Trump Should Be Scared — Very Scared — of Debating Kamala Harris

Credit…Ben Hickey

It’s easy to find examples of Vice President Kamala Harris answering questions in a vacuous, speciously thoughtful manner that borders on caricature, and it’s easy to conclude from that oratorical oatmeal that she has delayed a one-on-one sit-down with a serious journalist because she’s not nimble in unscripted situations or fluent in the necessary facts. Those are the Republican talking points, anyway.

But that assessment ignores her performance in a 2020 debate with the vice president at that time, Mike Pence. Remember it? A high-stakes encounter as risky as any interview with any network heavyweight, she did fine. Better than fine, in fact. Several post-debate surveys of viewers, including one published by 538 and another by CNN, found that Harris won it. Granted, Pence was contending with a fly’s decision to claim a time-share on his head, but still. He had been on the national political stage longer than she had, and she wasn’t buggy in the least.

Which is why Donald Trump’s recent complaints about and threats to back out of the planned ABC News debate on Sept. 10 make total sense. He should be hesitant. In fact, he should be scared.

For all his ludicrous boasting about his past debate performances, many of them have been laughable — some combination of puerile taunting, nonpareil lying, sulking, steaming, glaring and gloating. You know those cartoonish dances that football players do when they’ve breached the end zone in the fourth quarter of a close game? That’s Trump at the debate lectern, only he hasn’t scored a touchdown. Or even moved the ball so much as a millimeter downfield.

I’m referring to his antics amid his rivals for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, in three face-offs with Hillary Clinton in the general election that year and in two face-offs with Joe Biden in the general election of 2020. (He skipped the 2024 Republican primary debates — wisely, given his lead over the other aspirants.)

Now imagine Trump against Harris. Imagine his insult and upset over having a lectern no bigger, a standing no taller and an invitation no more gleamingly embossed than a Black woman’s.

Actually, you don’t have to imagine it. His insistence that she’s inventing her crowd sizes, that she’s not really Black, that he’s prettier than she is and that she deposed Biden in some sort of coup — projection, anyone? — tells you all you need to know. So does his determined, sustained mispronunciation of her name, the phonetic equivalent of stomping his feet. All of that affirms that Harris rattles him in a particular and powerful way.

Which gives her a debating edge over him, assuming she can maintain the discipline and poise that she has demonstrated during her crash-course presidential campaign so far. The more she keeps her cool, the more he’ll lose his. His and her advisers know that: It’s why the Harris camp has pressed for each candidate’s microphone to be unmuted when the other is talking and the Trump camp has pushed for the opposite. Everyone involved (except maybe Trump) recognizes his combustibility; it’s just that one side wants to light a match while the other is looking for a fire extinguisher.

Harris is catching Trump at the perfect moment — for her — because he at times seems to be flaming out. He’s certainly committing odd flubs and making strange choices. You don’t win the news cycle by inventing helicopter rides and hush-hush conversations that never happened, and you don’t repel the “weird” label by linking arms with the animal-carcass fetishist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who would apparently be part of any Trump transition team along with … Tulsi Gabbard, the autocrat-loving former member of Congress. Trump, Kennedy, Gabbard: It’s the dinner party from hell. Or maybe the Donner party, given Trump’s frequent mooning over Hannibal Lecter.

He caught a break in his June 27 debate against Biden, whose shocking unsteadiness eclipsed Trump’s galling mendacity. But he’s unlikely to get that lucky again. Harris may well provide inadequate or unconvincing explanations of her many changed positions, and she may retreat to the comfort of gauzy platitudes. During the Democratic primary debates in 2019, she had both strong moments and weak ones — and by early 2020, before the Iowa caucuses, she was out of the race.

But none of her recent appearances augur a showing as confused as Biden’s two months ago. And they foretell a bearing more presidential than Trump’s.

That’s a low bar, admittedly. But that’s my point. Trump did himself no favors against Clinton in 2016 or Biden in 2020. Why would he fare any better against Harris? She has vulnerabilities and shortcomings that a focused, fierce debater could take advantage of, but Trump has never been such a debater, and it’s impossible to believe that he’ll transform into one now. He’s older. He’s meaner, to the extent that that’s possible. He’s angrier (ditto).

And he’s harrumphing toward a humbling. Should be a riveting moment in an election year with no shortage of those.