From New York Times Opinion, This Is The Ezra Klein Show. It Is Wednesday, September 11. This night was the first, maybe the only presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. And I think to understand what happened at that debate, it's worth going back to a criticism of Trump, you could maybe say, an observation about Trump, that Harris and other Democrats made repeatedly in their speeches at the Democratic National Convention. Here's Harris.
I will not cozy up to tyrants and dictators like Kim Jong Un, who are rooting for Trump, who are rooting for Trump. Because you know, they know. They know he is easy to manipulate with flattery and favors. That isn't just an attack line, Democrats use on Donald Trump. At the high levels of power among the people in the Democratic Party who have governing, and particularly who have presidential experience, this is what they believe about him.
That Donald Trump is easily manipulated, that he is distractable, he is undisciplined, he is egotistical, he is interested above all in one topic, and that topic is himself. It's why it was such a big theme in the speeches of the former presidents over that couple of days. Here's Barack Obama from the DNC. Here's a 78 year old billionaire who has not stopped whining about his problems since he wrote down his golden escalator nine years ago.
It has been a constant stream of gripes and grievances that's actually been getting worse now that he's afraid of losing the camel. Where's the childish nicknames? The crazy conspiracy theorist? This weird obsession with crowd sizes. It just goes on and on and on. Here's Bill Clinton from the DNC. Look, what does her opponent do with his voice? He mostly talks about himself. The next time you hear him, don't count the lies. Count the eyes. His vengeance, his complaints, his conspiracies.
He's like one of those tenors opening up before he walks out on stage like I did trying to get his lungs open by singing, me, me, me, me, me. What Kamala Harris did at the debate on Tuesday night was to turn this attack line into a debate strategy to show that Trump is like this rather than just say Trump is like this. The key moment, the key turn in the debate came in the section on immigration, David Mirr, one of the moderators. Ashtarisa, a good and a tough question.
We know that illegal border crossings reached a record high in the Biden administration. This past June, President Biden imposed tough new asylum restrictions. We know the numbers since then have dropped significantly. But my question to you tonight is why did the administration wait until six months before the election to act? And would you have done anything differently from President Biden on this? Harris doesn't quite answer that question.
She talks instead about the bipartisan border bill that was negotiated in the fall of 2023 and then scuttled by Trump. So that does move the clock backwards a bit and it moves the blame onto Trump a bit. But it leaves open the underlying question and criticism you hear of the Biden administration here. Why did they wait until the fall of 2023 to do something substantial on the border? But Harris doesn't even try to explain that.
Instead she uncorxaligned that was clearly prepared, clearly she walked in with this one. And when I first heard her say it, it felt like it had been dropped into the wrong section of the debate. And I'll tell you something. He's going to talk about immigration a lot tonight, even when it's not the subject that is being raised. And I'm going to actually do something really unusual.
And I'm going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump's rallies because it's a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter, he will talk about when Mills calls cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.
What Harris is doing here is unleashing a test of these democratic theories about Donald Trump. She says Donald Trump is easily manipulated. And she is here on national television at the debate, manipulating him in an obvious and even clunky way. Obama says Trump is obsessed with conspiracy theories and crowd size. And so here's Harris baiting him on crowd size and conspiracy theories. Clinton says Trump can't resist talking about himself.
And so Harris is turning a question about immigration into a question about Donald Trump, whether he's interesting enough to keep people compelled during his rallies. So Harris dangles this bait in front of Trump. She does it in the section of the debate that should be Trump's strongest. The section where her record is hardest to defend. The section where Trump is most personally interested in the underlying issue. And Trump could easily have just ignored the bait.
Ignored the jab about his board crowds. Told Americans that Harris is trying to distract them from her failed record on the border by using some pre-cooked debate line about crowd sizes. If Trump had the presence of mind, the discipline to do that, I think that would have gone on quite badly for Harris. Instead he does this. First let me respond to this to the rallies. She said people start leaving. People don't go to her rallies. There's no reason to go.
