U.S. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican former President Donald Trump had never met until their presidential debate Tuesday night, but immediately started sparring in a pivotal encounter leading up to the national election on November 5.
The two candidates shook hands at the outset, took their places behind lecterns on a stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and then started assailing each other.
They feuded about the U.S. economy, abortion rights for American women, immigration at the U.S. border with Mexico, the Israeli war against Hamas militants in Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as Congress certified that Trump had lost the 2020 election.
Referring to the 2020 election that Trump lost to President Joe Biden, Harris said, “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. He has a very difficult time processing that.”
Trump recently said he lost the election “by a whisker,” but on the debate stage Tuesday, he said it was a sarcastic remark and refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the 2020 outcome.
“We are a failing nation,” Trump said. “We are in serious decline, and we’re laughed at all over the world.’’
In a snap poll after the 90-minute debate, CNN said its survey showed Harris had won the encounter by a 63-37% margin.
In addition to that quick assessment favoring Harris, the world’s top pop singer, Taylor Swift, endorsed the Democrat as the debate ended.
Standing a short distance away from each other, the two candidates shook their heads at each other’s comments, with Harris all but laughing out loud at some of Trump’s remarks. ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis gamely tried to control the flow of the encounter, failing at times.
Biden stumbled badly in a June debate with Trump and within a month ended his campaign as he endorsed Harris, his second-in-command.
On Tuesday, Harris, a former local criminal prosecutor in San Francisco and attorney general in California accustomed to tough courtroom encounters with defense attorneys, repeatedly baited Trump with insults.
At one point, she told him that his staunchest supporters at his political rallies often left early because they were bored with his speeches.
He described her as a Marxist, saying she was taught well by her father, a leftist economist. “This is a radical left liberal,” Trump said of Harris.
She recited her middle-class upbringing where her mother saved money for years before having the wherewithal to buy a house when she was a teenager.
Meanwhile, Harris said Trump was handed $400 million by his father “on a silver platter and then filed for bankruptcy six times.”
Trump assailed Biden and Harris’ handling of the U.S. economy, the world’s largest, saying the U.S. is becoming “Venezuela on steroids.” She said his plan for imposing up to 20% tariffs on imported foreign goods would prove to be a “Trump sales tax” for American consumers.
She blamed him for the end to a constitutional right to abortion with his appointment of three conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. He said that with the 2022 ruling, voters in individual states could now decide the issue.
“The government and Trump should not be telling” women what to do with their bodies, Harris said.
Trump blamed Harris as part of the Biden administration’s failure to control the masses of migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump has said he plans to deport 11 million or more undocumented migrants living in the U.S. but twice dodged Muir’s question of how he would arrest people and send them back to their home countries.
The former president repeatedly answered unrelated questions with comments about Harris’ handling of the border, with Republicans calling her the “border czar” because Biden tasked her to help determine the root causes of why people leave their Central American homes to trek to the United States.
Trump made the outlandish claim that Haitian migrants in the Midwestern city of Springfield, Ohio, were stealing their neighbors’ cats and dogs and killing them for food.
Muir rebuked Trump and said the city’s manager had assured ABC News the claim was not true.
Trump claimed that neither Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nor the shock Hamas attack last October 7 on Israel would have occurred if he were president. He said that if elected, he would solve both conflicts before he even takes office next January but did not say how.
Harris retorted, “If Donald Trump were president, (Russian President Vladimir) Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now with his eyes on the rest of Europe.”
Trump twice refused to say that he wants Ukraine to win the war, only that he wants the war ended to prevent more bloodshed.
Standing a short distance away from each other, the two candidates shook their heads at each other’s comments, with Harris all but laughing out loud at some of Trump’s remarks. ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis gamely tried to control the flow of the encounter, failing at times.
Tens of millions of Americans were likely watching what could be the only debate of the campaign. The faceoff took place eight weeks before Election Day but only days ahead of when early voting starts in some of the country’s 50 states.
On the debate stage, the rules for Harris and Trump were the same as at the debate Trump had with Biden in June, where Biden stumbled badly, leading him a month later to end his reelection bid as he fell behind Trump in national polling.
Trump and Harris’ microphones were muted when the other was speaking and they were not allowed to pose questions to each other.
But that did not stop them from interrupting each other. There was no live audience listening to the debate.
It was the first presidential debate for Harris. For Trump, it was his seventh over three presidential election cycles since 2016.
Speaking to reporters after the debate, Republican Senator Tom Cotton questioned why Harris has not worked to implement her policy proposals during her time as vice president.
"Kamala Harris wouldn't answer questions about what she's going to do for the American people and kept trying to shift onto other topics. Understandably, Donald Trump defended himself, but what he did the best job of is explaining that things were good when he was president and they have not been good for the last four years."
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy said it was Trump who failed to explain what he would bring to a new term in office.
"The real question is, what does Donald Trump stand for? You can have a conversation about how some of Kamala Harris' positions have changed, as all of our positions have changed over the years based on new information, or we can ask ourselves did Donald Trump articulate a single plan tonight to help the American people? Besides his reiteration of his belief that we should build a wall with Mexico, I don't think he talked about one single plan -- no healthcare plan, no housing plan, no plan to increase wages."
Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu told VOA Khmer that Trump is weaker on foreign policy than Harris, and that Trump is "friendly to dictators."
"Donald Trump has this weird relationship where if Putin flatters Donald Trump, Donald Trump gives away the store to Vladimir Putin. In contrast, the Biden-Harris administration built up this entire coalition to stop Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, and the Biden-Harris administration has built up an incredible alliance of countries in the Indo-Pacific to push back against aggression," Lieu said.
Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz told VOA Khmer that Trump won the debate by highlighting Harris' "dangerously liberal policies."
"President Trump did his job to show people that he is the change agent in this election. President Trump reflected the economic anxiety of the American people, the concern the American people have over their safety and over their ability to live in a world that isn't going to devolve into World War III," Gaetz said.
National polling shows the contest to be close, adding to the importance of the debate and making it crucial for both candidates to make their best case to sway the small number of voters who haven’t made up their mind. At stake, returning Trump to the White House after he lost reelection in 2020 to Biden or elevating Harris, Biden’s second-in-command.
Democrats coalesced around Harris’ candidacy when Biden dropped his reelection bid and endorsed Harris as his successor. While Biden trailed Trump when he ended his campaign, Harris has edged ahead of Trump in numerous national polls by 2 or 3 percentage points.
But a New York Times-Siena College poll released Sunday showed Trump with a 48-47% lead nationally, even as the newspaper said Harris was narrowly ahead in an average of multiple polls in three crucial battleground states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The two candidates were tied in four other crucial states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina.
The seven highly contested states are expected to play an outsized role in determining the outcome of the election because the U.S. does not pick its president and vice president by the national popular vote.
Rather, the election is 50 state-by-state contests, with electors for the winning ticket in all but two states casting all their votes in the Electoral College for either Harris and her vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, or Trump and his ticket mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance. The number of Electoral College votes for each state is based on population, so the most populous states hold the most sway.
The Times-Siena poll showed that the debate stakes were particularly high for Harris in introducing herself to the American public, with 28% of those surveyed saying they needed to know more about her, while only 9% said the same about Trump.
Trump, 78, has at times on the campaign trail seemed to miss running against Biden, 81. He has yet to develop a steady line of attack on Harris, 59, although on debate night he attacked Harris on every question posed by the ABC anchors.
If elected, she would be the first woman and first person of South Asian descent to serve as the U.S. president, and the second Black person after Barack Obama.
