Strikes Moscow

Ukraine strikes Moscow in biggest drone attack to date

Story by Reuters

Ukraine struck the Moscow region on Tuesday in its biggest drone attack so far on the Russian capital, killing at least one woman, wrecking dozens of homes and forcing around 50 flights to be diverted from airports around Moscow.

Russia, the world’s biggest nuclear power, said it destroyed at least 20 Ukrainian attack drones as they swarmed over the Moscow region, which has a population of more than 21 million, and 124 more over eight other regions.

At least one person was killed near Moscow, Russian authorities said. Three of Moscow’s four airports were closed for more than six hours and almost 50 flights were diverted.

Kyiv said Russia, which sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine in February 2022, had attacked it overnight with 46 drones, of which 38 were destroyed.

The drone attacks on Russia damaged at high-rise apartment buildings in the Ramenskoye district of the Moscow region, setting flats on fire, residents told Reuters.

A 46-year-old woman was killed and three people were wounded in Ramenskoye, Moscow regional governor Andrei Vorobyov said.

Residents said they awoke to blasts and fire.

“I looked at the window and saw a ball of fire,” Alexander Li, a resident of the district told Reuters. “The window got blown out by the shockwave.”

Georgy, a resident who declined to give his surname, said he heard a drone buzzing outside his building in the early hours.

“I drew back the curtain and it hit the building right before my eyes, I saw it all,” he said. “I took my family and we ran outside.”

The Ramenskoye district, some 50 km (31 miles) southeast of the Kremlin, has a population of around quarter a million of people, according to official data.

More than 70 drones were also downed over Russia’s Bryansk region and tens more over other regions, Russia’s defense ministry said. There was no damage or casualties reported there.

Drone war

As Russia advances in eastern Ukraine, Kyiv has taken the war to Russia with a cross-border attack in Russia’s western Kursk region that began on Aug. 6 and by carrying out increasingly large drone attacks deep into Russian territory.

The war has largely been a grinding artillery and drone war along the 1,000 km (620 mile) heavily fortified front line in southern and eastern Ukraine involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

Moscow and Kyiv have both sought to buy and develop new drones, deploy them in innovative ways, and seek new ways to destroy them - from shotguns to advanced electronic jamming systems.

Both sides have turned cheap commercial drones into deadly weapons while ramping up their own production and assembly to attack targets including tanks, energy infrastructure such as refineries and airfields.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has sought to insulate Moscow from the grinding rigors of the war, says the Ukrainian drone attacks are “terrorism” as they target civilian infrastructure - and has vowed a response.

Moscow and other big Russian cities have largely been insulated from the war.

Russia has hit Ukraine with thousands of missiles and drones in the last two-and-a-half years, killing thousands of civilians, wrecking much of the country’s energy system and damaging commercial and residential properties across the country.

Ukraine says it has a right to strike back deep into Russia, though Kyiv’s Western backers have said they do not want a direct confrontation between Russia and the U.S.-led NATO military alliance.

There was no immediate comment from Ukraine about Tuesday’s attacks. Both sides deny targeting civilians.

Tuesday’s attack follow drone attacks Ukraine launched in early September targeting chiefly Russia’s energy and power facilities.

Authorities of the Tula region, which neighbors the Moscow region to its north, said drone wreckage fell onto a fuel and energy facility but the “technological process” of the facility was not affected.

Takeaways

Takeaways from the ABC presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris

By Eric Bradner, Arit John, Daniel Strauss, Betsy Klein and Gregory Krieg

Kamala Harris baited Donald Trump for nearly all of the 1 hour and 45 minutes of their first and potentially only debate on Tuesday night – and Trump took every bit of it.

The vice president had prepared extensively for their debate, and peppered nearly every answer with a comment designed to enrage the former president. She told Trump that world leaders were laughing at him, and military leaders called him a “disgrace.” She called Trump “weak” and “wrong.” She said Trump was fired by 81 million voters – the number that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.

“Clearly, he’s having a very difficult time processing that,” she said.

Trump was often out of control. He loudly and repeatedly insisted that a whole host of falsehoods were true. The former president repeated lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. He parroted a conspiracy theory about immigrants eating pets, and lied about Democrats supporting abortions after babies are born – which is murder, and illegal everywhere.

He painted a dire picture of the United States, reminiscent of the “American carnage” he’d warned of when he was inaugurated in 2017.

“We have a nation that is dying,” Trump said Tuesday night.

As the debate ended, Harris got another boost: Musician and pop culture icon Taylor Swift posted on Instagram that she was backing the Democratic ticket. She signed her post “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady” — a reference to controversial comments by Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, that have alienated many women.

Here are some quick takeaways from the first portion of the debate:

A turning point when Harris jabs Trump over the size of his rally crowds

Harris came onstage with a clear plan: Throw Trump off his game.

It was, by any measure, a dramatic success. When the vice president mentioned Trump’s criminal conviction and outstanding legal issues, he bit. When she called him out for sinking a bipartisan immigration bill, he bit harder. And when Harris suggested Trump’s rallies were boring, he nearly choked on the bait.

Rather than engage on the issues raised by the moderators, including a few that Trump considers some of his political strengths, the former president went on at length about the entertainment value of his rallies, claims the Biden administration was legally targeting him and, in a long, bizarre spell, insisted – against all available evidence, that migrants were eating Americans’ pets.

“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,” Trump said, after Harris criticized him for tanking the immigration bill.

Harris looked on as though she was puzzled, but rarely returned to the claims, apparently content to allow Trump go off.

Trump seemed especially aggrieved by the vice president’s aside about his campaign events. Even after Muir sought to redirect the debate to immigration – again, one of Trump’s preferred topics – the former president refused to let it go.

“First, let me respond as to the rallies,” Trump said, mocking Harris’ crowds before returning to his own. “People don’t leave my rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

The first hour of the debate then ended much like it began – with Trump off on a long, narrowcast tangent about the 2020 election, which he claimed, falsely once again, was stolen from him.

Trump traffics in conspiracy theories

Despite signals from even his running mate, Trump did not refrain from repeating the conspiracy theory du jour during the debate.

The former president brought up the unfounded conspiracy theory that migrants from Haiti living in Springfield, Ohio, are eating people’s cats and dogs.

He said at one point “in Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of people who live there.”

When ABC News moderator David Muir pointed out that city officials denied any evidence that migrants in Springfield were actually eating pets, Trump doubled down, saying “the people on television” were saying it. When pressed, Trump just said, “We’ll find out.”

When the debate moved to crime, Trump claimed that crime was up in the United States contrary to the rest of the world. There too Muir pointed out that, according to FBI data, crime had actually declined in the past few years.

Trump, again, deferred to a different conspiracy theory that the FBI is deeply corrupt and issuing “defrauding statements.” He argued “it was a fraud.”

Later in the debate, Trump argued that US elections are “a mess” and claimed that Democrats are trying to get undocumented immigrants to vote in elections.

Fierce argument over abortion, a key issue for both candidates

Few moments highlighted the difference between Biden’s June debate performance and Harris’ on Tuesday as much as the abortion debate.

The vice president, who has long been one the administration’s strongest surrogates on reproductive rights, was able to respond to the former president’s defense of his abortion policy in a way Biden was not.

The former president, who appointed three of the Supreme Court judges who overturned federal abortion protections, has sought to moderate his stance on the issue by criticizing six-week abortion bans and reiterating his support for exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother. But he has also defended the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

“Now it’s not tied up in the federal government,” Trump said. “I did a great service in doing it. It took courage to do it.”

Trump repeated several of the arguments he made about abortion during his June debate with Biden. He argued that “everyone” wanted the issue returned to the states, despite widespread resistance from Democrats and some independents. He argued inaccurately that a former governor of Virginia said that babies should be executed – a reference to comments former Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam, a doctor, made about care for births after nonviable pregnancies.

And Trump repeated the false claim that some states allow abortions to be performed after a baby has been born, which drew a fact check from ABC News’ Linsey Davis.

“There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Davis said.

Harris responded by highlighting cases where women have been unable to get abortions after being victims of rape or struggled to get miscarriage care.

“You want to talk about this is what people wanted?” Harris said. “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot – she didn’t want that.”

Vice president casts Trump as out for himself

Seeking to introduce herself to voters, Harris set the tone early, drawing contrast with Trump by framing herself as an advocate for middle-class Americans – and framing her opponent as self-absorbed.