And the people that do go, she's bussing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So she can't talk about that. People don't leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That's because people want to take their country back. Our country is being lost. We're a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago.
And what's going on here, you can end up in World War III just to go into another subject. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country and look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk. It's not going to be a rora or a springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it.
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country and it's a shame. And after that, Trump never really recovers. The whole rest of the debate, he's red faced, pissed off, free associating, conspiratorial, not the guy you'd want sitting behind the Resolute desk in a crisis. Not the guy you'd want at your dinner table.
Not the guy you'd want at the next table over when you are having dinner. This was more than just debate strategy for Harris. It is an actual point about Donald Trump, about the way he thinks and acts and governs. He is easy to manipulate. He is unfocused. He is obsessed with grievance and flattery and criticism and yeah, crowd size. He couldn't hold it together for 90 minutes, 90 minutes. In a debate, he had weeks to prepare for. On the issue, he is best prepped to handle.
So why should anyone watching that think he can handle a presidential crisis? You think Putin doesn't know how to flatter him or that oil company executives can't get a briefing and how to butter him up or that he'll have reserves of focus and perspective and groundedness on day three of little no sleep when everyone is yelling at him when people aren't being relentlessly polite to him when the stakes are high, when he has antagonists with real power.
You think he will then have this focus and perspective and groundedness that he could not summon here? This was not, in my view, a perfect debate for Harris. She was much stronger at disqualifying Donald Trump than making the case for her own candidacy. If your theory of the election is in Americans needed reminding of Trump's chaotic, conspiratorial, childish temperament, then she did the job and then some.
Evening the problem is they don't know enough about her that they're unhappy with what the country feels like under Joe Biden and they want something different and they don't know or don't trust that Joe Biden's vice president will offer that. I'm not sure she did all that much to reassure them. Her canned answers seem canned. She's not the kind of light-footed debater who can sidestep a tricky question while appearing to answer it.
When she got questions, she didn't like, she just didn't answer them. Obviously, didn't answer them, but that leaves those questions like why the Biden administration didn't lift the Trump tear of sunshine or whether she would have done anything different in the Afghanistan withdrawal that leaves them lingering in voters' minds. Given a number of opportunities to distance herself from Biden to say the way she would actually be different or have done something different, she took none of them.
That might be respectful towards Joe Biden. It may not be good political strategy. What is Joe Biden used to say? You don't compare candidates to the Almighty. You compare them to the alternative. What Harris did last night was create a contrast, create an alternative.
She turned Trump into his worst self, you might say his true self, reminding Americans who haven't seen that guy for a while, what he looks and feels like, how he thinks, how he acts, and she showed her ability to master a moment, to perform under pressure, to do the very thing Donald Trump could not do, which is prepare a strategy, execute it when it mattered, and remain focused and consistent under pressure. Those aren't just skills you need to win a debate.
Those are skills you need to be president. I'm joined now by our senior editor, Claire Gordon, to talk through more moments from the night. Claire? Hi, great to be here. It really seemed like Harris's theory of this debate was to remind people of the worst of Trump. And it seemed like Trump's theory of this debate was the border, the border, the border. You pivoted to it in many of his answers when it wasn't the question.
Do you think that despite his weak and wild performance in other ways that there could actually be validity to that theory? It was the theory in 2016 and the surprise of many liberals. It was effective and the crisis of the border has only gone worse since then. This feels appropriate as an analogy given the day on which we're talking, which is September 11th.
In the 2008 primary, Joe Biden's best line of that whole primary, and you got to think back to a period in time when Rudy Giuliani seemed like a significant political force in American life. But Rudy Giuliani was running for president. And Biden, who was of the Democrats, the best at talking about national security and meeting Republican weakness baiting with his own very specific brand of condescension, had this devastating line.
