Borrowing from Muhammad Ali's "Rope-A-Dope" tactic of the 1970s, Kamala Harris allowed Donald Trump to hang himself, and the media said it produced a one-sided debate that went heavily in Harris' favor

Kamala Harris offers a handshake before taking Trump apart in debate (AP)

 

Kamala Harris got last night's presidential debate off to a relatively genial start by offering a handshake to Donald Trump, who appeared to rarely even look at Harris. Shortly after the pleasantries were over, Harris got off to a quick start, putting Trump on the defensive and keeping him there for most of the evening. That gave Harris the upper hand in what might be the candidates' only debate -- although the Harris camp said later they were up for a second debate. No wonder they were feeling confident;  moments after controlling Trump -- whose debate style might best be described as "lies, insults, and more lies" -- they received an endorsement from pop star Taylor Swift, and her fan base of "Swifties" -- who, according to one report, number about 58.23 million adults in the United States. 

While the consensus of news sites is that Trump was soundly beaten in last night's debate, his biggest concern going forward might be Taylor Swift and her massive and enthusiastic base of fans.

As for mainstream -media opinion, Trump took a well-rounded thumping from Harris.  Here is how TIME magazine put it under the headline "Trump Spent the Debate Walking Into Traps Harris Laid For Him": 

A poised and prepared Kamala Harris met a crabby and thin-skinned Donald Trump in a presidential debate, and it didn’t feel like much of a fair fight.

Over the course of almost two hours Tuesday night, the Vice President effectively needled the former President on his deepest insecurities while painting a clear choice for voters. Trump in response repeatedly took the bait and doubled down, leading him to go on wild tangents, engage in angry outbursts, and relitigate old battles. It was a striking dichotomy for voters to take in from two figures who share so little when it comes to political instinct, personalities, and even personal discipline. Harris leveraged Trump’s total lack of that last element to set the agenda for the evening.

While Trump spoke dismissively of Harris, she systematically dismantled his rhetoric. Trump invoked Fox personalities Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity as validators for his claims and she cited Nobel-winning economists. Trump admiringly invoked autocrats and Harris noted a raft of former Trump staffers who say they will be voting for her.

It was a snapshot of a bitter race that remains a jump ball with less than two months before Election Day. And it was the first time since Trump launched his first campaign in 2015 that he found himself on a debate stage against someone who matched him on political showmanship.

“What we have in the former President is someone who would prefer to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” Harris said, summing up the thesis of her campaign.

It was clear even before the debate ended that the balance of this election cycle will be spent trying to rev the engines of each political camp. Harris in many ways is picking up where Biden’s 2020 campaign left off in a pitch for normalcy and decency, but with a polish that gives Democrats fresh loads of optimism. Where Trump advisers saw opportunities to drag down Harris by tying her to all of Biden’s record, the candidate only intermittently kept up the strategy. Instead, Trump kept his focus on his own political record, aiming largely for the audience that takes their cues from right-wing sources and shares his belief that he should still be in the White House.

Put plainly, Harris made a very clear argument for the nation to move forward with a new generation of leadership while Trump continued to linger in his previous elections. Some of her answers didn’t exactly match the question asked, but at no point did her statements devolve into ad hominem attacks and easily fact-checked falsehoods.

“Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. So let’s be clear about that and clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that,” Harris said, one of her many tweaks aimed squarely at his ego.

Trump could not help himself, pivoting to his assertion without evidence that there remains enmity between Biden and Harris: “I’ll give you a little secret. He can’t stand her. He hates her.” Later in the evening, Trump even questioned if Biden still had the job and suggested Harris and her rhetoric were responsible for political violence aimed at him.

“I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they say about me,” Trump said, invoking the failed assassination attempt against him.

But for every moment that aimed at the handful of voters who are unsure about their choice this fall—who to vote for, or even whether to cast ballots—he took many more detours that most clearly targeted his die-hard supporters and his individual ego. For instance, in a bizarre moment that has been debunked widely, Trump wrongly said Haitian immigrants in Ohio are hunting dogs and cats for food.