“Donald Trump has no plan for you,” Harris said in response to a question on the economy, looking into the camera in a direct appeal to voters.

Leaning into her personal biography as she cast herself as a “middle class kid,” Harris outlined an economic vision including tax cuts for families and tax deductions for small businesses, while Trump, she said, will “do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations.”

Trump, Harris continued, “actually has no plan for you, because he is more interested in defending himself than he is in looking out for you.”

Her campaign has argued in its ads and talking points that Trump is a candidate looking out for himself, and Harris took that message to the debate stage Tuesday.

“I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. And I’ll tell you: I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first,” she said.

A handshake sets the tone

When Harris and Trump walked onto stage in Philadelphia, it was the first time they’d met in person. Trump, after all, skipped Biden’s inauguration.

Harris set the tone by walking across the six feet separating her podium from Trump’s and reaching out for a handshake. She introduced herself and said, “Let’s have a good debate.”

“Nice to see you,” Trump responded.

It was the first handshake in a presidential debate since Trump and Hillary Clinton squared off in 2016. Trump famously loomed uncomfortably close to Clinton during their town hall-style debate.

Trump generally looked forward as Harris spoke, while the vice president communicated through facial expressions. She laughed at some Trump comments, smirked at others, shook her head at some and at times appeared bemused.

When Trump repeated a debunked myth about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Harris laughed mockingly while shrugging and pointing at Trump.

Trump’s comments about Harris’ race, past controversies under the microscope

When Trump was asked about his comment last month falsely claiming Harris only recently started to identify as Black, the former president defended his remarks as something he’d read somewhere.

“I couldn’t care less,” Trump said. “Whatever she wants to be is OK with me.”

In the weeks since those comments, the vice president has avoided engaging in that personal attack beyond calling it the “same old tired playbook.”

At the Philadelphia event, however, Harris responded to Trump’s attacks on her identity a meaningful way. But instead of defending her indisputable racial identity, the vice president laid out the former president’s history of past racial discrimination and racist behavior.

That history includes investigations of housing discrimination, calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five – young teenagers of color falsely accused and convicted of raping and assaulting a woman in the New York park – and fueling the false birther allegation that former President Barack Obama was not born in the United states.

“And I think the American people want better than that. Want better than this,” Harris said. “We see in each other a friend. We see in each other a neighbor. We don’t want a leader who is constantly trying to have Americans point their fingers at each other.”

Trump pushed back, arguing that others, such as former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, also supported the case against the Central Park Five. He called the Biden-Harris administration divisive and argued that the vice president’s examples were outdated.

“This is a person that has to stretch back years – 40, 50 years ago – because there’s nothing now,” he said.

Trump and Harris dig their heels in on major global flashpoints

If anyone on stage Tuesday has a clear, point-by-point plan for ending the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, they did not share it with the viewers at home.

Asked how she would secure peace in Gaza, Harris first recalled the horrors of Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks inside Israel. She offered some mild criticism of Israel’s response, an ongoing bombardment that’s killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, before pivoting to her support for a two-state solution, Israel’s right to defend itself and a commitment to rebuilding Gaza.

“We need a ceasefire deal and we need the hostages out,” Harris declared. Biden and others recently conceded such an agreement is a long way off.

Trump offered even fewer details.

“She hates Israel,” he said of Harris, adding that she also hates “Arabs.”

Trump has occasionally sought to inflame anger among Arab Americans over Biden’s handling of the conflict. But on Tuesday he quickly abandoned the tactic, instead chiding Harris for slighting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a recent visit to Capitol Hill – she did, in fact, meet with him; she did not attend his speech to Congress – and declaring again that none of it “would have never happened” if he were still in the White House.

Ditto for the Russian war in Ukraine, per the former president, who – after stopping to note that he “know(s) Putin very well – said “Russia would have never ever … have gone into Ukraine” on his watch.

“I’ll get it done before even becoming president,” Trump added, claiming his election would reset the geopolitical state of play and, almost by definition, herald a deal.

Harris, for her part, used the Russia-Ukraine talk to attack Trump over his well-documented fondness for international strongmen and despots.

“It is well-known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again,” Harris said, “because it is so clear they can manipulate you with flatter and favors.”

Trump fought back there, recalling his push to get NATO member nations to pay more into the alliance and slamming Harris for Biden’s refusal to do the same, before saying the vice president “does not have the courage to ask.”

Harris replied that she believed Trump might, in fact, put a quick end to the war – by capitulating to Putin. And in so doing, she added, endangering Poland on Ukraine’s western border.  (Pennsylvania has a large Polish-American population, Harris noted.)

Trump repeatedly brought up the administration’s handling of the US’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, arguing it showed weakness in the White House and that Biden did not fire enough people in response to it. Harris said she agreed with Biden’s decision to pull US troops out of Afghanistan in 2021, asserting that Trump “negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine” on the matter during his time as president.

Trump – having been accused repeatedly of going starry-eyed for strongmen – quoted the one running Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

“Orban said it, he said, ‘The most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president,’” Trump said.

Back-handed...

Germany hammers Trump over debate barbs about Berlin’s energy transition

“P.S. We also don’t eat cats and dogs,” Berlin’s foreign ministry taunts Republican presidential candidate.

By Seb Starcevic, Gabriel Gavin and Jürgen Klöckner

Germany’s foreign ministry hit back Wednesday at former U.S. President Donald Trump after he criticized the country’s energy policy at the presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump slammed Germany in his closing remarks, claiming Berlin regretted its decision to transition to renewable energy.

“You believe in things like we’re not going to frack, we’re not going to take fossil fuel, we’re not going to do things that are going to be strong, whether you like it or not,” he said, addressing Harris.

“Germany tried that, and within one year, they were back to building normal energy plants,” he added.

But the German foreign ministry took umbrage at that, blasting Trump in an unusually blunt statement on social media.

“Like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully operational, with more than 50 percent renewables,” the ministry wrote. “And we are shutting down — not building — coal and nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest.”

"Like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully operational, with more than 50% renewables. And we are shutting down – not building – coal & nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest. PS: We also don’t eat cats and dogs. #Debate2024 pic.twitter.com/PiDO98Vxfo

— GermanForeignOffice (@GermanyDiplo) September 11, 2024"

“PS: We also don’t eat cats and dogs. #Debate2024,” the statement added, referring to Trump repeating a widely debunked claim that undocumented immigrants were eating people’s pets in Ohio.

Germany, which had deepened its reliance on cheap Russian oil and gas for decades, faced a major energy crisis at the beginning of the Kremlin's war on Ukraine and was forced to keep several coal-fired power plants online for longer than planned, while restarting others.

Berlin has also faced criticism over its controversial decision to shutter nuclear reactors after Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster, a move which was pushed by then-Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative-liberal coalition.

Opponents, including other governing parties, were quick to warn that the decision would lead to more fossil fuels being burned for energy, and that German nuclear power plants were unlikely to face the threat of a tsunami.

Initially, Germany burned almost 10 percent more coal to make up for the shortfall in electricity production, with rising prices for natural gas in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine making it a cheap alternative. But that change has since been reversed and use of coal-fired power plants in Germany last year dropped to the lowest level in decades.

While it’s not clear what Trump means by a “normal power plant,” no new coal-fired plants are being built in Germany — although the government has abandoned its original 2030 deadline for phasing out coal in order to shore up its energy supplies.

However, in a decision decried by environmental activists, Berlin in February signed off on a plan to build four major new natural gas plants that it said were needed to supplement its renewable energy supplies.

Poor debate performance....

Republicans have an answer for Trump’s poor debate performance

The pile-on started before the debate was even over.

By Emily Ngo, Kimberly Leonard, Natalie Allison, Jessica Piper and Holly Otterbein

Republicans know Donald Trump didn’t win Tuesday’s debate. And they know who to blame: the media.

“It was three-on-one. They continued to engage in so-called fact-checking of Donald Trump. They never did that to Kamala Harris,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told reporters.

“You have two moderators there who acted as agents of the Harris campaign,” said David Bossie, a longtime Trump adviser and Republican National Committee member from Maryland.

“It was a little outrageous that they would fact-check only one candidate on the fly,” said Tim Murtaugh, who was the communications director for Trump’s 2020 campaign.

