Unhinged Trump goes off the rails during debate with Kamala Harris spouting lies, distortions and same tropes
Donald Trump’s campaign and allies had hoped a debate against Kamala Harris could give him yet another chance to finally deliver a focused attack against his Democratic rival.
Instead, he unraveled.
The former president repeated false claims about abortion, amplified conspiracy theories, and grew frustrated and defensive over discussion of his rally crowd sizes in a series of flailing responses in their first, and potentially last, presidential debate of 2024.
By the end, he was predicting a Third World War without him in office, and one of the world’s biggest pop stars Taylor Swift was endorsing his rival.
In their highly anticipated prime-time matchup in Philadelphia on Tuesday, the former president repeated discredited claims about immigrants stealing and eating pets, falsely stated that abortion patients are killing their children after they are born, and steamed over Harris’s accusations that his supporters are leaving his long-winded rallies “exhausted and bored.”
The first-ever face-to-face meeting between the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates presented not only starkly different visions of America’s future, but what America’s reality even is.
Harris pitched to voters an opportunity to leave Trump’s distortions in the past and instead “build on the aspirations and hopes of the American people.”
Trump, by contrast, was spiraling, turning to his worn-out list of lies and personal attacks as he seemed to struggle with the fact that he is no longer running against President Joe Biden.
ABC News moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir were tasked with directing what could have been 90 minutes of chaos. But without an audience, and with a muted microphone when it wasn’t his turn to speak, Trump appeared alone, flailing, not in control, and visibly rattled.
He repeatedly tried to turn the conversation to immigration, claiming that immigrants are “taking over buildings … violently,” and blurting out at one point that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”
Haitian immigrants in Ohio are “eating the dogs,” he said.
“The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said. “They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
Harris, laughing and shaking her head in disbelief, appeared to say “this is unbelievable.”
“Talk about extreme,” she said.
She predicted at the start that Trump would turn to immigration throughout the debate, a topic that she said he wields against his supporters to scare them into voting for him.
Trump, Harris said, “would rather run on a problem than fix a problem.”
At his rallies, “he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter” and claims that “windmills cause cancer.”
“And what you will also notice is people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” she said. “And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about, is you.”
Trump, lashing out in response, and clearly stung by the dig at his crowd sizes, fired back that “nobody” goes to the vice president’s events except people who are “paid” and “bussed in.”