“They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said as a puzzled Harris did little to hide her disbelief. Confronted by anchor David Muir that there is no evidence of that, Trump, naturally, doubled down.

Similarly, Trump demanded he was correct in inflating the number of migrants in the country without legal status, that the FBI cooked the books on crime stats, international monitors were lying about the death toll in Ukraine, and government economists manufactured the number of new jobs created on the watch of Biden and Harris.

Understanding Trump’s unique vulnerabilities, Harris consistently threaded the needle to derail Trump, who never seemed to catch onto the transparent trickery.

“People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Harris said of her rival. 

It’s a bait Trump always takes. “People don’t go to her rallies. The people who do go, she’s bussing them in and paying them to be there, showing them in a different light,” Trump said.

Then he puffed up his political chest: “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” The dispute was completely immaterial for undecided voters and would win him zero new votes, but Harris understood exactly what she had done: in inviting Trump’s ego to overtake actual issues, she was showing his pettiness in full display. And, for millions of voters watching Harris in such an environment for the first time, it’s impossible to imagine a better first showing.

In the end, TIME concluded that Harris outsmarted Trump -- essentially giving him rope to hang himself, much as Muhammad Ali did to George Foreman in a 1974 heavyweight championship boxing match, long famous for Ali's use of the "Rope-A-Dope" tactic. In last night's debate the "dope" was Donald Trump.

Harris had to love reading that, just as she surely loved a separate TIME article under the headline "Kamala Harris dominates Donald Trump."

On top of that, Harris got these kind words from Taylor Swift, as reported by NPR:

Taylor Swift is entering her 2024 election era.

The mega pop star has thrown her support behind Vice President Harris, just under two months out from the election.

"I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos," she wrote in a post to her more than 280 million followers on Instagram.

Swift said she was alarmed by Trump posting recent AI pictures on social media, falsely showing her endorsing him, and wanted to combat misinformation with the truth.

The pop star began publicly weighing in on politics ahead of the 2018 midterms, has a record of boosting civic participation by discussing politics online. Her past endorsements and statements, though infrequent, have prompted tens of thousands of people to register to vote.

Swift signed her post "Childless Cat Lady." 

More insights on last night's debate came from a joint ABC News/Yahoo! report, featuring two experts, on political debate and race:

As the two presidential candidates entered the debate stage, Kamala Harris strode across it and offered her hand to Donald Trump to shake, setting a confident tone that didn’t flag throughout the debate.

Trump, appearing to grow angrier through the night, stuck to his well-trodden themes of American decline and reminded viewers that Harris was part of the Biden administration, which he blamed for that decline.

Each candidate probably won points with their supporters – whether they won over undecided voters will become clear when the ballots are counted. The Conversation U.S. asked two scholars, Miami University sociologist Rodney Coates, an expert on race, and Lee Banville, a 13-year veteran of the PBS NewsHour and now director of the School of Journalism at the University of Montana who has written a book on presidential debates, to respond to what they heard in the debate.

‘The American people want better’

Rodney Coates, Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Miami University

From the very opening of the presidential debate, Kamala Harris made clear her vision of a more just society while at the same time directly challenging Donald Trump’s controversial views on abortion, immigration and the U.S. legal system.

“I’m about lifting people up and not beating people down,” Harris said.

A former prosecutor, Harris repeatedly used Trump’s own words and past behavior to attack his chaotic first administration. In response, Trump resorted to personal attacks, calling Harris “the worst vice president in the history of our country,” and said she had no ideas except for those of her boss, President Joe Biden.

But after listening to Trump’s frequent personal attacks against Biden, Harris finally snapped. “You are not running against Joe Biden,” Harris said. “You are running against me.”

