Opinion Frank Bruni Donald Trump Made a Raving, Rambling Fool of Himself in That Debate

 Opinion

Frank Bruni

Donald Trump Made a Raving, Rambling Fool of Himself in That Debate

Sept. 11, 2024, 1:33 a.m. ET

A black-and-white photograph of Donald Trump in the spin room after the debate.

President Trump in the spin room after the debate.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

In Kamala Harris’s big general-election debate four years ago, she faced off against an opponent with a fly on his head.

In her immeasurably bigger debate on Tuesday night, she confronted an opponent with bats inside his.

And out they came, flapping and screeching, when he brought up cats and dogs.

He was talking about what he couldn’t stop talking about — the millions of migrants who, he insisted, were depraved criminals being dumped on us by cackling foreign leaders — and in his indiscriminate zest to describe an American hellscape, he repeated debunked stories that in Springfield, Ohio, these desperate newcomers were noshing on Fido and Whiskers.

“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,” he sputtered, red-faced. Harris didn’t even have to correct him, because David Muir, one of the two ABC News anchors moderating the debate, got there first and did it for her.

Some dark fantasies need immediate dispelling. And some deranged fantasists need to be tugged back into reality before they wander so far from it that there’s no returning.

Trump made a raving, rambling fool of himself on Tuesday night, and while Harris by no means did everything right, she had the good sense to alternately call him out on that and simply watch him unravel. She had the discipline to shake her head sadly and smile dismissively when he made laughably false accusations against her. She had the skill — here, on full display, was the prosecutor in her — to needle him into maximal seething.

He looked livid.

She looked amused.

He scowled.

She smiled.

After a slightly rocky start, she projected confidence.

After a somewhat confident start, he staggered down the rockiest of roads.

And all that predebate chatter about his being a foot taller than she is and how that might visually diminish her? Most of the televised debate was a split screen of their two faces, and it was Trump who ended up looking small.

He spent most of the 90 minutes on the defensive, and while both of them kept repeating their favorite put-downs of the other and boasts about themselves, Trump’s vocabulary disintegrated entirely by night’s end. He was a broken record with lyrics as redundant as they were incoherent.

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Will that performance hurt him on Nov. 5? Impossible to say, because at this point the battiness is old hat. But he was a particularly unattractive version of his titanically arrogant, spectacularly dishonest and shockingly ill-informed self, claiming that Democrats were slaughtering newborns, that Harris was a Marxist, that he’d championed the Affordable Care Act, that the Jan. 6 rioters were veritable peaceniks and that as soon as he turns his gilded hand to the war between Russia and Ukraine — abracadabra! — it will magically end.

Maybe such a florid exhibition of his delusions before an enormous television audience this close to Election Day really will make a difference, especially because Harris successfully presented herself as a stark contrast to him. I don’t mean all those “turn the page,” no-going-back lines from her stump speech, which sounded as canned as they were. I don’t mean her honeyed calls to optimism and patriotism.

I mean her demeanor — steady, rational, reasonable — and the fact that when she talked about Ukraine, China and energy, she sounded much better educated than he did. She was more fully and fluently versed in his record than he was in hers, and that enabled her to make a methodical, compelling case about his lawlessness, untrustworthiness on abortion rights and adoration of autocrats the world over.

“They can manipulate you with flattery and favors,” she said, staring at him. “And that is why so many military leaders who you have worked with have told me you are a disgrace.”

Boom! She was that blunt at times, and the measure of contempt in her voice was just right — not as much as he deserved, not so little that it dulled her point. And she’d done her homework. He never does his. It’s beneath him: Buckling down to homework suggests that he’s not already perfect — a word he, of course, used to describe himself on Tuesday night — as is.

In fact, one of the ways her debate performance definitely helped her was in exposing Trump’s incessant denigration of her intelligence as the reflexive nastiness and trash talk it is. He got the failing grade on Tuesday night. She indisputably passed.

But while she was brilliant when discussing the damage done by what she shrewdly termed the “Trump abortion bans,” she was evasive when asked whether she supported any abortion restrictions. She was evasive, period, routinely answering questions by not answering them and pivoting to statements of principle, pitches for her policy proposals or indictments of Trump.

At one point she promised that she’d clearly explain inconsistencies in her positions over time on fracking and on the criminalization of unauthorized border crossings. She didn’t.

And while I don’t think that will be the focus of the first phase of commentary about the debate, I guarantee it will linger and fester. An explanation of her journey from statements she made in 2019 and 2020 to statements she makes now is unfinished business. The sooner she attends to it, the better her chances of victory, and her victory is imperative. Trump just reminded us why.

And when will she do what she also clearly must and establish more separation between her and President Biden? She had several opportunities on Tuesday night, and while she made a joke by responding to one of Trump’s many rants about the president by telling him that “you’re not running against Joe Biden,” she put no flesh on those bones. She’s too afraid of dishonoring him.

But the best and most meaningful way to honor Biden is by doing whatever it takes to beat Trump. Biden has always said that he jumped into the 2020 presidential race to wrest the reins of the country from Trump, an unendurable threat to it. And Biden’s exit from the 2024 race would be validated — and his long delay in surrendering to that necessity forgiven — if Harris kept Trump away from the White House. This is no time for delicacy. The stakes forbid it.

And Trump can be beaten. That was the clearest takeaway on Tuesday night.

Insufficiently prepared and demonstrably perturbed, he was reduced to insults and catcalls: Biden was a beach bum. Harris shirked important matters of state for a sorority reunion. And she had no real plan for the economy.

“It’s, like, four sentences,” Trump groused. “Run, Spot, run.”

Um, that’s three words. And isn’t Spot running so he doesn’t end up as charcuterie?

Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter.  Instagram  Threads  @FrankBruni • Facebook

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