We said that for Rudy Giuliani, a sentence is a noun of verb in 9-11. And for Donald Trump, a sentence is sometimes a noun of verb and the border. That it is his sort of unified field theory of everything. And he can lay claim to at least under his version of this some success. If you look and we've been preparing for an episode on the border, so I've been kind of deep in this data, if you look at border encounters, which is the way we track the migrant flow to the southwestern border.
As soon as Joe Biden takes office, they spike. It goes from around and often below 50,000 a month, I think it was, under Trump to as highest 300,000 in I think it's December of 2023. The problem for Donald Trump is that he's not really making a policy case about the border. He's making an expressive case about the border. That's also why it's significant that he repeated these sort of social media seems to be largely bullshit stories about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats.
That he's motivated by dislike of immigrants. He's motivated by desire to not have them in this country. There is some position year to his than Democrats would like to admit that has become quite popular and you see it in how far right Democrats have moved. What was Kamala Harris's pitch on the border, not comprehensive immigration reform, not more humane treatment of immigrants, but a quite far right border security bill that would actually be about stopping this flow.
Democrats have moved quite a bit further to the sort of policy positions you might have associated with Donald Trump or someone more from his side of things a couple of years ago and they've had to do that because under Biden and under their both their policies and their sort of expressive governance, they lost credibility on the border. This situation got much, much worse. The flow got much higher.
It actually became a policy problem, not just an invented Fox News thing and now they're trying to win back credibility on deterrence. They're trying to win back credibility. People can manage an orderly border and you got to have that credibility where you can do anything else. I don't know that it is helpful to Donald Trump who's scuttled that bipartisan bill to just seem like a guy who is monomatically obsessed with the border because most people don't think the border is everything.
Donald Trump, I think at this point, is not doing a good job explaining aside from the signal that he would be somebody who immigrants would understand would not want them here and he would try to do things to make their lives miserable and hassle them and deport them. There's not a lot there beyond it. The effort to kind of connect everything else to it. I don't know, at least for me, it falls flat.
You can imagine a better candidate making it work, but he was at least not that candidate on Tuesday night. But you said it's expressive and I think that people and for good reason trust that he would shut down the border. He means it. I'm actually writing a column about this. I think a lot about this line from Mark Schmidt who is at the New Marker Foundation but is an old political mentor of mine and he used to say that it's not what you say about the issues.
The reason policy communication matters is not because every voter is a policy expert with a highly detailed sense in their mind of whether or not they believe in the taxation of unrealized capital gains. It is because policy is a way of communicating who you are and what you think is important. And Trump, who is very scattered on policy, is a master of this kind of communication. The way he communicates about immigration communicates something very true about him. He does not like immigration.
He thinks there are too many immigrants here. He does not want more coming. That if you elect Trump, you are electing somebody who will look at the immigration situation and will try to think of ways to lock down the border. Try to think of ways to make the lives of immigrants worse. Try to think of ways anything he can to keep people from coming to this country. I actually think this is a place where on a lot of issues, Harris, I mean, Democrats more broadly, but Harris in particular struggles.
She talks about policy in a clear way. She will describe her policies correctly. She does not fall into the word salad that Donald Trump falls into. But they don't feel like they are saying that much about her. At her core level, what is Kamala Harris' belief about immigration? At her core level, what is Kamala Harris' belief about fracking? The problem is that the signal from many people is muddled about what it is saying about her.
Compare that to the way she talks about something like abortion, where you can feel that the policy communication is a value communication. She's been steady on the issue her whole career. When she talks about it, you get an immediate sense. If you were a voter watching that on Tuesday and you looked at this, Donald Trump is kind of all over the place. He's not really saying what he clearly thinks. Kamala Harris wants to restore abortion protections.
You would walk away with no doubt about that at all. That would be a true statement about her. Because what is Donald Trump actually want to see happen on abortion unclear? So that's a place where he's communicating policy a bit, right? Return it to the States without communicating what the policy says about him, because there's actually a disconnect between the policy and what he seems to believe.
