She turned to him with an arched brow. A quiet sigh. A hand on her chin. A laugh. A pitiful glance. A dismissive shake of her head.

From the opening moments of her first debate against Donald J. Trump, Kamala Harris craftily exploited her opponent’s biggest weakness.

Not his record. Not his divisive policies. Not his history of inflammatory statements.

Instead, she took aim at a far more primal part of him: his ego.

At his rallies, on his sycophantic social media network and surrounded by flatterers at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is unquestioned, unchallenged and never ever mocked.

That changed over the course of 90 minutes in Philadelphia on Tuesday, when the woman who had never before met him succeeded, bit by bit, in puncturing his comfortable cocoon and triggering his annoyance and anger.

Harris questioned the size and loyalty of the crowds at his rallies. She said world leaders call him a “disgrace”. And she claimed his fortune was built by his father, recasting a business mogul who proudly boasts of being a self-made man as just another nepotism baby.

Then she stood by and watched, as Trump did himself a whole lot of damage.

In answer after answer, the former President reminded Americans of his role in so much of what many would rather forget: the deadly and devastating pandemic, his refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, a bloody siege on the US Capitol and the fall of Roe v. Wade. He lingered on his criminal charges and praised Viktor Orban, the strongman leader of Hungary. He defended a false claim that migrants in Ohio are eating their neighbours’ dogs and cats and recycled years-old anti-abortion attack lines that Democrats supported “execution after birth”.

In such a fractured and polarised country, it remains unclear how the lopsided debate may alter the 2024 presidential race. But the immediate reaction was telling: Trump led Republicans in attacking the moderators — the debate was “three-on-one”, he complained — while Democrats notched perhaps the most important endorsement of the election cycle with Taylor Swift.

“He is so easy to trigger,” governor Gavin Newsom of California, a Harris ally, said in the post-debate spin room.

Since her head-spinning rise to the Democratic ticket in July, Harris has faced a race focused on her record, history and shifts in positions. But from the moment she crossed the stage to shake Trump’s hand, the Democratic presidential nominee made clear her intention to transform a night expected to be about her into a referendum on him.

She displayed a composure and tactical restraint that was palpable through the television screen. Equally palpable was his fury, which at times seemed to make him unable to even look at his opponent.

“She’s a Marxist — everybody knows she’s a Marxist,” Trump said when Harris accused him of coddling China during the coronavirus pandemic. “Her father is a Marxist professor in economics, and he taught her well.”

Harris looked at him with a condescending smile, performatively leaning in to hear more. He’s the former reality television star, but she clearly understood the power of the medium. Her expression was her rebuttal. And when her turn to speak came, she focused not on rebutting the attacks on her character and ideology, but on the far more politically potent issue of abortion rights.

Trump, she charged, would ban abortion nationwide and monitor women’s pregnancies to ensure they carried the baby to term. Already, current restrictions in some states, she told viewers, make no exceptions for victims of rape or incest.

“That is immoral and one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government and Donald Trump certainly should not be telling a woman what to do with her body,” she said.

Instead of attacking Trump as an existential threat to democracy, as President Joe Biden so often did, Harris invited voters to judge the former President for themselves. She urged them to attend one of his campaign events, hear his references to “fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter” and his claims that “windmills cause cancer”, and watch his followers leave early.

“The one thing you will not hear him talk about is you,” she said into the camera. “You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams and your desires, and I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a President who actually puts you first, and I pledge to you that I will.”

Trump quickly responded, but not to dispute her criticism that he was not tuned into voters’ needs. Instead, he defended his crowds.

“People don’t leave my rallies,” Trump said. “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

By the end of the debate, Harris turned one of the worst moments of the Biden presidency — the US’s withdrawal from Afghanistan — into an attack on Trump, saying he “negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine” with the Taliban and invited its leaders to Camp David.

Even Trump’s allies grudgingly admitted the Harris strategy of trying to knock Trump off-balance was effective.

“She spent 90 minutes attacking Donald Trump, trying to get under his skin, to do everything to get away from her record as vice-president of the United States,” Representative Byron Donalds of Florida said. “He defended himself like any human being would.”

In recent weeks, as the burst of enthusiasm around Harris’s candidacy has tempered, the questions about her policy positions and plans have grown. Very few were answered on Tuesday night.

Aside from immigration, Trump did not effectively attack her over high costs of living. His attempts to paint her as a flip-flopper on energy policy and other key issues, and as too liberal for voters in swing states, largely failed to gain traction amid his focus on re-litigating old grievances.

Instead, Harris used the opportunity to explicitly appeal to the moderate voters and anti-Trump Republicans who helped deliver the White House to Biden in 2020. It’s a group Harris has struggled to win by the same margin and one that could, once again, play a decisive role in November.

As the governors, senators, activists and political gadflies spun his performance in the post-debate spin room, a surprise guest suddenly appeared and was swarmed by more than 100 journalists.

It was Donald Trump. Presidential candidates rarely — if ever — spin their own performances in the minutes after exiting the stage. But Trump couldn’t let it go.

“It was,” he said, “my best debate ever.”

New York Times News Service