely suggested that she supported Mr. Trump, which the former president promoted on social media. She underscored concerns that Americans would not know where she genuinely stood if she had not spoken out.
“It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” Ms. Swift wrote. “It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth."
Mr. Trump has called Ms. Swift “liberal” but “beautiful,” and he has praised a friend of hers, Brittany Mahomes, the wife of the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, as well. Some fans of Ms. Swift had encouraged her to go public about her support for Ms. Harris to make a point of contrast after it appeared that Ms. Mahomes had liked one of Mr. Trump’s social media posts.
Ms. Swift, who has been a star musician spanning country and pop music for almost two decades, is one of the few celebrities with broad appeal and the ability to cut through a crowded media environment. Her romance with Travis Kelce, the star tight end for the Chiefs, has captivated the worlds of football and culture, and she is in the final stages of a head-spinning international tour that has sold out stadiums around the globe.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, dismissed the endorsement as “more evidence that the Democrat party has become the party of the wealthy elite.”
In 2020, Ms. Swift’s endorsement of Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris generated significant backlash from conservatives who urged her to keep her music career apolitical.
Four years later, her growing political involvement led to fevered speculation from Democrats about whether and when she would endorse Ms. Harris. Last month, some fans became convinced that she was signaling her endorsement by posting a photo of one of her backup dancers in silhouette that bore a resemblance to the vice president.
For her part, Ms. Harris has embraced pop music in her campaign.
Her rallies have had the feel of concerts as much as political events, with hip-hop stars like Megan Thee Stallion giving performances and D.J.s warming up dancing crowds of thousands before the vice president walks onstage to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom.” (Many Democrats had hoped that Beyoncé would perform at the party’s national convention in Chicago, but rumors of her presence turned out to be false.)
Mr. Biden’s rallies, in comparison, were small and low in energy, often reaching their peak of raucousness when a high school drum line played.
Polls show that Ms. Harris is doing much better with younger voters than Mr. Biden was, a crucial part of a resurgence in her polls that has allowed her to draw even with Mr. Trump. Ms. Swift’s backing of her campaign is a reflection of that appeal.
In making her endorsement, Ms. Swift added that she was “heartened and impressed” by Ms. Harris’s choice of Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, saying that Mr. Walz had been “standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”
Soon after, Mr. Walz appeared on MSNBC, where the host Rachel Maddow read Ms. Swift’s endorsement to him in its entirety.
“I am incredibly grateful, first of all, to Taylor Swift,” Mr. Walz said, putting his hand over his heart. “I say that also as a cat owner — a fellow cat owner.”
Ms. Swift has long pushed for her supporters to do their civic duty, posting a picture of herself in a long line on Election Day in 2016, a photo her fans thought was a cryptic endorsement of Hillary Clinton.
It was not until 2018 that Ms. Swift made her first formal foray into politics by endorsing a Democrat, Phil Bredesen, over a Republican, Marsha Blackburn, in a Tennessee Senate race. (Nashville is the nation’s country music capital, and Ms. Swift maintains a residence there.)
Ms. Blackburn won the race by more than 10 percentage points in the deep red state.
In an interview with Vogue in 2019, Ms. Swift indicated that she had wanted to be more vocal about supporting Mrs. Clinton but had worried that her support could backfire. She said she had feared that Mr. Trump might try “weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement” against her and Mrs. Clinton. Ms. Swift also shared concerns that public criticism of her at the time would be unfairly applied to Ms. Clinton as well.
Ms. Swift continued: “The summer before that election, all people were saying was, ‘She’s calculated. She’s manipulative. She’s not what she seems. She’s a snake. She’s a liar.’ These are the same exact insults people were hurling at Hillary. Would I be an endorsement or would I be a liability?”
Jess Bidgood, Michael M. Grynbaum, Julia Jacobs, Jazmine Ulloa and Michael Gold contributed reporting.
It’s unclear whether or not climate change will be one of the topics the candidates address at the debate on Tuesday. But if Times climate reporters and editors were moderating the debate, which is hosted by ABC News, here are questions we would ask, and some background to inform how each candidate might answer.
The United States is currently the world’s biggest producer of both oil and gas, the burning of which are the main contributors to global warming. Would your administration continue working to expand fossil fuel production, or is it time for the U.S. to start moving away from fossil fuels?
Harris has walked back her 2019 pledge to ban fracking, a key way of producing oil and gas. Her softening of this stance reflects economic concerns. While the Biden-Harris administration has worked to promote clean energy, it has also benefited from an economy buoyed by record fossil fuel production. Besides fracking, another key area of focus is liquefied natural gas exports. The Biden administration said it would ban new liquefied natural gas export permits, but that decision is being challenged in court.
Trump’s position is less nuanced. He has said he would unburden the oil and gas industry of regulations they find onerous and promote an aggressive agenda of oil and gas drilling and exploration. In a direct appeal to the industry, he told a group of fossil fuel executives they should donate $1 billion to his campaign because so he could roll back environmental regulations if elected. He also said one of the first actions he would take if re-elected would be to sharply expand oil and gas production.
Last year was another 12 months of record-breaking heat and extreme weather: Some 645 people in died in Maricopa County, Ariz., alone from heat-related illnesses. Economic losses from climate change are mounting and adding billions of damage to roads, bridges, seaside communities and critical infrastructure. How would your administration help the country prepare for more such disasters and prevent more death?
As vice president, Harris has talked about the importance of helping vulnerable populations recover from climate-related disasters. In 2022, she announced more than $1 billion in grants to help communities prepare for extreme weather events. “As the climate crisis gets worse, extreme weather will pose a rapidly growing danger to a rapidly growing number of communities,” she said at the time. But beyond her record as vice president, there are few clues to how Harris would approach the issue.
Trump has falsely claimed that climate change is not making extreme weather worse. Five months into his administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did not have leaders. And while Trump offered federal support for relief efforts after a number of severe storms, he was slow to respond to many weather disasters, most notably Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.