Noticeably absent from Trump’s first face-to-face meeting with Harris were his racist attacks against her. Since Biden dropped out of the race in July 2024 and Harris became the Democratic nominee, Trump has described Harris as having “a low IQ,” “dumb as a rock,” “weak” and “lazy.”

For most of the debate, Trump avoided this line of attack, but he could not avoid repeating a debunked myth that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were killing and eating pets. But when asked about Harris’ racial identity, Trump said he didn’t care what she was.

“I read where she is not Black … then I read that she was Black,” Trump said. “That’s up to her.”

Critics have accused Trump of putting racist attacks at the center of his campaign strategy.

But Harris said there was no place for such a racially divisive strategy.

“It’s a tragedy,” Harris said. Trump, she said, “has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people. … I think the American people want better than that.”

As the two presidential candidates entered the debate stage, Kamala Harris strode across it and offered her hand to Donald Trump to shake, setting a confident tone that didn’t flag throughout the debate.

Trump, appearing to grow angrier through the night, stuck to his well-trodden themes of American decline and reminded viewers that Harris was part of the Biden administration, which he blamed for that decline.

Each candidate probably won points with their supporters – whether they won over undecided voters will become clear when the ballots are counted. The Conversation U.S. asked two scholars, Miami University sociologist Rodney Coates, an expert on race, and Lee Banville, a 13-year veteran of the PBS NewsHour and now director of the School of Journalism at the University of Montana who has written a book on presidential debates, to respond to what they heard in the debate.

‘What people wanted’

Lee Banville, Professor and Director of the School of Journalism, University of Montana

Often these spectacles of American politics come down to some memorable moment – a rhetorical jab that bloodies an opponent, an unforced error that dogs a campaign for weeks. The first 30 minutes of Biden’s performance in his June debate with Trump is just the latest in a long line of pivotal moments that can throw a campaign off.

But when does a fumbled phrase elevate into a political crisis or a factual slip turn into lost votes? And what from tonight’s historic encounter will merit more than a couple of TikToks making fun of politicians?

We should know in the next day or so, but one may be when Trump claimed that ending the constitutional protection for abortion in Roe v. Wade had returned the issue to the states – a move, he said, “Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote. And that’s what happened.”

Harris then turned that phrase “what people wanted” back on the former president.

“You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that,” Harris said.

It was a moment of policy, but also a personal moment, and hit on a major theme of the race. That is the kind of moment we have seen stand out in the past: President Gerald Ford wrongly declaring Eastern Europe free of Soviet domination; President Ronald Reagan deftly dispatching concerns about his age with a well-placed quip about the youth and inexperience of his 56-year-old rival; President George H.W. Bush looking at his watch repeatedly during a 1992 town hall debate.

I was lucky enough to work on a 2008 documentary – Debating our Destiny – where the moderator of 12 presidential debates and my former boss, the late Jim Lehrer, interviewed many of those candidates about debates. The first President Bush was one of our favorites.

“You look at your watch and they say that he shouldn’t had any business running for president. He’s bored. He’s out of this thing, he’s not with it and we need change,” Bush told us later. “Now, was I glad when the damn thing was over. Yeah. And maybe that’s why I was looking at it, only 10 more minutes of this crap.”

Now, Bush might have been the funny one, but it was former President Bill Clinton who, after mulling it over, offered insight into why some debate moments stick: “The reason the watch thing hurt so badly was it tended to reinforce the problem he had in the election.”

Put another way, stories and moments that reaffirm a theme in the campaign that already is present in the minds of voters often resonate long after the lights dim.

So, now Americans will sit back and see what the echo chambers and cable outlets make of an exchange like the one on abortion. Will it fire up more women voters to back the Harris ticket or will it be lost in a sea of economic issues and immigration policy?

If Bill Clinton is right, the abortion back-and-forth will probably resonate if it connects to what voters already think about these candidates and what are the primary issues of this campaign.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Rodney Coates, Miami University and Lee Banville, University of Montana