In their first and only planned faceoff before Election Day, former president Donald Trump blamed Vice President Kamala Harris for record inflation and for allowing in millions of illegal immigrants who are “destroying the fabric of our country.”
And he said it was likely the fault of Harris and her allies that he was shot this summer.
Harris in turn accused Trump of being a criminal, a liar, and a disgrace who does not have the temperament to lead the country again. She repeatedly tried to tie him to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 plan, which Democrats have used to paint Trump as an extremist, but which the former president has repeatedly disavowed.
Trump and Harris did not hide their apparent disdain for one another during Tuesday’s fiery, nearly two-hour debate on ABC, which could be their only one-on-one showdown.
The debate offered voters a rare opportunity to see Harris operating in a mostly unscripted environment. The vice president has faced charges of being a poor extemporaneous performer and off-the-cuff speaker, who has generally avoided the press and is running a campaign heavy on manufactured hype and light on substance.
Harris mostly stuck to her talking points — she painted herself as a “middle class kid” who offers “a new generation of leadership” for the country — and appeared increasingly comfortable on the stage as the evening wore on. She did little to explain away her changing positions on a variety of issues, and Trump rarely pressed her on it.
For Trump, the debate offered him another opportunity to exhibit discipline by staying away from playground-style taunts, tying Harris to Biden’s unpopular record, and bringing the conversation back to issues that favor him, such as immigration and the economy. “She is Biden,” Trump said, pushing back on what he said were attempts by Harris to distance herself from the administration’s record.
Throughout the evening, Trump repeatedly hammered Harris on inflation and on the high rates of illegal immigration during her term as Joe Biden’s vice president. But he often came across as blustery, angry, and combative and made several claims that were either clear exaggerations or just not true.
Inflation under Biden and Harris has been “a disaster for people, the middle class” and “every class,” Trump said. “On top of that,” he added, “we have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums, and they’re coming in and they’re taking jobs that are occupied right now by African Americans and Hispanics and also unions.”
In Springfield, Ohio, he said, immigrants are “eating the pets of the people that live there,” a claim that moderator David Muir pushed back on.
Trump called Harris a “Marxist” and claimed that Democrats are okay with executing newborns that survive abortions. He falsely claimed that “everybody” wanted Roe v. Wade overturned and abortion policy returned to the states. He said that if Harris is elected president the U.S. will become “Venezuela on steroids” and “Israel will be gone.” And he said it was the language of people like Harris and her Democratic allies who nearly got him assassinated in July.
“I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he said.
When he was pressed on whether he had any regrets about his role on January 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters rioted at the Capitol, Trump dodged the question. He said his supporters have been “treated so badly” and questioned why Biden and Harris haven’t done more to arrest illegal immigrants and racial-justice rioters.
He also reiterated his claim that he actually won the 2020 election.
“We have so many facts and statistics,” he said. “But you know what, that doesn’t matter, because we have to solve the problem that we have right now. That’s old news. And the problem that we have right now is we have a nation in decline, and [Biden and Harris] have put it in decline. We have a nation that is dying.”
Harris responded, saying that Trump was “fired by 81 million people” in 2020, and “clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that.”
“It leads one to believe that perhaps we do not have in the candidate to my right the temperament or the ability to not be confused about fact,” Harris said. “That’s deeply troubling, and the American people deserve better.”
Harris dodged questions about whether Americans are better off financially under her term as vice president or if she would have done anything differently from Biden on the border. She seemed to suggest at one point that Trump was responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Donald Trump left us with the worst unemployment since the Great Depression,” she said. “Donald Trump left us the worst public health epidemic in a century.”
She took aim at Trump for overturning Roe, saying 20 states now have “Trump abortion bans.” She accused him of backing a “tax cut for billionaires and big corporations.” And she alleged that numerous world leaders and former Trump staffers have called Trump a disgrace — Trump said the former staffers were all people he had fired.
“If you really want to know the inside track on who the former president is, if he didn’t make it clear already, just ask people who have worked with him,” she said. “His former chief of staff, a four-star general, said he has contempt for the Constitution of the United States. His former national-security adviser has said he is dangerous and unfit. His former secretary of defense has said the nation, the republic, would never survive another Trump term.”
And Harris questioned Trump’s focus on crime.
“I think this is so rich coming from someone who has been prosecuted for national-security crimes, economic crimes, election interference, has been found liable for sexual assault,” she said. “And his next big court appearance is in November at his own sentencing.”
Trump called the criminal cases he’s faced “fake cases,” and accused Harris and Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department against him. “They’re the ones that made them go after me,” he said.
Trump and Harris were each hoping that Tuesday’s debate on ABC would give them momentum and shake up the race that polls show is essentially tied.
While the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll released on Sunday shows Trump with a narrow 48 percent to 47 percent lead over Harris nationally, the Real Clear Politics polling average still shows Harris with a slight edge in the race. Polls similarly show Trump and Harris running neck and neck in top battleground states.
Prior to Tuesday night’s debate at the National Constitutional Center in Philadelphia, there were questions about whether the debate would happen at all.
Trump initially agreed in May to two debates with Biden, after Biden taunted his rival on X and urged him to “make my day, pal.” But the 81-year-old Biden, who has long faced questions about his ability to serve another term, dropped out of the race after he appeared disoriented and stumbled over his words in the first debate on CNN in June.
In late July, after Biden endorsed Harris, Trump’s campaign said it would be “inappropriate” to finalize the September debate details until the Democrats officially decided on their presidential nominee. Democrats and some in the media accused Trump of showing weakness and attempting to dodge the ABC debate.
In August, Trump raised the possibility of skipping the debate. Writing on his Truth Social website, Trump suggested that “ABC FAKE NEWS” was biased against him, and wrote, “why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?”
For her part, Harris and her campaign attempted to change the debate rule about muted microphones, which Biden initially proposed. Biden’s team wanted the debates to occur in a TV studio with no audience and the candidates’ microphones cut off when they weren’t speaking, which Trump agreed to. But Harris’s camp wanted the microphones on for the entire 90 minutes in an apparent effort to expose the former president’s behavior.
Harris’s campaign eventually agreed to the initial rules, including the quiet mics, claiming that if they didn’t “Donald Trump is a risk to skip the debate altogether.”
Tuesday’s debate is the only scheduled faceoff between Trump and Harris before Election Day, though Trump had previously agreed to debates on NBC and Fox News. Harris has since said she is open to a second debate in the coming weeks.
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