Debate Disaster: Trump’s Seething, Unhinged, Incoherent Onstage Meltdown

In their first and maybe last face-to-face encounter, Vice President Kamala Harris successfully got under Donald Trump’s skin early in their debate on Tuesday night, putting him into angry rally speech mode where he spent the rest of the encounter shouting his usual lies and insults.

He claimed his top officials, from chief of staff John Kelly to defence secretary Mark Esper to joint chiefs of staff chair Mark Milley were all terrible people. “So when somebody does a bad job, and you take a guy like Esper, he was no good, I fired him.”

He claimed no one ever left his campaign rallies early: “People don’t leave my rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

He brought up a debunked conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town were eating peoples’ pets: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats!”

Eventually he even claimed that President Joe Biden disliked Harris because she was now the nominee instead of him: “I’ll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can’t stand her.”

Trump began the debate relatively calm, as he was during most of his debate against Biden in June, but lost that composure within 15 minutes of the start. He shook his head when she spoke, but seemed unwilling to look her way. He badgered the moderators into turning his microphone back on as they would try to move to the next question.

As the night progressed, he seemed to spiral further, allowing himself to be drawn off-topic, wandering off onto unrelated tangents – praise for Hungary’s autocratic ruler Viktor Orban, for example ― and lashing out with personal attacks.

“She’s a Marxist,” he claimed. “Her father’s a Marxist professor and he taught her well.”

From there, Trump’s lies came fast and at high volume. He falsely claimed that foreign countries pay U.S. tariffs, when in reality American importers and consumers do. He falsely claimed that some states allow parents to murder newborn babies if they decide they don’t want them. He repeated a frequent claim ― without any evidence ― that crime rates are falling all over the world because they are sending their criminals to the United States.

When the ABC News moderators asked about his coup attempt to remain in office despite losing the 2020 election and his failure to end the violence at the Capitol he himself had unleashed, Trump again said he had done nothing wrong and repeated his lies that the election had been stolen from him.

On this issue, as in many others, Harris pointed out that he was lying and urged Americans not to let him back into office. “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people,” she said. “So let’s be clear about that, and 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 election.”

When Trump claimed that Harris would ban fracking in Pennsylvania and confiscate people’s guns, Harris responded more bluntly: “Stop with the continuous lying with this stuff.”

The debate is the latest major hurdle for Harris to clear in her unprecedented, 100-day sprint since she transitioned from a vice president seeking reelection to the top-of-the-ticket nominee.

Biden, dogged by voters’ concern about his age, faced Trump in the first general election debate of the 2024 general election on June 27. But after turning in a disastrous performance, Biden dropped out less than a month later. He almost immediately endorsed Harris to succeed him as the presumptive Democratic nominee, which helped her lock down the necessary delegates within days.

Harris then staged what observers described as a successful convention capped with a well-received acceptance speech. Only about 30 million Americans watched that speech, though, which may be far fewer than the number who tuned in Tuesday.

Tuesday’s face-off could also be the final presidential debate of this election. While Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz and his Republican counterpart J.D. Vance have a debate scheduled for early next month, there are no current plans for another Harris-Trump encounter.

After Harris took over for Biden as the nominee, Trump had been clamouring for a series of debates with her, starting off with one hosted by Fox News. Harris declined and insisted that Trump honour his commitment to attending a September 10 debate he’d scheduled when Biden was still his opponent, and Trump eventually agreed.

Trump, who has essentially been running to return to the White House for three years, has good reason to want his old job back. If he loses the election, he may be headed for prison from one or more of the criminal prosecutions against him. The sentencing in the New York state case, in which he has already been convicted of felonies, could happen as early as late November, although he likely would not be forced to begin any prison term he receives until after his appeals are decided.

Trump is also facing a federal prosecution for his actions leading up to and on his January 6, 2021 coup attempt. That trial could start next year, as could one in Georgia based on state charges over Trump’s attempt to overturn his election loss there.

A second federal prosecution, based on his refusal to turn over secret documents he took with him to his South Florida country club, was dismissed by the trial judge, but could be reinstated by an appeals court, which currently has the case.

If Trump wins, however, he could order his attorney general to dismiss all the federal charges against him and would likely be able to postpone the state prosecutions until after he has left office.