How Kamala Harris goaded (and goaded and goaded) Trump into a debate trainwreck

By any reasonable metric, Vice President Kamala Harris soundly beat former President Donald Trump in Tuesday night’s presidential debate. 

She did it by demonstrating superior knowledge not only of policy, but also of her opponent’s psychology. Harris figured out exactly how to get Trump angry, how to trick him into veering off course, and how to keep the debate on favorable terrain.

To put it more bluntly: Harris manipulated Trump into spiraling at several points during their first (only?) debate.

Let me give you an example. Early on in the debate, the moderators tried to press Harris on President Joe Biden’s unpopular immigration record, asking her if she would have done anything differently from her current boss — a topic favorable for Trump. 

Harris answered the question — but then took a seemingly unrelated shot at Trump’s rallies.

“I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about [how] windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” the vice president said.

This gave Trump a choice; either prosecute Harris on immigration, an issue where she’s weak, or go on a rant in defense of his vaunted rallies. You can guess what he chose. 

“Let me respond as to the rallies,” Trump said. “She said people start leaving. 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.”

That began a tailspin: a series of weird tangents, including a humiliating rant about the completely fake problem of Haitian migrants supposedly eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio, punctuated by immense concern about the honor of Trump rallies. He never really got back to what he should have been doing — attacking Harris on migration across the southern border. 

By needling Trump where it hurts — the rallies he cares about so much — Harris managed to get him off balance, and he honestly never really recovered.

Harris deployed this strategy again and again. 

During an exchange on crime, Harris brought up Trump’s own criminal conviction — leading him to go on a diatribe about “political prosecutions” instead of effectively pushing Harris on her flip-flops on crime policy. 

She brought up world leaders calling him a “disgrace,” pushing him into bragging about his relationship with Hungarian “strongman” (in Trump’s words) Viktor Orbán, perhaps not a callout that the swing voters of Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania were clamoring for. She needled his closeness with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blasting “what you think is a friendship” with a “dictator who would eat you for lunch.” 

Each time, Trump took the bait — losing control of his temper and going off message, while Harris looked on what must have been glee.

In hindsight, this strategy might seem innovative, but it speaks to something well-known about Trump’s psychology. 

Covering foreign policy during the Trump years, one fear I heard a lot from national security professionals was that Trump could be easily manipulated: His well-known vanity and narcissism made it easy for foreign powers to extract policy favors through personal flattery and lavish receptions. This seems to explain, at least in part, how Trump went from hostile to friendly with foreign leaders like Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping.

But if foreign leaders could figure out how to manipulate Trump’s self-absorption, so too could his domestic opposition. Harris played on that immense pride Tuesday night. 

This tactic wasn’t the only reason she won the debate — see her strong answer on abortion, among other things — but it was a vital one.