Trump had been setting the stage for weeks, arguing that the debate would be biased against him. Soon after the debate began, the complaints began rolling in — on social media, at watch parties across the nation — as if on cue: If anyone thought Trump was having a bad debate, it’s because of the media.

The posture from Trump’s backers on Tuesday stood in contrast to the June debate against President Joe Biden on CNN, which didn’t have any fact checking and left Trump saying he was treated “very fairly.”

Just 40 minutes after Tuesday’s debate ended, Trump himself picked up the charge that he was treated unfairly, an allegation on brand with his long-running critique of the news media as biased.

“I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!” the GOP nominee for president posted on Truth Social.

Trump surrogates and staff in the post-debate spin room echoed the argument.

During the course of the 90-minute debate, ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis repeatedly sought to set the candidates — and the viewing public — straight on Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations. Those false claims included the viral accusation that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, kill and eat pets, the charge that Democratic states allow the killing of infants after birth and Trump’s statement that crime in the country is “through the roof.”

Harris’ claims were less far-fetched, and — to Republicans’ displeasure — the moderators didn’t similarly correct her. However, Davis did confront Harris over her flip-flopping on key issues, including fracking and buyback programs for assault weapons. She also challenged her on why the Biden-Harris administration waited until six months before the election to issue executive actions on the border.

To Republicans watching, the lopsided fact-checking undermined the legitimacy of the debate and reinforced long-standing beliefs about mainstream media bias against conservatives — and Trump in particular.

“They made themselves the story,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) said in the spin room. He criticized the moderators for not fact-checking Harris’ comments on Charlottesville, which he said were taken out of context. He also said Trump’s comments that his loss would result in a “bloodbath,” were intended to be about energy policy and not the election.

Trump had repeatedly sought to manage expectations about the debate. Just last week, he insisted at a Fox News town hall that Harris would receive questions in advance, though there was no evidence to back up his claim. The moderators squashed the speculation at the start of Tuesday’s debate by saying neither nominee had seen questions ahead of time.

Some journalists covering the news media industry commended Davis’ and Muir’s performance, and Republican pollster Frank Luntz, a Trump critic, posted a kudos on X to the moderators for “covering a wider range of topics than most debates.”

A spokesperson for ABC News did not comment about Trump’s attacks on their credibility.

At debate watch parties in New York and Florida, Republicans viewed the faceoff as unfairly weighted.

“I think, in general, she was going to have a home field advantage,” said Gavin Wax, president of the New York Young Republican Club, which hosted a watch party. “They definitely asked her a few questions on some policy changes over the years, but I didn’t really see any fact checks on her, and I think they were definitely necessary.”

At points throughout the night, the party’s attendees booed the moderators’ pushback on Trump’s claims.

In Coral Gables, Florida, Katherine Amholt, a board member for Women’s Republican Club of Miami Federated, which hosted a watch party, pointed to opportunities she saw for the moderators to fact-check Harris tying Project 2025 to Trump — who didn’t write the plan, though many members of his former administration did. (Trump during the debate again disavowed any connection to the Heritage Foundation effort.)

Kevin Cooper, vice chair of the Miami-Dade GOP, said he wished the moderators had asked Trump more about his vision for the country rather than heated topics like Jan. 6 and the criminal indictments.

“It’s more about a review of grievances than it is about the future of our country, and that’s really the moderator’s fault,” he said. “Few questions started with, ‘What would you do?’”

Probably won’t happen

Trump insists he won debate, says another ‘probably won’t happen’

While Kamala Harris’ campaign immediately called for a second debate — and Fox News offered to host it — the former president all but ruled it out.

By Irie Sentner

Kamala Harris’ campaign left Philadelphia on Tuesday night eager for another showdown against Donald Trump. The former president, once eager to schedule a second debate, seemed not so sure.

Trump, whose debate performance was widely panned as chaotic and peppered with falsehoods, insisted Wednesday morning that he’d been the victor against Harris. Another debate, Trump suggested, would hand the vice president another bite at the apple.

“The first thing they did is ask for a debate because when a fighter loses, he says ‘I want a rematch,’” Trump said Wednesday morning on “Fox & Friends.” Pushed on whether he would agree to another debate, the former president said: “I’d be less inclined to because we had a great night, we won the debate, we had a terrible network.”

Trump bashed ABC News, which hosted the debate, as “the most dishonest news organization” and called Tuesday’s debate — during which moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis repeatedly fact-checked Trump — “three to one” and “a rigged deal.” Still, he characterized his performance as “one of my better debates, maybe my best debate.”

That Harris and Trump would appear on stage at all was for a time an open question amid squabbling over when, where and how they would meet — for the first time — on the debate stage. The former president had called for multiple debates, including one on Fox News on Sept. 4 — an offer Harris rebuffed. Trump then threatened to drop out of the ABC News debate, then the campaigns squabbled over the rules, the main snag being whether each candidate’s microphone would be muted while the other spoke.

Harris, whose team had fought for unmuted mics but ultimately relented, still appeared to try to interrupt Trump even with her volume turned down. At one point, Trump shut her down, saying “I’m talking now … does that sound familiar?” — a reference to Harris’ 2020 debate with Mike Pence when she cut off a Pence interruption by saying “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.”

“She wanted a moment like she did with Mike Pence,” Trump said Wednesday, “but I actually got that moment too, I won that too because she was talking while I was speaking quite a bit actually.”

Late Tuesday, Harris’ campaign released a statement calling for a second debate and Fox News offered to host one moderated by Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier “while early in-person voting gets underway in multiple battleground states,” on Oct. 9 in Arizona, Oct. 15 in Georgia or Oct. 16 in North Carolina.

“Seems like the American people would love another opportunity to see these candidates. It’s been such a short window and they deserve as many opportunities as possible,” MacCallum said during the network’s post-debate coverage. “We certainly hope they will take us up on that.”

But Trump on Wednesday appeared to reject the network’s offer, saying “I wouldn’t want to have Martha and Brett.” Although he said he “probably” wouldn’t agree to any more debates, he said he would consider right-wing pundits Sean Hannity, Jesse Watters and Laura Ingraham — Fox News opinion hosts who are sympathetic to the former president.

“I didn’t think Martha and Brett were good last night,” he added, as the “Fox & Friends” hosts scrambled to steer the conversation elsewhere.

Harris campaign spokesperson Quentin Fulks affirmed Wednesday on CNN that Harris “is open to a debate in October.”

“But if I were Donald Trump,” he said, “I would not want to debate Kamala Harris.”

Worst Possible Way

It Was Donald Trump’s Night — in the Worst Possible Way

It’s clear Kamala Harris won the faceoff. Here’s what to look for next.

By Jeff Greenfield

The pre-debate chatter was almost unanimous: Voters know pretty much everything they need to about Donald Trump, but they’re still wondering about Kamala Harris and her presidential plans. For Democrats who grimaced at recent polls, it’s a potential silver lining — that she still has room to grow as voters hear more from her.

The debate was one of her best opportunities to make her case, so did she?

Fundamentally, there are three key takeaways from the debate. First, Harris did herself a world of good; second, Trump confirmed the most serious doubts of anyone not firmly in his corner. But the third conclusion is yet to be determined: If Trump does not suffer any political damage from this debate, it means he is even more invulnerable to the traditional ebb and flow of politics than we have imagined.

Let’s go through what happened.

Harris knew the points she wanted to hit, and hit them. She did so well enough that the Trump folks might have suspected a hidden teleprompter had been smuggled in. She repeatedly talked about her plans to lower the cost of housing, to give tax relief to new parents, oh and did you hear that she won’t ban fracking and owns a gun?

But perhaps even more impressively, Harris made it Trump’s night — in the worst possible way. The campaign armed Harris with a series of trip wires hoping that Trump would be unable to resist setting them off. Not only did Trump take the bait, he brought a couple of his own, which he tripped over again and again. It was as if Lucy showed up with half a dozen footballs for Charlie Brown to kick, and Charlie himself brought a few more for good measure.

The fact that Trump had more speaking time will not be a source of complaint from the Harris camp; they’d likely have ceded him a lot more minutes.

Harris knew exactly what she was looking for when she taunted Trump about crowds leaving his rallies “out of boredom and exhaustion.” She knew he could not resist claiming that his crowds were bigger, that she had to pay her followers to attend. But even the Harris team could not have expected that Trump would pivot immediately back to the “millions and millions” of undocumented immigrants and claims that they’re “eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!” (As sportscaster Warner Wolf might have said, “You could’ve turned your sets off right there.”

