My column for the San Francisco Chronicle on the debate...
Who won? The person who made linear sense...
First, Harris shook Trump’s hand, then shook him to his core
By Jack Ohman
Sep 10, 2024
Vice President Kamala Harris won Tuesday’s presidential debate if you can call it that. This was, more than anything, the nervous breakdown of a presidential candidate on national television.
If there is any question about the emotional stability of former President Donald Trump among undecided voters, he answered it in demeanor and deportment, let alone his pathetic lies spit out on the stage of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
How ironic that Trump was forced to debate in a building devoted to the U.S. Constitution, given that he wants to effectively terminate it.
Harris put Trump on defense immediately when she strode up to him, stuck out her hand, and said, “Kamala Harris,” pronouncing her name as a courtesy to the man who calls her “Kamabla.”
He never recovered.
For her part, Harris was composed and got to show off her comic expressiveness. Her bright smile was a devastating counterpoint as she listened to this disturbed mendicant, escaped from his padded cell in Mar-a-Lago.
“I’m a different kind of person,” he said in an all-time dramatic understatement in American political history.
Sometimes she rested her chin on her hand as he rambled on about off-point accusations, flat-out lies and his endorsements from dictators like Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
Most of the time, Harris looked like someone who knew that her opponent was pouring gasoline on himself in real-time, and her job was to make sure he got the lighter in his hand.
Trump’s bizarre facial expressions betrayed his internal turmoil as Harris calmly but effectively made her points.
Had she faced a more effective opponent, perhaps she wouldn’t have had such an easy night.
But she didn’t.
Trump has been imploding before our very eyes for years, but the rapid acceleration was on full display tonight as he made mad assertions, such as “(Biden) hates her. He can’t stand her.”
“Unhinged” is a charitable description of Trump’s performance, and it was evident as he became increasingly angrier and his face turned magenta, bursting through his ridiculous orange makeup.
At one point, Trump raved about immigrants eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, which its city manager said was completely unfounded.
“They’re eating the pets!” he burbled.
There’s a campaign slogan upon which all sensible Americans can rally around.
Harris was occasionally tempted to interrupt, and she did, which opened the door for Trump’s (I am certain completely planned) line about her 2020 debate comeback to Vice President Mike Pence. Mostly she quietly said, “That’s not true,” and she was right. It never was.
Harris and her team wanted him to go on and on about crowd size, so she tossed the fat worm into the pond: “I’m gonna invite you to a (Trump) rally,” she suggested, noting his frequent references to Hannibal Lecter and more kooky rants, and she concluded that his audiences “leave out of exhaustion and boredom.”
On abortion, an issue tailor-made for Harris to highlight her starkest difference with Trump aside from her obvious sanity, she described the anguish that Trump’s Three SCOTUS Stooges have inflicted on young women, who are “bleeding out in a car in a parking lot.”
That’s a devastatingly effective closing argument in any courtroom.
On immigration, which was usually Trump’s answer to any given question, the former president said immigrants “can’t even speak English.”
At times, it wasn’t utterly clear that Trump spoke English, either. Trump’s new word “techticality” isn’t any English language word I’m familiar with. Oh, and he has “concepts for a plan” on health care.
At one point, in a stream of surreal moments solely of Trump’s creation, he suggested that Harris leave mid-debate, fly to Washington and sign a bill closing the border.
Huh. Not sure that’s in the vice president’s powers as described in Article Two of the Constitution.
Trump was more than happy to drag House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi into the conversation if you can call it that, blaming her for Jan. 6, which he affectionately called “J6,” the preferred term of the insurrectionists.
In what was probably the peak moment of Trump’s display of wacky delusion, he screamed, “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they said about me!”
Of course. That was it. All those mean things those vindictive Democrats say about him! My golly! How could they say mean things, as he routinely calls Harris stupid, weak and possessing a low IQ.
While Harris’s only job tonight was to stand back, covered in plastic, while Trump sprayed juice through his nostrils, she got off some very effective lines, which clearly annoyed him.
“Not everyone got handed $400 million and then declared bankruptcy six times,” she zinged, further inflaming his facial capillaries.
As for Trump’s ranting about undocumented immigrants, Harris calmly walked him through his own indictments and convictions, summarizing his transgressions as easily as an Alameda County deputy DA would walk a burglar through his priors on the stand.
Harris had a low bar to hurdle. All she had to do was look sane and competent. She vastly exceeded that.
Trump, the untethered carnival barker, was unfit to shake the hand of the 47th president of the United States.
Jack Ohman is a Pulitzer prize-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist who also writes at jackohman.substack.
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Since everything is projection with these people, I assume that when Trump raved that Biden hated Kamala Harris, he really meant that he hated Vance.
Thank you for mentioning Trump’s name-dropping of Victor Orban as a character reference. It didn’t receive enough attention in the tidal wave of ridicule over the crowd sizes and the cats and dogs.
Well said! PS: I don't know how to delete my Twitter account and don't visit X, but I was curious about Pres. Biden's reaction to the debate. It has yet to show up in my FB feed, but Newsweek did reprint his X message full of praise for Kamala Harris.