Let's talk about Trump's abortion policy, because this was a pretty interesting moment I thought in the debate, where Trump says that he doesn't support a federal abortion ban, but then he's specifically asked whether if that came to his desk, he would veto it. He doesn't answer, and then he's asked directly. But if I could just get a yes or no, because your running mate, Jen and JD Vance has said that you would veto if you did come to your desk. And this is what he said.
I didn't discuss it with JD and all fairness JD. And I don't mind if he has a certain view, but I think you speak of him. But I really didn't. Look, we don't have to discuss it because she'd never be able to get it, just like she couldn't get student loans, they couldn't get student loans, they didn't even come close to getting any student loans. They taunted young people and a lot of other people that had loans. They can never get this approved.
So it doesn't matter what she says about going to Congress. It's wonderful. Let's go to Congress, do it. But the fact is that for years, they wanted to get it out of Congress and out of the federal government. And we did something that everybody said couldn't be done. And now you have a vote of the people on abortion. So Trump has already said in this debate that he's against an abortion ban. JD Vance said he would veto it. Why wouldn't Trump just say he would veto it?
I think that is one of the good questions of the debate. And Trump's unwillingness to simply say no, I will not sign. I would indeed veto a six week, a 12 week abortion ban. Spoke volumes. What he does here is very strange. He tries to move off of abortion. He's so uncomfortable talking about abortion. He begins inserting student loans as the example to talk about instead of the thing that he's actually talking about.
And the argument he goes on to make, both about him and about Harris, is if I'm being generous to it, this argument is in a way correct. Neither of them under the current rules of the Senate are going to be sent an abortion bill of any size that right now you can't run abortion through budget reconciliation so it is subject to the filibuster. Neither party is going to have 60 votes in the Senate. So Harris always phrases this very carefully.
She says if and when Congress sends me a bill codifying Roe v Wade, I will sign it proudly. She doesn't say she will be able to do that. She says if she's given that bill, she will sign it. What Trump says is she won't be given that bill. When he is kind of saying repeatedly when he is pushed on this, he won't be given the bill either. I've got two problems here. One is that one of them might be given the bill. We were not that far in 2021 from seeing the filibuster opened up.
There's already been significant talk of carving out an exception to the filibuster and there are exceptions to the filibuster, including by the way, for nominating Supreme Court justices, which is how Trump was able to get these people on the court in the first place. But there are exceptions to the filibuster and there are people in both parties who want to make abortion one of them.
And so if that happened, if Republicans had 53 votes or Democrats had 52 votes and they carve out an exception, either President Harris or President Trump could indeed get one of these bills. What Harris has said is that she will sign a bill codifying Roe v Wade and it's worth noting that that is actually a climb down for Democrats. That is her taking a more moderate position than what the Democratic Party has taken recently.
What Democrats wanted to do around the Dobs decision was pass something called the Women's Health Protection Act. It banned all kinds of things that red states were doing when Roe is still in force to make abortion harder to access. And saying that she will sign the protections of Roe back into law, she is very notably not saying that she will sign the Women's Health Protection Act into law. Maybe she would if it got to her, but her actual position is Roe.
And Trump, I suspect because he does not want to actually make pro-life voters angry at him, is refusing to take the other side of this. Now he has said in his platform that the states should decide what he has not said is if he gets a Republican Congress and they send him an abortion ban, that he would veto it. And I think you should take that seriously.
It may not be literally his position, so not his position in the campaign, but he's a pro-life politician who appointed a pro-life majority to the Supreme Court, who governs in a pro-life coalition. And he also did not say in a way I think was telling that the states that have passed the severe bans are doing in his view something wrong. But he seemed comfortable upsetting the pro-life voters in the past, what changed?
I think there are red lines in his mind, and possibly actually in politics that he cannot cross. I think a lot of pro-life voters understand that he is trying to win an election. And they're not happy with his repositioning here, but they are accepting of it. Being a clear promise about the future to oppose the single thing pro-life movement voters want more than anything else is different. A bit of pandering during the campaign is different than a commitment to oppose this.