More broadly, Harris anticipated that Trump would resort to “Donald’s Greatest Hits.” She wants to convince the country to turn the page on Trump and as soon as she said that Trump had been “fired by 81 million voters,” she watched Trump dive deep into the rabbit hole of the “stolen 2020 election.” She all but invited Trump to profess a remarkable neutrality between Russia and Ukraine, and then argued that with Trump in power, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv and then staring down Poland — and that there just so happens to be hundreds of thousands of Polish Americans in Pennsylvania.

Even the optics played out in Harris’ favor. She trumped Trump at the outset of the debate by going over to him and shaking hands. She certainly wasn’t afraid of being seen as smaller than Trump.

During the debate, she repeatedly looked over at him while she was assailing everything from his record on race to his global troubles to the refusal of so many of his top aides to support him. Trump looked doggedly ahead — something the occasional two-shots made clear. It was one of a number of key differences between the debate Trump had with President Joe Biden, who often looked listless in the split screen on television.

You’ll be able to gauge how the Trump supporters feel about this debate by their sharp criticism of the moderators for repeatedly fact-checking Trump and not Harris. Some of that imbalance may be due to the imbalance of flat-out lies by the two candidates, but it is true that ABC’s David Muir and Linsey Davis never followed up on the issue of just why Harris has changed her mind on so many key issues.

You’ll really know how bad Republicans think it went if a bunch of senators and House members start reading through the rules on how to replace a candidate after he’s been nominated, like some wanted to do after the Access Hollywood tape emerged in 2016.

But no, Trump isn’t leaving the GOP ticket; his control over the party is complete, and he surely has a strong chance to return to the White House even after a dismal debate.

In the days following the debate, keep an eye on the polls. They don’t mean everything — Election Day is what matters — but we’re about to find out how baked in sentiment really is about Trump, and whether Harris needs to find some other way to win over the few remaining swing voters in a polarized electorate.

Tells

9 Body Language Tells From the Presidential Debate

Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had a lot to say — but their body language said even more.

By Joe Navarro

Three months ago, President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate against former President Donald Trump upended politics and ultimately toppled him from his place as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Tonight, Americans got their first real look at the surprise matchup he left behind, when Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris met for the first time on a debate stage in Philadelphia.

It was a chance for each candidate to outline the shape of this unprecedented race and make their case to the American people. But for me, it was their body language — even more than their words — that really revealed who they are.

For over 50 years, 25 of them with the FBI, I’ve studied the infinitely nuanced language of nonverbal communication. Particularly in politics, words have a way of bending the truth. But the messages we communicate with our bodies — a raised eyebrow, pursed lips, a too-tight smile — speak with an authenticity rarely found in a stump speech. Here’s what I noticed on the debate stage tonight:

Harris Got Her Handshake

Trump and Biden did not shake hands at the beginning of their debate, and some pundits expected the candidates would again decline to shake hands tonight. But Harris wouldn’t let Trump go without greeting him with a handshake. Trump seemed reluctant, taking his position behind his podium. But Harris marched across the stage, extended her hand and introduced herself. A handshake is more than just a greeting: It communicates politeness, civility, a basic level of respect both to the other person and, in the case of a debate, to the American people. When Harris initiated the handshake, she embodied her message of unity over divisiveness, and demonstrated that she wasn’t afraid to take Trump on. It took him off guard. As she walked back to her side of the stage, she had a big grin on her face. She got what she wanted, and she knew it.

Harris Wore Her Tension in Her Neck

Harris took the first question, and you could see a lot of tension in her throat — hard swallows, tense neck muscles, a lot of motion in the laryngeal thyroid cartilage. From a nonverbal standpoint, that kind of nervous tension detracts from the appearance of confidence. It was subtle, but undeniable to the trained eye, and it took longer than one would expect for that tension to dissipate. Trump by comparison seemed more poised, less nervous in the beginning, though Harris recovered as the debate went on.

Trump Would Not Look Her in the Eye

You would be hard pressed to find a time when Trump looked at Harris directly. When she spoke, he stared straight ahead, as if looking at her was his kryptonite. Good leadership requires us to confront our opponent head on. Trump’s refusal to lock eyes over 90-some minutes could be read in many ways: as a form of indifference, of disrespect, or even fear that looking at her would somehow put him on tilt.

In contrast, Harris looked right at Trump when he spoke. When she addressed him, she gestured toward him, even when he wouldn’t meet her gaze. She demonstrated that she had no fear of locking eyes with him, of reaching out to him, of challenging him directly.

Harris’ Chin Showed Her Disbelief

When Trump accused Harris of being a “Marxist” because of her father’s academic career (he has been described as a “Marxist scholar”) she looked at him with her hand posed on her chin — a look of absolute incredulity. It was a deliberately eye-catching way to silently say, “I cannot even believe what you’re saying.” This was her go-to behavior several times when Trump said something that she perceived as outrageous. I cannot remember another presidential debate in 50 years where we have seen that behavior, and it says something about Harris and her willingness to convey her sentiments directly and overtly, without fear, looking at Trump with laser-like focus.

Trump’s Uncomfortable Tell: Pursed Lips

Trump often displays an idiosyncratic behavior that makes it abundantly clear when he hears something he doesn’t like: He purses his lips forward, like a smooch. This behavior is commonly associated with dislike or disagreement, and it has become ubiquitous for Trump. We saw it when he was confronted with how many of his former employees — including his former chief of staff — no longer support him.

Harris Openly Laughed at Him

Sometimes something is so outrageous that it deserves no immediate answer other than laughter. When Trump claimed without evidence that immigrants are eating people’s pets, Harris openly laughed at him — a stark contrast to the grave tone he’d taken. That use of emotional contrast undercut Trump’s argument. I’ve seen this same technique in court, when lawyers use humor to deflate an ultra-serious (and misleading) claim. Perhaps Harris learned the technique in her time as a prosecutor.

Trump Pulled a ‘Joker Face’

When Trump heard something that really got under his skin — like when Harris criticized him over his actions on Jan. 6 — he pulled his lips into a tight, over-dramatized smile and raised his eyebrows high, a bit like the Joker. It was meant as a dismissive gesture, dripping with sarcasm or contempt. In a true smile, also called a Duchenne smile, the eyes naturally crinkle as the zygomaticus major muscle pulls the corners of the mouth into an easy grin. But with Trump, the firmness of his lips betrayed the fakeness of the expression. It’s a behavior he’s displayed in previous debates as well, and it’s unique to him — I’ve never seen it in another political candidate before.

Blink and You’ll Diss It

Harris and Trump clearly share very little in common. The one thing they do seem to have in common, interestingly enough, is that they both blink a lot when they hear something they find absurd. We often use repeated blinks to display disagreement or incredulity. It’s an effective communicative behavior because it’s highly visual: Observers notice it right away, and it doesn’t disrupt the flow of communication. Both candidates displayed that behavior tonight. Harris notably did it when Trump accused her of copying Biden’s policy plans, when he said, “It’s like four sentences, like, ‘Run, Spot, run.’” It was a way of nonverbally dismissing his argument as unserious.

We Started With a Handshake — But Didn’t End With One

Harris forced a handshake at the beginning of the debate, but it certainly didn’t end that way. As soon as they were done, Trump immediately walked off the stage before Harris had even gathered up her notes. There was no attempt to shake hands or socialize whatsoever. It showed that Trump was clearly not in the mood for any niceties with the vice president. She might have gotten a handshake out of him at the start, but by the end, an abrupt walk-off was the best we could hope for.

CRUSHED!

Trump’s Improv Stood No Chance Against Harris’ Coached Attacks

The vice president let Trump do the work of executing her strategy.

By John F. Harris

Vice President Kamala Harris did exactly what the political professionals said she should do.

In some cases, that was what operatives would tell any candidate to do in any election at any time: Don’t worry about the specific question you are asked, just use it as another opportunity to recite the lines we practiced.

In other cases, of course, Harris’ strategy in her first debate as a presidential nominee was custom-tailored for one specific moment and one specific opponent. She plainly used her long days of debate prep in a Pittsburgh hotel to compile a rich anthology of taunts, putdowns and derisive one-liners against former President Donald Trump. The rehearsal was enough to commit dozens of them to memory — not enough to avoid sometimes sounding a bit stagy in delivery. At times, one could almost see the candidate flipping through a stack of neatly organized 3-by-5 index cards in her mind.

