Kamala Harris came out swinging against Donald Trump during their only scheduled debate and first-ever meeting ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election, putting in an aggressive performance calculated to pre-empt and bait her notoriously combative opponent.

The high-stakes Tuesday evening debate, which unfolded for more than an hour and a half at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, could break open a race currently tied in the polls.

The Democratic Vice-President asserted that “world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump,” that he “wants to be a dictator” and that U.S. military commanders “have told me you are a disgrace.”

At one point, she directly admonished him: “Don’t lie.” At another, she mocked him for being “handed US$400-million on a silver platter” by his real-estate-developer father before “filing for bankruptcy six times.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, got flustered. In response to a jibe from Ms. Harris that attendees at his rallies often leave early “out of exhaustion and boredom,” Mr. Trump launched into a comparison of rally crowd sizes.

“People don’t go to her rallies,” he said. “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

Then, the former president veered into a debunked claim that legal Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town have killed residents’ pets for food.

“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,” Mr. Trump said, as Ms. Harris laughed at him and gestured with seeming incredulity.

At other times, Mr. Trump accused Ms. Harris of being “a Marxist,” falsely claimed that Democratic support for abortion extends to “execution after birth” and heckled his opponent. “That’s just a sound bite, they gave her that to say,” he interjected at one point. At another, he told Ms. Harris: “Wait a minute – I’m talking now.”

He also repeated some of his signature falsehoods on immigration, including the baseless assertion that migrants are coming to the United States from “insane asylums.” When the debate’s moderators, ABC News hosts David Muir and Liney Davis, fact-checked several of Mr. Trump’s untrue statements, the former president doubled down.

One of the toughest clashes came on abortion, after Mr. Trump incorrectly asserted that all legal scholars “wanted” the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision overturned, which happened after Mr. Trump’s appointees to the court tilted its ideological balance firmly to the right. Ms. Harris fired back with an example of a woman suffering a miscarriage who cannot get an abortion.

“She’s bleeding out in a car in a parking lot – she didn’t want that,” Ms. Harris said. “A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump addressed abortion in their presidential debate, with Trump repeating a claim about infants being killed after birth, which an ABC News moderator fact-checked. Harris recounted cases of women denied medical care when doctors feared going to jail for treating a miscarriage or victim of incest. The Globe and Mail

Mr. Trump refused to say whether he would veto a national abortion bill as president. Reminded that his running mate, J.D. Vance, has said that he would, Mr. Trump disowned the comment. “I didn’t discuss it with J.D.”

Ms. Harris, meanwhile, derided Mr. Trump’s economic plans as amounting to “tax breaks for the richest people.” She dubbed his proposal to impose 10-to-20-per-cent tariffs on imported goods a “Trump sales tax.”

The former president said other countries should “pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world,” even though U.S. consumers typically pay the cost of importing tariffed goods. Such a levy would, nonetheless, affect the economies of Canada and other countries that rely on exports to the U.S.

The debate unfolded in the shadow of the election cycle’s only previous debate, which took place in June between Mr. Trump and President Joe Biden. Mr. Biden had trouble forming sentences and sometimes stood with his mouth agape, raising concerns of age-related decline that forced him out of the race.

Tuesday’s debate used the same rules as the previous one, largely dictated by Mr. Biden, with no studio audience and microphones muted for the candidate not speaking. Ms. Harris had unsuccessfully sought to get the second rule changed, apparently in hopes Mr. Trump’s interruptions would irritate voters.

During many of Mr. Trump’s answers, Ms. Harris laughed in his direction and shook her head “no,” at one point seeming to wave away one of his comments with her hand. On at least one occasion, when Mr. Trump started to interrupt Ms. Harris, his microphone was simply turned back on.

Five key takeaways from Tuesday’s U.S. presidential debate

For Ms. Harris, the evening’s challenge was boosting her profile with voters after a vice-presidency in which she largely flew under the radar.

For Mr. Trump, one wild card was whether he would bring race and gender into the debate: the biracial Ms. Harris is attempting to become the first woman elected president. Mr. Trump has previously attacked both her racial identity and her first name.

“I don’t care what she is. I don’t care,” he said when asked about these comments Tuesday. “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 okay. Either one was okay with me. That’s up to her.”

Ms. Harris is the daughter of a Black father and Indian mother.

On health care, Mr. Trump had an equivocal answer: “I have concepts of a plan,” he said. He doubled down on his baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen and said accused Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol rioters “have been treated so badly.”

Ms. Harris made a direct appeal to Republicans disaffected by Mr. Trump’s attempts to overthrow the democratic result of that election. “It’s time to turn the page,” she told them. “If that was a bridge too far for you, well, there is a place in our campaign for you – to stand for country to stand for our democracy.”

Donald Trump repeated a false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating pets during the presidential debate with Kamala Harris. The claim originated in anecdotes posted on social media that were fact-checked by an ABC News moderator, with other media reporting that local police called the claims baseless.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was another sharp divergence between the pair. Ms. Harris supports continuing to back Kyiv while Mr. Trump has said he would immediately bring a halt to the fighting, drawing accusations that this would mean Ukraine giving up territory to Russia.

“It is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again. It’s so clear they can manipulate you with flattery and favours,” she said.

On Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Ms. Harris walked a fine line. She hewed to the U.S.’s traditional military support for Israel (“Israel has the right to defend itself”) while also advocating a ceasefire in a bid to placate pro-Palestinian voters who have previously leaned Democratic (“too many innocent Palestinians have been killed … it must end.”)

Mr. Trump asserted that, if Ms. Harris becomes president, the entire Middle East may be destroyed. “The whole place is going to get blown up – Arabs, Jewish people, Israelis – Israel will be gone,” he said.

Adrian Morrow, U.S. Correspondent
Nathan VanderKlippe, International correspondent
The Globe and Mail, September 10, 2024