And by the way, a commitment to oppose it, they would then be used against any other Republican. If Donald Trump made that commitment in that debate and he loses in 2024, well then in 2028, when Marco Rubio and Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis and JD Vance and so on are running for the Republican nomination, they'll all be confronted with Donald Trump's position. And they'll say, well, do you agree with Donald Trump, your former standard bearer, that you would veto a national abortion ban?
So for him to make that step is to betray or act the very least oppose the pro-life movement in a much more substantial way than to be saying not that much about it in his platform. So talking about another policy piece, Trump's tariffs and Kamala Harris has been attacking Trump for the tariffs saying there are sales tax. My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month.
Just have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires. And Trump pointed out in his answer on that that the Biden administration has kept some of his Chinese tariffs in place. In fact, they never took the tariff off because it was so much money they can't.
They would totally destroy everything that they've set out to do. They're taken in billions of dollars from China and other places. They've left the tariff so on. And then Kamala Harris was directly asked about that by the moderator and let's just play that clip. Vice President Harris, I do want to ask for your response and you heard what the president said there because the Biden administration did keep a number of the Trump tariffs in place. So how do you respond?
Well, let's be clear that the Trump administration resulted in a trade deficit, one of the highest we've ever seen in the history of America. He invited trade wars. You want to talk about his deal with China. What he ended up doing is under Donald Trump's presidency.
He ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military, basically sold us out when a policy about China should be in making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century. When you read the tea leaves there on what her trade policy would be, what she believes on trade and why wouldn't she want to answer that question more clearly? Here's what I wish Kamala Harris would have said here. What I think is actually true.
I wish you would have said something like Donald Trump has a lot of bad ideas, but I'm a big enough person to say he has some ideas that have had kernels of truth in them. And when he ran in 2016 on a much more skeptical position towards China, he was right. And one of the things we did in the Biden-Harris administration is to not change things where we thought Donald Trump had a point. We changed things where he didn't have a point, but not where he did.
So yes, we kept his relatively modest tariffs on Chinese goods. That is a different policy than putting a 10 or 20% tariff on anything that any country, including Canada or Ireland, might export to the US. And Trump's presentation on his own policies here that people are not going to pay this, the countries will pay it, it's going to be eaten up. We know how tariffs work. Of course it gets passed on. Of course it does.
But this is a place, I think people think so much about the way Trump lies, that they don't think that much or talk that much about the places where he just has a misguided view of how economics for the world works. You might want to put a tariff on a very particular kind of good, where you're trying to either stop unfair competition from elsewhere or nurture in a very specific way a domestic industry. You might say we want Americans to be the leading semiconductor manufacturer.
So we're going to put a tariff on semiconductors from other countries. The reasons you may not want to do that, but that's the kind of theory you would do. You don't put a tariff on fruit that you import from other countries, and you have neither the climate nor the intention of growing here. That's stupid. That's just raising costs for no reason. And Trump's policy here is stupid.
But on China, it is a surprising and very important fact about the Biden administration that they were to Trump's right on China. They went further than he did. They didn't just keep his tariffs on China. They went further, they gave it technologies. They've done a whole number of things. They've done more in terms of alliances than he was ever able to do. The critique they can make of Trump on China is that they've been harsher China hawks than he has. And you did kind of communicate that.
She challenged him on chips. But I think without admitting, again, this is where I think it's important to admit what people already sense. They believe Trump is tough on China, telling them he is and is not going to work. Because that's not true. Trump occasioned a huge shift in how American politics thinks about China. And that is his victory.
You can say that he did something wrong, whatever, but the unwillingness to admit that things have moved and then build on that, which I think is a more convincing presentation is weaker. So I thought he didn't do a good job. I thought he did a bad job. I thought he didn't do a very good job of separating out what was going on here. There's a set of China policies. China is universal tariff policies.