Harris’ strategy worked because Trump arrived at the National Constitution Center without much of a strategy — or at least not with one that could survive past the first 15 minutes or so of the encounter.

On countless occasions, he did the opposite of what any conventional operative would tell him to do.

He responded to her jabs in detail, and thereby let her drive the agenda for the evening. He raised his voice and scowled. For flashes he was clear and forceful, attacking parts of the current administration’s record on immigration or inflation that are genuine vulnerabilities. Then he would let his sentences wander in ways not unlike what President Joe Biden is prone to do. Rather than developing a clear and sustained argument throughout the evening, he flung thick brushes against the canvas and let the paint drip wherever.

While Harris was coached up to her eyeballs, Trump was improvisational to the point of incontinence.

No need to hedge: By any conventional measure of debates, she won the debate by getting him to do most of her work.

Better hedge at least a little: Trump thrills his supporters in part because he shreds media- and operative-class assumptions about presidential comportment or winning campaign strategies. By conventional standards, Hillary Rodham Clinton won her debates against Trump in 2016.

Still, Harris plainly accomplished her objectives for the evening — prosecuting her case against him in relentless detail and issuing four different invitations to Americans, in nearly identical language each time, to “turn the page” on Trump and a brand of politics that has hovered over all aspects of politics for nearly a decade. The New York Times stopwatch said he spoke for 43 minutes while she had just 38 — but it is hard to imagine she begrudged him the extra five minutes. She might have benefited from giving him ten.

If someone ever builds the Political Consultants Hall of Fame, this evening may deserve its own exhibit.

Historically, the mythology of debates is that they are occasions to transcend the realm of pollsters and commentators and campaign gamesmanship and present the candidates in ways that speak to everyday voters watching in their living rooms.

This debate, by contrast, underlined how much the inside game — the daily trash-talk and fevered speculation of cable television and social media — now infuses the highest-profile moments of the public campaign.

Harris charged that Trump’s rallies are filled with nonsensical references to windmills causing cancer and the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, and that people now commonly leave early “out of exhaustion and boredom.” Trump couldn’t resist an extended reply, including an allegation that most of the people who attend her rallies are stooges who get paid to be bused in.

She jabbed him on the number of former Trump appointees and other Republicans who say he is not fit to serve another term. She responded to his criticism about crimes committed by undocumented immigrants by saying, “Well, I think this is so rich,” because of his own felony convictions in New York, his loss of a civil suit charging sexual assault, and the ongoing investigations of his role promoting election denialism and trying to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory.

She baited Trump for being “handed $400 million on a silver platter” by his father and then filing for bankruptcy on six occasions. On this occasion, as on multiple others, Trump took the bait with an angry defense that kept the spotlight on his controversies rather the Biden-Harris record.

The reality is that we learned little new about the essential characters of either candidate. Who did not know that Trump is vain on some matters and can’t let criticism go unanswered? Most people who have been around Harris’ ascent in national politics know how much her rhetorical style is shaped by her early career as a local prosecutor and her penchant for preparation. Now a much larger share of Americans has seen that in action.

While Harris sometimes seemed to be delivering answers that ChatGPT might have produced for a composite Democrat, there were more moments of real passion. The strongest was the measure of sincerity she conveyed — the pitch of her voice shifted a register — when she decried the situation in some states after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022 and its protection of abortion rights: “A survivor of a crime, a violation to their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next. That is immoral.”

Both candidates at times made contradictory arguments. Trump said of Harris: “She is a Marxist. Everybody knows she is a Marxist.” But the notion that the vice president is a dangerous leftist doesn’t sit easily with his contention that she is a lightweight who “doesn’t have a plan” for almost any issue.

Harris, meanwhile, frequently derided Trump as “weak.” But if Trump is really so weak there would be little reason to fear Harris’ argument that he is a potential dictator who in a second term would be “back in the White House with no guardrails.”

As the evening finished, one hovering question was: Will there be another one of these before Nov. 5? Trump clearly could benefit from another swing at bat. Harris might now have less incentive — but also more confidence to accept the challenge. From the voters’ perspective, it was an entertaining show — but also one that invited a sequel a bit less steeped in the obsessions of campaign operatives and television producers.

Tried to zing

Trump tried to zing Harris with her iconic 2020 line. It didn't work.

By Alec Regimbal

During Tuesday night’s presidential debate in Philadelphia, former President Donald Trump tried to embarrass Vice President Kamala Harris with a line she made famous during the 2020 presidential election: “I’m speaking.”

While Trump was answering a question from ABC debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, Harris — her mic muted — began to talk.

“Wait a minute, I’m talking now,” Trump said to Harris. “If you don’t mind? Please. Does that sound familiar?”

Trump’s retort was a reference to a viral moment from the 2020 vice presidential debate between Harris and former Vice President Mike Pence. During that Oct. 7 face-off in Salt Lake City, Harris frequently said, “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” when Pence began to interrupt her.

The phrase became a rallying cry for Democrats, and appeared on T-shirts and other merchandise in the run-up to that year’s election. It’s no surprise that Trump would attempt a call-back to that significant moment when Harris began to interrupt him Tuesday, but coming out of Trump’s mouth, it didn’t have the same impact.

In 2020, women who often felt talked-over or interrupted by men saw Harris’ determination to finish her thought as a symbol of strength. But for Trump — who famously interrupted President Joe Biden when the two debated  in 2020 — to say it, it simply felt petty. It’s also worth noting that recycling lines popularized years before always runs the risk of being cringey.

Trump’s use of the line on Tuesday is also notable in that the man Harris first used it on, Pence, has broken with Trump. The two had a falling out when Trump pressured him to overturn the results of the 2020 election (the vice president has no such power), and supporters of the former president chanted “Hang Mike Pence” during the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Pence, who ran against Trump for the Republican nomination for president this cycle, has said that he would not endorse Trump for president, telling Fox News earlier this year, “I’m incredibly proud of the record of our administration. But that being said, during my presidential campaign, I made it clear there were profound differences between me and President Trump on a range of issues.”

Milky Way galaxy with two of its famous stellar nurseries

A natural border between Slovakia and Poland is the Tatra Mountains. A prominent destination for astrophotographers, the Tatras are the highest mountain range in the Carpathians. In the featured image taken in May, one can see the center of our Milky Way galaxy with two of its famous stellar nurseries, the Lagoon and Omega Nebula, just over the top of the Tatras. Stellar nurseries are full of ionized hydrogen, a fundamental component for the formation of Earth-abundant water. As a fundamental ingredient in all known forms of life, water is a crucial element in the Universe. Such water can be seen in the foreground in the form of the Bialka River.

Shouldn’t be surprised

Wait, Kamala Harris owns a gun?

Why liberals shouldn’t be surprised by this news.

by Marin Cogan

Vice President Kamala Harris had a quick comeback for Donald Trump when he accused her of wanting to take people’s guns away at Tuesday’s debate.

“Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away. So stop with the continuous lying about this stuff,” Harris said.

While the remark caught attention online, it wasn’t actually news. Harris had spoken about being a gun owner during her last campaign for president. “I am a gun owner, and I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do — for personal safety,” Harris told reporters after a campaign event in 2019.

At the time, Harris pointed to her career as a prosecutor by way of explanation. It’s not unusual for people who work in law enforcement, from parole officers to police to chief law enforcement officers, to own a gun out of concern that someone they’ve encountered in the legal system might try to exact revenge — as has happened before. The surprise is almost certainly for another reason altogether: Harris is a multiracial woman from a liberal state who has called for banning assault weapons and passing universal background checks.

But this shouldn’t be all that shocking, either. As I wrote in my feature last month about the millions of Americans who decided to buy their first guns during the pandemic, women — particularly Black and Hispanic women — are among the fastest growing cohort of gun owners in the country.

Between 1980 and 2014, only 9 to 14 percent of women owned guns. But half of first-time gun buyers between 2019 and 2021 were women, according to a study from Northeastern University. Another study of new gun owners found that, from 2020 to 2022, 69 percent were people of color. As of last year, more than half of Americans said they or someone in their household had a gun.

