Kamala Harris commanded the first debate against Donald J. Trump, flashing her prosecutorial skills to leverage every chance to get under the former president’s skin in a 90-minute clash of visions and style.

They disagreed fiercely on abortion and the economy, immigration and the war in Ukraine. But throughout the night, Trump found himself in a defensive crouch, relitigating his record rather than picking apart hers.

The contrast was apparent even on mute. She smiled. He glowered. He spoke more, but she dictated the terms of the evening. Here are takeaways from a debate that was a remarkable reversal from June:

Laying traps

Harris strode across the room to deliver the first handshake in a presidential debate since 2016. It was the first time she had met Trump in person, and she was intent on introducing herself: “Kamala Harris,” she said, as he took her hand. “Have fun,” he instructed her.

She sure appeared to. He did not.

Harris dominated the proceedings from nearly the start. She laid bait. He took it. It began with her needling Trump that his bored supporters had been leaving his rallies. It continued with her comment that he had inherited riches from his father. And on it went as she invoked his Republican critics, including those who served in his administration.

On the back foot, Trump repeatedly spun down rhetorical cul-de-sacs.

At one point, Harris invited viewers to watch a Trump rally for a more unfiltered view of the former President. “You will not hear him talk about your needs,” she said.

He responded not by talking about voter needs but about crowd numbers.

“People don’t leave my rallies,” he pushed back.

Defence record

Within the first five minutes, Harris looked into the camera and told viewers what to expect from Trump: “The same old, tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling”.

He indeed talked less about what he would do in a second term and spent more time trying to clarify his record. He defended his handling of the pandemic, his decision to fire his top military advisers, and even his seven-year-old response to the deadly far-Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Trump fumbled a moment where he had hoped to go on offence: the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal. Instead, he found himself defending his decision to invite the Taliban to Camp David.

Harris forced Trump to defend his closeness to authoritarians like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and his past courtship of Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, “a dictator who would eat you for lunch”, she said. She even goaded him by turning an epithet he calls her — “weak” — towards him on national security.

He called her “weak” back.

Harris looked straight into the camera as she pitched herself as the candidate of the future and forced him to defend the violence on January 6, 2021. “We don’t have to go back,” she said. “Let’s not go back.”

Abortion advantage

Abortion was one of the biggest missed opportunities for President Biden in his first debate. It was one of Harris’s strongest moments.

Trump is keenly aware of his vulnerability on abortion, having appointed the Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Yet on Tuesday he danced around the issue of potentially vetoing a national ban. “As far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favour of abortion ban,” he said.

He even rebutted his own vice-presidential pick, Senator J.D. Vance, who has previously expressed openness to a national ban. “I didn’t discuss it with JD,” Trump said.

Trump, 78, sounded his age as he tried to articulate his position on in vitro fertilisation: “I have been a leader on fertilisation,” he declared.

Harris, 59, had laced into Trump. She called his position on abortion “insulting to the women of America” and said she had met women across the country whose health and lives had been endangered by abortion restrictions.

A Harris campaign official said the exchange on abortion, delivered in the first half-hour with viewership at its highest, was one of the night’s best in her team’s testing of voters in swing states.

New York Times News Service