What are policy piece in the debate, which I just have to ask you about because this has been your bread and butter for a long time, was the healthcare section. And it was the most incredible flashback to 2016 having the moderator ask about whether Trump had a plan if he were to repeal a bomb and care. I had a choice to make. Do I save it and make it as good as it can be? Or do I let it rot? And I saved it. I did the right thing.
But it's still never going to be great and it's too expensive for people. And what we will do is we're looking at different plans. If we can come up with a plan that's going to cost our people, our population, less money and be better healthcare than Obamacare, then I would absolutely do it. But until then, I'd run it as good as it can be run. So just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan. I have concepts of a plan. I'm not president right now.
But if we come up with something, I would only change it if we come up with something that's better and less expensive. And there are concepts and options we have to do that. And you'll be hearing about it in the not too distant future. Were you surprised to hear that Trump saved Obamacare? Yeah, I was surprised to hear that Donald Trump saved the Affordable Care Act. Though obviously, I thank him for his service. I thought a lot of things were interesting in this.
But Obamacare is a lot of imperfection to it. There are many things many of us would do differently. But actually beating it is not easy. There isn't a plan that just like, tastes great, is more filling, costs less money, induces less disruption than Obamacare. And so for Trump not to take partial ownership of Obamacare, that is political victory. But I also think this speaks to a genuine weakness of him as a candidate. Like Harris's policy bucket is a little unfilled right now.
Because she didn't go through a primary, which would have been a long period of time, in which her policy teams could be working and meeting with her and testing things out and talking to experts and talking to groups. Policy development takes time. But Donald Trump was president. He has been running this whole time. And he still has nothing, the concept of a plan. It's not that that's like a crazy thing to say on some level, that he's not done his plenty yet. But you do have to ask why?
What have you been doing that was so much more important than coming up with a good healthcare plan? Why don't you have anything here? And the truth is, it reflects something else among Republicans now, which is that they have given up on healthcare. There isn't a good plan that has adherence in the Republican caucus and also has some political savvy to it. The Trump can take down off of a shelf. The Obamacare pill effort failed.
And that is sort of left Republican healthcare wonkery in a state of rough devastation. They don't want to go back into the dark room where the bad thing happened. And you see that here, right? The Trumpists don't know what they want to do on healthcare. The GOP broadly doesn't know what it wants to do on healthcare. So Donald Trump doesn't know what he wants to do on healthcare. And so he fumbled around.
And what Harris's position on healthcare was, which he didn't go into in any detail, but has been what he saw with Joe Biden, is like, yeah, we're going to keep tweaking the Affordable Care Act. Make it a bit bigger, make it more generous, make it more expansive. We're going to negotiate down Medicare prescription drug prices. There actually is like a playbook Democrats know how to run now. And Republicans, like not just Donald Trump, are kind of nowhere on this issue.
I know you wish we lived in a world where this was all a policy debate, but the differences in tear of policy and healthcare policy, how much is the election at all about that? How much does any of that stuff matter? I never know how to answer this question because I think the way policy communication works is a little tricky. What I will say is that if you watch Kamala Harris on that stage, what you saw as a candidate who does think policy positioning is meaningful.
And it goes back again to this point that the point is not the policies per se, but policy is one way and record is another that voters intuit who a politician is. And she is trying to signal who she is to the electorate, which does not know her very well, and so is Donald Trump.
And what she did last night was bait Donald Trump into reminding the electorate of something much of it already believes about him, which is that there is a crazed side to the man that while he might be right about some things, he can't trust this guy. He's not normal on some fundamental level. He doesn't have it together. And she tried to offer I think a pretty straightforward view of who she is.
In a way, I thought that the Kamala Harris presentation on Tuesday was a huge victory for Joe Manchin. On abortion, her position is not what the Democratic Senate caucus's position was. It was Joe Manchin's position. He did not vote for the bill, Democrats supported and said, no, no, what we should do is just rovy weight. If you heard her on fracking, she got pushed a few times. Well, didn't you say you had banned fracking?