Harris is right that the vast majority of gun owners say they own a gun for protection, and the fact that she counts herself among the millions of Americans who own guns reveals an important truth that often gets hidden. While the national debate is typically framed as a fight between two opposing interests — anti-gun liberals who want to take everyone’s guns away and pro-gun conservatives who steadfastly refuse any regulation — the reality is much more nuanced.

It’s true that support for measures like banning assault weapons is mixed. But the notion that all gun owners are totally against any gun regulation is clearly false and a narrative that gun control advocates have been working to unravel.

It’s not just that a majority of Americans say it’s too easy to get a gun and regulations should be stricter. Even a majority of American gun owners say they support things like universal background checks, permits, and extreme risk laws meant to keep guns away from domestic abusers and others likely to commit violence.

In interviews I’ve done with gun control activists and in other news articles, these advocates highlight the gun owners in their midst who are fighting for stronger gun laws. It’s not just urban and coastal liberals and people who’ve never owned guns before who want to see better regulation, but a wide range of Americans.

Harris understands this dynamic well. “We are being offered a false choice,” she said in 2019. “You’re either in favor of the Second Amendment or you want to take everyone’s guns away. It’s a false choice that is born out of a lack of courage from leaders who must recognize and agree that there are some practical solutions to what is a clear problem in our country.”

She’s right, of course. As the polls show, millions of Americans own guns and have complicated feelings about them. It’s only the people who don’t want to see any regulation who have an interest in pretending otherwise.

Debate trainwreck.......

How Kamala Harris goaded (and goaded and goaded) Trump into a debate trainwreck

Harris found Trump’s biggest weakness: his ego.

by Zack Beauchamp

By any reasonable metric, Vice President Kamala Harris soundly beat former President Donald Trump in Tuesday night’s presidential debate.

She did it by demonstrating superior knowledge not only of policy, but also of her opponent’s psychology. Harris figured out exactly how to get Trump angry, how to trick him into veering off course, and how to keep the debate on favorable terrain.

To put it more bluntly: Harris manipulated Trump into spiraling at several points during their first (only?) debate.

Let me give you an example. Early on in the debate, the moderators tried to press Harris on President Joe Biden’s unpopular immigration record, asking her if she would have done anything differently from her current boss — a topic favorable for Trump.

Harris answered the question — but then took a seemingly unrelated shot at Trump’s rallies.

“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 [how] windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” the vice president said.

This gave Trump a choice; either prosecute Harris on immigration, an issue where she’s weak, or go on a rant in defense of his vaunted rallies. You can guess what he chose.

“Let me respond as to the rallies,” Trump said. “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 busing them in and paying them to be there.”

That began a tailspin: a series of weird tangents, including a humiliating rant about the completely fake problem of Haitian migrants supposedly eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio, punctuated by immense concern about the honor of Trump rallies. He never really got back to what he should have been doing — attacking Harris on migration across the southern border.

By needling Trump where it hurts — the rallies he cares about so much — Harris managed to get him off balance, and he honestly never really recovered.

Harris deployed this strategy again and again.

During an exchange on crime, Harris brought up Trump’s own criminal conviction — leading him to go on a diatribe about “political prosecutions” instead of effectively pushing Harris on her flip-flops on crime policy.

She brought up world leaders calling him a “disgrace,” pushing him into bragging about his relationship with Hungarian “strongman” (in Trump’s words) Viktor Orbán, perhaps not a callout that the swing voters of Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania were clamoring for. She needled his closeness with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blasting “what you think is a friendship” with a “dictator who would eat you for lunch.”

Each time, Trump took the bait — losing control of his temper and going off message, while Harris looked on what must have been glee.

In hindsight, this strategy might seem innovative, but it speaks to something well-known about Trump’s psychology.

Covering foreign policy during the Trump years, one fear I heard a lot from national security professionals was that Trump could be easily manipulated: His well-known vanity and narcissism made it easy for foreign powers to extract policy favors through personal flattery and lavish receptions. This seems to explain, at least in part, how Trump went from hostile to friendly with foreign leaders like Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping.

But if foreign leaders could figure out how to manipulate Trump’s self-absorption, so too could his domestic opposition. Harris played on that immense pride Tuesday night.

This tactic wasn’t the only reason she won the debate — see her strong answer on abortion, among other things — but it was a vital one.

I don't think the debate moderators were strong enough... They need a mic kill switch.

3 winners and 2 losers from the Harris-Trump debate

This debate went a whole lot better for Democrats than the last one.

by Andrew Prokop, Nicole Narea, and Christian Paz

After Vice President Kamala Harris’s first debate with former President Donald Trump Tuesday, Democrats across the country breathed a sigh of relief and thought: That’s more like it.

Harris, by widespread consensus, was the clear winner. “Make no mistake about it, Trump had a bad night,” Fox News’s Brit Hume said on the network afterward. “My sense is she came out of this in pretty good shape.”

The online prediction market Polymarket — reflecting bettors’ estimates of what’s likely to happen — showed a 97 percent chance that the debate would help Harris in the polls. Prediction markets typically just reflect the conventional wisdom, but what this does tell us is that very few people are willing to bet actual money that the debate will help Trump.

The conventional wisdom matters, because the winner of the debate isn’t just determined by what happened onstage, but also by the spin war that ensues afterward. The narrative of who won, the kind of groupthink of the commentariat, gets endlessly discussed in the days after the debate — and, in this case, that narrative is: Harris won by effectively baiting Trump.

It’s too early to say how much the debate will impact the race. Though politics junkies are near-unanimous that Trump lost, it is at least possible that swing voters will have different takeaways. Early signs, though, suggest they may have the same takeaway: a Washington Post focus group of 24 undecided swing state voters found that 22 thought Harris performed better. And a CNN post-debate poll found that 63 percent of debate watchers thought Harris won.

It is also possible the debate will have little effect on the polls — or, that if it does help Harris, it will help her only briefly, since other events will impact the polls in the nearly two months remaining before Election Day.

But, running the briefest presidential campaign in modern history, the stakes were high for Harris — voters have seen little of her so far, particularly in unscripted high-pressure settings like a debate. And she delivered the strong performance she needed.

Loser: Donald Trump

Before the debate, the conventional wisdom was that to have a strong night, Trump needed to do a few things. He needed to remain focused on tying Harris to the Biden administration’s unpopular record on the economy, immigration, and foreign policy. He had to avoid minefields for him on his weakest issues, abortion and democracy. And he needed to avoid getting sidetracked on rants or conspiracy theories.

But he mostly failed to do those things.

On abortion, Trump took credit for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, saying it happened “through the genius and heart and strength” of the conservative justices.

He also repeatedly dodged the question of whether he’d veto a national abortion ban if Congress sent one to his desk — saying (probably accurately) that Congress wouldn’t pass such a ban. And yet, despite several opportunities, he couldn’t bring himself to clearly say he’d veto such a bill — perhaps fearing angering his pro-life allies, who have been disgruntled with his handling of the issue of late.

Asked whether he regretted anything he did on January 6, 2021, when his supporters attacked the US Capitol, he didn’t come up with anything. The only thing he complained about was that, in the midst of the chaos inside the building, one of his supporters, Ashli Babbitt, “was shot by an out of control police officer,” he said. (Babbitt and other angry rioters were trying to breach the last barrier separating them from members of Congress who feared for their lives.)

And he repeatedly voiced ludicrous-sounding conspiracy theories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, or states executing babies after they are born.

Late in the debate, Trump claimed that Harris “is Biden,” but he wasn’t even consistent on that — earlier in the evening, Trump had insisted that President Joe Biden “hates” Harris and “can’t stand her,” an odd choice if your campaign strategy is to make Harris responsible for Biden’s record.

And while it is true that Trump hit Harris on inflation and the border many times, it seems unlikely that any of that messaging will sink in when he was saying so many other bizarre and nonsensical things that will get far more attention.

Perhaps the clearest indication Trump lost, though, is that his supporters took to social media to complain vociferously about the moderators — the telling move of whining about the refs when the outcome isn’t what they’d hoped.

—Andrew Prokop

Winner: Kamala Harris

In the days before the debate, it had seemed that the good vibes Kamala Harris had enjoyed since her sudden ascent as the Democratic presidential nominee were in danger of disappearing.

Polls showed a very close toss-up race. Nate Silver’s election forecast model tipped toward making Trump the favorite. Criticism rose of Harris for mostly avoiding media interviews in unscripted settings. A New York Times/Siena College poll released Sunday even showed Trump taking the lead by 1 percentage point nationally — an excellent result for Trump, given the Electoral College’s slant against Democrats.

