"Stop! Stop! He's Already Dead"
Kamala Harris opened up a can of whup ass on Donald Trump last night
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My debate recap in one photo.
This one works too.
Last night’s debate wasn’t a win. It was an ass-kicking.
Kamala Harris beat Trump like a rented mule.
If this were a Little League baseball game, the mercy rule would have been invoked.
If it were a heavyweight fight, a towel would have flown across the ring, and the referee would have stopped the bout.
I have a longer piece in MSNBC today about how, even though most debates don’t matter, this one might (the piece isn’t up yet, but I’ll send it around tomorrow when it is)
And then, after the dust had cleared, came the coup de grace.
Taylor Swift, who is one of America’s most celebrated pop-culture icons and has an enormous following across the world, endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris late Tuesday after Ms. Harris’s debate against former President Donald J. Trump.
The endorsement by Ms. Swift, delivered minutes after Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump had stepped off the debate stage in Philadelphia, offers Ms. Harris an unrivaled celebrity backer and a tremendous shot of adrenaline to her campaign, especially with the younger voters she has been trying to attract.
“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Ms. Swift wrote on Instagram to her 283 million followers. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them."
She signed her post as “Childless Cat Lady,” a reference to comments made by Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, about women without children. The photo that accompanied her post showed her holding a furry feline, Benjamin Button, her pet Ragdoll.
As I noted on Twitter, Taylor Swift endorsing Harris after her debate performance against Trump is like the soldier who walks up to the guy executed by firing squad and shoots him again to make sure he's dead.
How Did She Win?
As to why Harris succeeded, it’s because she adopted a rather ingenious debating strategy. In every one of her answers, she inserted a landmine for Trump — a comment that she knew would get under his notoriously thin skin.
She talked about the size of his rallies and called them “boring.” She said he’d inherited his $400 million fortune from his father. She pointed out that his alma mater, the Wharton School of Business, had thrown cold water on his economic plans. She listed his litany of criminal indictments and prosecutions.
The intent was clear: to throw Trump off his game and send him into a tizzy. And it worked each and every time. Trump is such a classic narcissist, and he can’t let any attack go unanswered. This led to incredible cringe moments, such as when Trump said, “People don’t leave my rallies,” which he described as the “most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”
And in perhaps the most extraordinary moment of the debate, Trump repeated a debunked conservative talking point that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating the dogs and cats of local residents.
The whole evening was like this. It was one incoherent, rambling rant after another in which Trump looked angry, aggrieved, and embittered. You could see it in his face — he was pissed. As the evening wore on and Trump got more and more frustrated, it was harder for him to keep his anger in check, like in this exchange about the war in Ukraine.
She's worse than Biden. In my opinion, I think he's the worst president in the history of our country. She goes down as the worst vice president in the history of our country. But let me tell you something. She is a horrible negotiator. They sent her in to negotiate. As soon as they left Putin did the invasion.
Harris didn’t negotiate with Putin, but fidelity to truth was in short supply with Trump last night.
Later, he said this about Biden:
They threw him out of a campaign like a dog. We don't even know, is he our president? But we have a president.that doesn't know he's alive.
Maybe this creates guffaws in MAGA households, but I think most voters will see it as unhinged and mean-spirited.
When not placing the cheese in the mousetrap for Trump, Harris was also hitting him hard on abortion, January 6, his failed foreign policy leadership, and his plan to raise tariffs on America’s trading partners. Indeed, on the abortion question, Trump once again made the false claim that Democrats support killing babies after they’re born and repeated his bizarre argument that all legal scholars wanted Roe v. Wade overturned (they didn’t). On that question alone, Harris won the debate.
But it wasn’t just that Trump lost the debate; Harris performed quite well. In a New York Times poll released Sunday, 28 percent of voters “said they felt they needed to know more” about her. The number is close to half among the small segment of undecided voters. So, for Harris, one of her primary goals last night was to introduce herself to Americans who still think they don’t know enough about her — or are unsure she has presidential timber.
On that front, Harris acquitted herself well. She was polished. She didn’t get rattled. She stuck to her talking points and smartly kept pointing out that Trump is more focused on himself and his grievances than he is on the needs of actual voters.
She also did a nice job of trying to appear above the fray. I thought, in particular, this answer on race and diversity was excellent.
I think it's a tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people. You know, I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us. And we don't want this kind of approach that is just constantly trying to divide us, and especially by race. And let's remember how Donald Trump started. He he owned land, he owned buildings, and he was investigated because he refused to rent property to Black families. Let's remember, this is the same individual who took out a full-page ad in The New York Times calling for the execution of five young Black and Latino boys who were innocent, the Central Park Five. Took out a full-page ad calling for their execution. This is the same individual who spread birther lies about the first Black President of the United States. And I think the American people want better than that. Want better than this. Want someone who understands as I do, I travel our country, we see in each other a friend. We see in each other a neighbor. We don't want a leader who is constantly trying to have Americans point their fingers at each other. I meet with people all the time who tell me "Can we please just have discourse about how we're going to invest in the aspirations and the ambitions and the dreams of the American people?" Knowing that regardless of people's color or the language their grandmother speaks we all have the same dreams and aspirations and want a president who invests in those, not in hate and division.
And you’ll notice that she slipped in the nugget about the Central Park Five, and unsurprisingly, Trump used most of his response to hit back on that point.
The question now is, will it matter? Here’s what I wrote for MSNBC:
The differences between Harris and Trump were so significant—and considering the potential boost to a candidate not as well known as her opponent — it's hard to imagine last night’s debate will not have at least some effect on voter opinion. At the very least, she might have given the sliver of the electorate still unsure about Harris enough information to win their vote in November.
In the near-term debate should generate days of coverage about the former president’s precarious mental state and perhaps move the news media away from continuing to claim that Harris has not explained herself and her plans to the American people.
But ultimately, the unknowable question for Democrats is: did Kamala Harris swing enough voters in her direction to ensure she wins the White House? Even if her poll numbers improve in the next week, will those gains remain in place until Election Day?
Time will tell.But if Trump remains a high-floor, low-ceiling candidate, with a strong base of support and a limited ability to bring in new voters, even a small move of undecided voters to Harris could be decisive. And it’s hard to imagine any presidential candidate having a better night than Harris did on Tuesday. Democrats can’t ask for much more than that from their new standard bearer.
The bottom line is that last night’s debate allowed Harris to make her case to the American people and highlight the clear contrast between her and Trump. She succeeded. In a close election that could come down to a handful of votes in a handful of states, any night when you best your opponent and make a strong case for your candidacy is a good one.
A few other highlights:
At one point in the debate, the ABC moderators tried to pin him down on whether he had a plan for health care reform, and Trump’s response was a classic: “ I have concepts of a plan.” I laughed so hard at that line that I scared my dog
Trump referred to the leader of the Taliban as a guy named “Abdul.” His name is Hibatullah Akhundzada.
ABC moderator David Muir repeatedly asked Trump if he wanted Ukraine to win the war against Russia. He refused to answer the question.
Trump said that Harris both hates Israel and also hates the “Arab population.”
He pinned the blame for the attempted assassination against him on Democrats. “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me.”
(Feel free to leave your favorite moments in the comments below. There were just so many).
What’s Going On
Friend of the newsletter Brian Rosenwald had a good take on last night.
Same goes for Seth Masket and Mike Tomasky.
Musical Interlude
Don’t give me a hard time … it’s a good song.
My favorite line from the debate was stated of course by Kamala Harris: "Putin will eat you for lunch!"
My favorite internet comment is this:
Breaking news. Daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants eats orangutan for dinner tonight on live television.