A missed opportunity for Trump

With an assist from ABC, Kamala Harris won the presidential debate in Philadelphia.

The moderators vigorously, and at times misleadingly, fact-checked Trump. He was right that Harris has in previous years come out for kicking 180 million Americans out of their private health plans and for confiscating guns. (The key word in “mandatory buybacks” is the first.) They did not challenge her, letting her claim that his reference to a postelection “bloodbath” was about civil strife rather than damage to the auto industry. They asked him more pointed questions than they asked her. Her vouching for Biden’s acuity and vigor, for example, drew no queries.

But nobody forced Trump to go down the many blind alleys he took. He didn’t have to defend the January 6 rioters, claim that he won in 2020, or get in a dispute about crowd sizes — or, for that matter, name-check Sean Hannity and Viktor Orbán as fans of his. Anyone cheered by those comments is already an active supporter of Trump

Harris did not have a good answer when asked whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago, or what she would do differently from Biden, or why she had flip-flopped on many issues, or even — and here we should give credit to the moderators for the question — whether she would draw any limits on abortion. But Trump did more to raise doubts about himself than about her. The race is still close, and her defects still glaring, but he did neither himself nor his supporters any favors.

Trump, for his part, was vigorous but angry and belligerent. He probably won not a single new vote, but he reminded people who are already committed for or against him why they are. He was the same old Trump. At least he wasn’t the rambling Trump of the weeks after his assassination attempt (which he tried, without any basis, to blame on Democrats). But if you had any illusions of getting a Trump chastened by mortality or wiser from experience, you were bound to be disappointed. There’s only one Donald Trump, and you’re not getting a new one.

Frankly, the big question remains: what do voters think of Harris? We know what they think of Trump. Trump was fairly effective tonight in arguing that Harris was four more years of Joe Biden. He was too rambly to pin on her — against the resistance of the moderators — her prior record. But she failed to define herself. If the voters buy what the media is selling them about Harris, the Trump campaign will look back on tonight as a lost opportunity to substitute their own portrait of the vice president. If voters conclude that she’s just four more years of the same, however, it’s the Harris campaign that will regret tonight.