But in retrospect, Harris’s avoidance of the media helped her debate performance have more impact. She preferred a high-stakes setting where she’d be contrasted with Trump over one in which she’d be squaring off against journalists.

And she was very effective at drawing that contrast.

Harris hammered home her core message that Trump only cares about himself, not ordinary Americans. She repeated, several times, that her campaign plan includes tax cuts for young families and tax deductions for startup small businesses. She voiced righteous outrage about how Trump’s Supreme Court appointees eliminated national abortion rights protections. She promised to unite Americans rather than divide them, and said she’d represent a new generation of leadership.

Repeatedly, she baited Trump into wasting time indulging in his narcissism — asked about immigration, she threw in a claim that people often leave Trump’s rallies early. Trump couldn’t resist using some of his time to clarify that his rallies are great and everyone loves him.

There were some questionable moments for Harris. It was clear she did not want to talk about inflation — not wanting to get drawn into a discussion about Biden’s record, in contrast to her own tax plan. Asked why she no longer supported some very progressive positions she took while running for president in 2020, she really didn’t give a clear answer on why.

But it’s not clear she had any real perfect answer on those topics — avoiding them may have been her best strategic option.

And where she had points to make and punches to land on Tuesday night, she did.

—Andrew Prokop

Winner: ABC News’s debate moderators

David Muir and Linsey Davis had a difficult task going into Tuesday night’s debate, but they mostly acquitted themselves well. The pair of ABC News moderators ran a tight debate, keeping the candidates to their allotted times (for the most part) and finding the right moments to step in to fact-check as needed.

A particularly striking moment came when Trump repeated multiple times the false claim that Democrats support killing babies even after birth. Trump went on to ramble about how he is fine with abortion policy being decided by the states, and waffled about his support for a national abortion ban. As soon as he finished, Davis clarified to the audiences at home: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

Similarly, when Trump expounded on the racist far-right conspiracy theories that undocumented immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are killing and eating pets, Muir once again fact-checked the claim, saying ABC News “did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

No similar fact-checks of Harris were made, which contributed to a feeling among Trump allies that the moderators were conducting a “rig job.” “Trump needs to directly challenge the moderators. Say they’re in the tank for Kamala. Put them on the defensive,” the far-right activist Chris Rufo said on X.

And yet, despite the rules allowing the moderators to mute mics to prevent crosstalk, Trump was repeatedly allowed to talk over Harris, to get the final word during exchanges, and generally to speak for longer than Harris — a fact that rankled liberal viewers.

Ultimately, the moderators did a good job of keeping the debate on track, at least to the degree you can when moderating a debate involving Trump. The fact-checking may have been controversial with Trump supporters, but they did what journalists should do: call out falsehoods and insist on accuracy. They walked a fine line and managed to mostly stay on it.

—Christian Paz

Loser: Immigration

The national debate over immigration has shifted greatly, and that was on full display Tuesday night.

In 2020, Democrats emphasized Trump’s cruelty toward asylum seekers and other migrants at the border, while Trump made exaggerated — or outright false — claims about the alleged dangers immigrants posed to citizens’ safety and sovereignty.

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump has stayed the course, only growing more extreme in his rhetoric. But Democrats have pivoted greatly. On Tuesday, Harris eschewed any significant mention of immigrants’ plight — or their massive contributions to the country. Instead, she accused Trump of being insufficiently attentive to border security.

Specifically, Harris criticized Trump for urging Republicans in Congress not to vote for a right-wing border bill that Democrats tried to pass in February. The bill was a bipartisan compromise that would have instituted a Republican priority — a new authority to quickly expel migrants arriving on the southern border at times of high demand — in exchange for something Democrats wanted: closing gaps in the legal immigration system that have left everyone from the children of high-skilled foreign workers to Afghan refugees in limbo.

“He preferred to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem,” Harris said.

Trump responded by repeating the racist and dehumanizing claim, for which local authorities have identified no evidence, that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, eat pets.

“A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it,” Trump said. “This is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

At no point in the exchange, however, did the Democrat come to the defense of immigrants — a marked departure from the political dynamic that has ruled this issue for years. And that is perhaps a reflection of the fact that anti-immigrant sentiment in the electorate is higher than at any point since the early 2000s, just after the 9/11 terror attacks.

Border crossings have come down significantly in recent months due to a crackdown by Mexican authorities and Biden’s implementation of new asylum restrictions. Voters have correspondingly become more favorable toward Harris on immigration. But Harris nevertheless did not seem compelled in the debate to take a more empathetic stance on immigration.

—Nicole Narea

​​Winner: Swifties for Kamala

Seemingly the only way a presidential debate could possibly be overshadowed would be to have the biggest star in the world break some news immediately after it — which is what happened when Taylor Swift officially endorsed Harris via an Instagram post released about half an hour after the end of the debate.

“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Swift wrote. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election … I’ve done my research, and I’ve made my choice. Your research is all yours to do, and the choice is yours to make.”

The endorsement comes after some uncertainty over whether Swift would even comment on the election, despite vocally supporting Democrats in past elections. To the extent politics touched Swift, it centered over her recent friendship with Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes’s wife Brittany, who appears to be supportive of Trump.

But tonight, “Swifties for Kamala” got their wish.

Swift’s endorsement offered the slyest of subtweets of Trump’s running mate Sen. JD Vance. She highlighted how she admired Harris’s running mate Gov. Tim Walz, and his “standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.” The piece de resistance: She signed off the endorsement as a “childless cat lady” — the most influential one alive.

—Christian Paz

Tried Everything

Missouri Officials Tried Everything to Keep Abortion Off the Ballot. They Just Lost.

An 11th-hour decision gives voters the chance to overturn the state’s near-total abortion ban in November.

Madison Pauly

Reproductive rights advocates in Missouri have beaten back a last-ditch effort by Republican officials to stop voters from having their say on abortion in November. On Tuesday afternoon, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered that a proposed amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution will remain on this year’s ballot.

The ruling ensures that Missourians will have the opportunity to vote on Amendment 3, which would establish a right to “reproductive freedom”—defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about contraception, abortion, and healthcare during pregnancy. If approved, the amendment will set a high legal bar for how the state can regulate abortion prior to “viability”—the difficult-to-pinpoint moment when a fetus becomes likely to survive outside the uterus. After viability, the measure would let the state ban abortion, with exceptions to protect the life and health of the pregnant patient.

The decision caps a roller-coaster of a year for Missouri reproductive rights advocates, who faced hurdle after hurdle to get the measure on the November ballot. Supporters gathered more than 380,000 signatures this spring, circumventing a legislature dominated by hard-line abortion foes who passed the state’s current, near-total abortion ban. A St. Louis University/YouGov poll of 900 likely voters in mid-August found that 52 percent supported Amendment 3 and 34 percent opposed it.

“Today’s decision is a victory for both direct democracy and reproductive freedom in Missouri,” Rachel Sweet, campaign manager for Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, the group behind the amendment, said in a statement. “This fight was not just about this amendment—it was about defending the integrity of the initiative petition process and ensuring that Missourians can shape their future directly.”

Ballot initiatives have become a central part of the strategy to restore and expand abortion rights in the post-Roe v. Wade era. They’re also key to Democrats’ efforts to turn out voters in battleground states in this year’s tight presidential election. Abortion rights are popular, even in solidly red states; the pro-choice side has won all seven abortion-related measures on state ballots since 2022.

That’s led Republican officials in GOP-dominated states including Arkansas, Florida, and Nebraska to pull out all the stops this year to prevent abortion-rights measures from getting to the ballot in the first place—filing lawsuits, delaying or invalidating petitions, and spreading misinformation.

In Missouri, Tuesday’s ruling comes in response to a last-minute lawsuit by two Republican state lawmakers, Rep. Hannah Kelly and Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, working with anti-abortion activists and lawyers from the Thomas More Society, a law firm aligned with conservative Catholics. They argued that Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft should never have certified Amendment 3 because it did not specify which state laws it would repeal. (Missouri law requires initiative petitions to “include all sections of existing law or of the constitution which would be repealed by the measure.”) In a court filing, they claimed that the Amendment 3 campaign “defrauded potential signers” and that the measure “would have far-reaching effects,” including on Missouri’s rules on human cloning and single-sex bathrooms.