And she did say bad or a version of that and she has flipped on that and she said, look, I'm here in Pennsylvania. I hear here cares a lot about fracking and I'm here to tell you that we've never had more domestic natural gas production than we have under the Biden and Harris administration. And not only that in the inflation reduction act, we opened up new leases for fracking. And I was a tie-breaking vote on that. Why was that in the IRA? Partially Joe Manchin. Significantly, Joe Manchin.
She didn't brag about the climate investments of the IRA at any length. She bragged about opening up new lands for fracking. On immigration, what did she say? She didn't say she was going to restart a big conference of immigration reform process because we need to balance the humanity of how we treat immigrants with the national interest with an orderly border. She said the bipartisan Senate border deal negotiated with James Langford that she would sign that bill.
This was on policy an extremely centrist presentation. Her economic ideas right now are fairly modest. She talks about building more homes, but is not specific about how to do that. She talks about an expanded child tax credit, which is a great idea and I hope does pass. Talks about this boost to small businesses. But there isn't a kind of uniting theory of it.
What you're seeing here is a lot of policy communication meant to communicate to wavering voters in Pennsylvania that she is not too far left for them, that she is a kind of moderate Democrat of a type they recognize. Maybe the vibe they associated with Joe Biden in 2020, even if in practice, Joe Biden governed to the left of that as president. So I think that was the message of a lot of what was happening there.
Do you think she successfully fended off the attack at least from Trump or the attempt to define her as a dangerously liberal Marxist who wants to give transgender surgeries to illegal aliens in prisons? Man, Trump did her so many favors in that. I don't even think he tried very hard to make this argument. Everybody in the Republican Party is begging Donald Trump to focus on her positions from 2020. And he's just not disciplined enough to do it.
Now I don't think she totally elayed concerns, right? These were things that the moderate is suppressing her on and she would often just sort of dodge them. The problem right now for Harris, in my view, or the work that is left undone, is Harris is sort of dragging around two anchors in terms of her self-definition, which is she's dragging around the 2020 primary, which is the only time people really saw her on the national stage under her own definition.
And she went way to the left, way further left than her reputation was in California. And so now she's pivoting away from these positions, but without a very clear explanation of, well, these are all dumb. Why did you adopt them in 2020? I think it's hard for her to say like, well, we all thought you lost our mind in that primary because we were terrified that we'd lose to Bernie Sanders. And so we tried to co-opt his positions, but we were never going to do any of that, right?
Like, let's the actual answer to that question, but it doesn't really work. And then the other is the Biden administration. And she could do a few things. She could try to forthrightly defend their records. See, there's been a much better presidency than you get a credit for. But she's not doing that. They're probably wise not to do that because people's views of that are pretty stable and they don't like the Biden presidency. They just don't like how things have gone.
So saying, I am running as the proud heir to this wildly successful presidency is not going to work. But nor is she exactly separating herself from it. So the Biden administration is also kind of an anchor she's tracking around. So she's sort of defined around the 2020 primary to extension itself definition, defined around the unpopular Biden administration to the extension is national, you know, vice presidential definition.
And what they've done is sort of try to sand the edges off of both of those things. But without creating, I think, in a clear way, a new definition for her separate from just being the prosecutor who will prosecute the case against Donald Trump. So I think she wiped the floor with Donald Trump in this debate. But that was the Donald Trump part of the debate. I think the Kamala Harris part of this is still a little bit of an open question.
And the focus groups I was seeing of undecided voters sort of reflected that too. Like, they didn't like Donald Trump. They thought she was better. They didn't really feel like they left knowing her. What is the thing she is trying to say that Kamala Harris cares about most? And if you vote for her, this is what you're going to get. In terms of her own record, she's not been a politician driven by economics.
But there are things that drive her like for any president or candidate and things that are a little bit more distant from her core. And I don't think she's managed to collapse the distance. I don't, you know, she doesn't burn with it in a way that I think you kind of need to. And the way that Bernie Sanders did with Medicare for all and the way that Elizabeth Warren does on corporate power and the way that Donald Trump does on immigration. And the economy is big, right?