Amendment supporters responded that no state laws would be automatically repealed. Instead, advocates would have to file lawsuits challenging anti-abortion laws, with judges making the final decisions about which ones violate the new constitutional amendment. “This is another example of someone flailing, trying to gum the works of a campaign that has serious momentum,” said Mallory Schwartz, executive director of Abortion Action Missouri, part of the pro-Amendment 3 coalition. “What they’re really doing is trying to deny people access to direct democracy.” 

The Missouri Supreme Court’s decision overturns a surprise ruling by Cole County Circuit Judge Christopher Limbaugh last Friday evening declaring that the vote on the amendment should be canceled—though he left time for an appeal. Judge Limbaugh, a cousin of the late conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, was appointed to the bench by his former boss, Republican Gov. Mike Parson, barely five weeks ago.

Ashcroft defended his certification in a hearing before Limbaugh. But following the Friday ruling, Ashcroft sent the abortion-rights campaign a letter announcing that he was decertifying Amendment 3 himself. “On further review in light of the circuit court’s judgment, I have determined the amendment is deficient,” he wrote.

In its Tuesday ruling, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Ashcroft to recertify Amendment 3 for the ballot, ruling that the deadline for him to issue a certification decision had passed.

For Ashcroft and other Missouri Republicans, the decision is yet another rebuke in a long and exhausting campaign to keep the amendment off the ballot. In at least four previous lawsuits, Missouri courts have slapped down state officials’ attempts to interfere with the amendment.

First, state Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is running for reelection, held up the initiative for months by pushing a baseless theory that the initiative could cost the state billions in federal Medicaid funding and declining to rubber-stamp a cost estimate prepared by the state’s auditor. After a legal battle, the Missouri Supreme Court ordered Bailey to stop stonewalling.

Then last fall, Kelly and Coleman—the same legislators behind the latest lawsuit—seized on Bailey’s phony theory about Medicaid funding and sued the state auditor over his cost estimate. They too were slapped down by the courts, which found the cost estimate “fair and sufficient.”

Meanwhile, Ashcroft—an outspoken abortion opponent whose job requires him to craft neutral summaries of ballot initiatives—issued summaries claiming the measure would permit “dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortion.” Last October, an appeals court ruled those summaries were “replete with politically partisan language.” A circuit court judge completely rewrote them.

But Ashcroft didn’t learn his lesson. Last month, on the same day he certified the amendment for the ballot, he issued “fair ballot language” to be posted at polling places that made a slew of false claims, including that the measure would prohibit legal recourse against “anyone who performs an abortion and hurts or kills the pregnant women.” Last Thursday, Cole County Circuit Judge Cotton Walker threw out Ashcroft’s description, calling it “unfair, insufficient, inaccurate and misleading.”

Tuesday’s Supreme Court ruling is a crucial win for the fight to expand abortion rights in Missouri, which has some of the most restrictive laws in the country. Even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, only one clinic remained open in the state, providing fewer than 100 abortions annually. Hours after the fall of Roe, state officials invoked a dormant law making it a felony to provide abortion in virtually all cases.

Missouri isn’t the only place where state officials have been making last-ditch efforts to block or blunt voter referendums on abortion. On Monday, the Nebraska Supreme Court heard arguments in a trio of lawsuits over dueling amendments—one to protect abortion until viability and another to ban abortion after the first trimester. Arguments focused on whether the protective amendment violates a state rule requiring ballot measures to only cover a single subject, according to the Nebraska Examiner.

Last month in Arkansas, the state Supreme Court threw out thousands of signatures in favor of an abortion-rights measure, ruling that organizers had failed to file training certifications for their paid canvassers in the proper format, the Associated Press reported. The decision affirmed state officials’ move to disqualify the measure from the ballot.

In Florida, the state Attorney General lost a lawsuit arguing that an amendment to protect abortion rights until viability was “too complicated” for voters to understand. But last month, the state Supreme Court approved a fiscal impact statement for Amendment 4 written with the help of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative group behind Project 2025. Meanwhile, the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration unveiled a website on Thursday full of false claims about the initiative, as my colleague Julianne McShane reported. And the Florida Department of State is reportedly investigating 36,000 voter signatures submitted by amendment organizers.

As it stands on Tuesday, ten states will vote on abortion-related measures on the ballot come November. Missouri is one of two where voters could overturn a near-total abortion ban.

Still in “Concept” Phase.......

After a Decade, Donald Trump’s Health Care Plan Still in “Concept” Phase

But he’s clear that Democrats were always the ones to blame for the problem.

Julia Métraux

Former President Donald Trump has “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. At least that’s what he claimed during his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris in Philadelphia tonight. Having access to affordable health care remains a key issue for Americans, according to Pew Research Center.

Moderator Linsey Davis of ABC News asked Trump if he had plans to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, something he vowed and failed to do during his presidency. Recently, Trump walked back this claim, saying he would keep the Affordable Care Act, unless he was able to find a good replacement. Trump, in his response, was very vague, concerning an issue as serious as health care—except he knew Democrats were to blame for any problems.

“Obamacare was lousy. It’s not very good today. And what I said that if we come up with something…we’re going to do it and we’re going to replace it. But remember this, I inherited Obamacare because Democrats wouldn’t change it. They wouldn’t vote for it. They were unanimous. They wouldn’t vote to change it. If they would have done that, we would have had a much better plan than Obama’s.”

Davis followed up, asking if he had a plan in mind to replace it. Trump seemed unable to remember that during his time as president, he had the opportunity to create a new health care program, but was unable to do so. Today, he still can’t seem to provide a coherent answer, saying,

“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.”

Blatantly Racist Lie

With Trump, a Blatantly Racist Lie Just Reached the Presidential Debate Stage

By mentioning “Springfield,” the former president gives a false, bigoted attack on immigrants its biggest audience.

Inae Oh

The opening minutes of the very first question of the first presidential debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday saw the former president alluding to a racist lie—which has been roundly debunked by law enforcement officials—about Haitian immigrants.

“You see what’s happening with towns throughout the United States,” Trump said in response to a question regarding his plans for the economy. “You look at Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns, they’re taking over buildings, they’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country.”

But that was just the mere mention of “Springfield, Ohio,” now shorthand for a virulent conspiracy theory that has swiftly captured the Republican Party in recent days. Later in the debate, Trump unleashed, fully leaning into the blatant racism by repeating the vile lie that immigrants, specifically those from Haiti, in far-flung corners of the US are eating pets.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” Trump said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country and it’s a shame.”

The remarks, by a former president and GOP presidential candidate, are evidence of the complete and total platforming of a viral lie, as it progressed from one single Facebook comment to far-right influencers, then to prominent members of Congress, and tonight, the presidential debate stage.

Devastating Consequences

Harris Laid Out the Devastating Consequences of “Trump Abortion Bans”

Trump did not say whether or not he would veto a national abortion ban.

Julianne McShane

Vice President Kamala Harris just showed why she is a better candidate on abortion than President Biden ever was.

In a blistering response to former President Donald Trump’s rambling about his ever-shifting stance on abortion—which included appointing three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe v. Wade—Harris put the ex-president on blast for what she has been calling the “Trump abortion bans” now present in over a dozen states.

“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,” Harris said.

And when Trump repeated his false claim that “every legal scholar” wanted Roe overruled, Harris promptly laid out the devastating consequences of the Dobbs decision.

“Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she is bleeding out in a car in the parking lot—she didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that,” Harris said.

“A 12 or 13 year old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term—they don’t want that,” she continued. Harris pledged to sign legislation restoring Roe into law if Congress passed it during her presidency—and noted that Trump could very well sign a national abortion ban if reelected, as Project 2025 recommends.

“Understand, in his Project 2025, there would be a national abortion monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages,” she said. “I think the American people believe that certain freedoms—in particular, the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body—should not be made by the government.”

Tonight, Harris showed exactly why abortion rights advocates see her as their ideal messenger: In clear and forceful language, she described the health care apocalypse Trump helped create, and the first-hand experiences of pregnant people bearing the brunt of it. When Biden talked about abortion during the first debate, on the other hand, it was a garbled, confusing mess that ended with him talking about immigration.

But in fairness, Trump was also clear about his stance on abortion: When asked two different times, he refused to answer whether he would veto a federal abortion ban if Congress passed one.