Like that's like the first thing often on people's minds. So I am extremely sympathetic to where they are in this. I mean, again, they have not had any of the normal time a candidacy at this level would have to figure all this out. They're trying to do everything all at once at warp speed with really only weeks to go until the election itself. And still, she is lucky that Trump has not been doing a good job defining her. She's lucky that he is undisciplined and chaotic.
So how do you replace the vague impression people have of Kamala Harris, maybe impressed by her as a performer? I think she seems better than they had heard, but they still don't really know she is. And what do the fights you can pick that give you a sense of her core commitments? I think that's their sort of unsolved problem. And I just want to end by playing the moment of the debate that if there is any spark that animates the anti-magicalition, this would be it.
Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. So let's be clear about that. Clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that. But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election. And I'm going to tell you that I have traveled the world as vice-president of the United States. And world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump.
I have talked with military leaders, some of whom work with you, and they say you're a disgrace. And when you then talk in this way in a presidential debate and deny what over and over again are court cases you have lost because you did, in fact, lose that election, 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. That's deeply troubling and the American people deserve better.
I thought that was her best answer of the debate. After a while of beating him, that was when she delivered a roundhouse. And the thing she did beautifully there and correctly, not just a debate tactic, but this whole sort of strategy they were playing out over that night, was to take something that was performance and make it indictment. What she is saying about Trump here, that the move she makes so adroitly, is that on the one hand, yeah, Donald Trump is lying about the election.
He did not allow or try not to allow the peaceful transfer of power. He has made us look terrible in front of the world. But that gets to something fundamental about him. He is not able to process something like losing the election. He is actually confused or has confused himself about the facts of the election. This guy does not keep facts straight in his head. He does not know what to believe. He's like all up in his own grievances and personal narrative and conspiracies.
And whatever else you think about him, whether you like his position on China or the border, or tariffs whether you like the Donald Trump economy or not, this is not the guy you trust with power. At the absolute core of the selection, is can you trust Donald Trump to be president again, given what happened and what he did last time he was president? And also what happened last time he lost as president.
And turning this not just into a question of who won the election, but of Donald Trump's cognitive fitness, not that you can't trust Donald Trump here because he's undemocratic. But because when you talk in this way in a presidential debate and deny what over and over again or core cases you have lost, it leaves 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. That's getting at the fundamental thing here.
I don't think the guy you saw up there on Tuesday seemed like he could do the job. I don't think you would want that guy in a negotiation with congressional leaders to say nothing of a negotiation with Putin or Netanyahu or Kim Jong Un. In any set of directions, he was not cognitively strong. He did not have high levels of executive function. After the first debate, Democrats looked at the candidates and said, we are not drawing the fitness contrast we want to be drawing.
They did something very difficult, persuaded Joe Biden to step aside, they united around Harris, and they basically tried to redraw the contrast. And I think they were pretty successful at that overnight. Debates don't just matter because of what happens at night. They matter because of the stories they create in American politics and the way people respond to them. It's not that I think this debate will end the Trump candidacy.
But even if you watched our Republicans are responding, which is largely complaining about the ABC moderators, you saw their own dispiritedness. Donald Trump did not perform. He had a job to do and he didn't do it. That sentiment in American politics, the vibes, I guess we now call momentum, all that really does matter. And this is what I think Harris did to win the debate. That she fundamentally made Donald Trump look like he wasn't up to the job.
And she got Donald Trump to make Donald Trump look like he wasn't up to the job. And she had her own weaknesses and imperfections in that, but she looked like she was. And that was a fundamental contrast. This episode of The Ezra Clancho is produced by Claire Gordon, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Jack McCordock. Our senior engineer is Jeff Gellb. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.
The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristen Lin, and Amman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Christina Simuluski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose Strosser.