During Tuesday's debate, Harris was in command; Trump was incoherent
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Tuesday night at 9:00, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris strode onto the debate stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
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VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: Kamala Harris. Let's have a good debate.
DONALD TRUMP: Nice to see you. Have fun.
HARRIS: Thank you.
TRUMP: Thank you.
KELLY: In something of the ultimate power move, Harris walked over to Trump and held out her hand to shake. Some observers noted Trump seemed reluctant or caught off guard by the act of civility. Then it was off to the races, and it became clear what Harris' strategy was - beat the former president - and he latched on hook, line and sinker.
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HARRIS: What you'll also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.
TRUMP: 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 bussing them in and paying them to be there.
KELLY: Using precious debate time to talk about crowd size was not the only time that Trump went off message.
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TRUMP: In Springfield, 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.
KELLY: Trump is talking there about a debunked conspiracy theory about Haitian migrants eating pets in an Ohio town. During these moments, when Trump veered off to extremes or repeated falsehoods, the vice president lifted her eyebrows as if to say - really? - or laughed or propped her hand on her chin with a smirk or sighed, as if in disbelief. As one CNN commentator put it...
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UNIDENTIFIED COMMENTATOR: She was aware, as she must have been as a prosecutor, that the second you were inside of a courtroom, the jury is looking at everything you're doing - muted microphones, doesn't matter.
KELLY: And then there were the times when Trump seemed to miss his old opponent.
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TRUMP: Where is our president? We don't even know if he's the president.
DAVID MUIR: And just to clarify here...
TRUMP: They threw him out of the campaign like a dog. We don't even know, is he our president? But we have a president...
MUIR: Mr. President.
TRUMP: ...That doesn't know he's alive.
KELLY: Harris' response?
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HARRIS: Well, first of all, it's important to remind the former president you're not running against Joe Biden, you're running against me.
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KELLY: CONSIDER THIS - Vice President Kamala Harris is widely seen as the winner of Tuesday's debate. With the election neck and neck, will it make a difference?
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KELLY: From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
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KELLY: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. Last night's presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was the first, and possibly the last, time we will see the two candidates face off. Harris seems to have come out on top, but the race for the White House is in virtual ties across key battleground states. Will this one debate make a difference? Here to read the tea leaves are NPR senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro and NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik.
So now that you all have had a chance to sleep on it, Domenico, you first, what was your major takeaway from last night's debate?
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: I've slept on it, and my takeaway has not changed. The debate was not really close. I mean, arguably, this was the best handling of Trump by any candidate that's debated him, in what Kamala Harris was able to do. You know, she baited him on several things, mentioning the Wharton School economist not liking his economic plan. That's, of course, where Trump went to school for undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania.
KELLY: As he mentioned - as he went out of his way to tell us, yes.
MONTANARO: Right. Exactly. You know, she talked about his crowds, which really derailed him. There were lots of other examples, and Trump took the bait every single time. She sort of flipped the script on masculinity. She really was the alpha in this debate from beginning to end, which is usually his stance at these debates. And Trump did so many things that presidential debate coaches would tell you not to do. Like, for example, instead of hammering home a rational point about immigration and a small town not having the resources to respond to an influx of migrants, he instead used this provocative and debunked conspiracy about immigrants in the U.S. illegally eating cats and dogs. Never mind that he got the conspiracy wrong because it was about ducks, not dogs, and Harris was able to paint him as extreme.
KELLY: I want to ask, speaking of debunking conspiracies and other things, you know, back in the June debate, the one that was between Trump and President Biden, we did not hear fact-checks in real time from the moderators. Last night, we did. That was ABC's David Muir and Linsey Davis. David Folkenflik, what impact did that have?
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Sure. And back in June, you know, CNN traded that for the right to go after questions that hadn't been answered.
KELLY: Right.
FOLKENFLIK: In this case, you know, you got to be careful 'cause if you get it wrong, as we've learned in the past, it becomes a huge partisan focal point. In this instance, I would say the fact-checks were, you know, restrained, focused, measured, quiet and concise. You know, we talked about the question of animals in this conspiracy theory. Let's listen to David Muir after Trump accused Haitian immigrants in a small Ohio city of eating pets.
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MUIR: I just want to clarify here, you bring up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there had been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.
TRUMP: Well, I've seen people on television.
MUIR: Let me just say here, this is to...
TRUMP: The people on television who say, my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that, and maybe that's a...
MUIR: Yeah.
TRUMP: ...Good thing to say for a city manager...
MUIR: I'm not taking this from television. I'm taking it from the city manager.
TRUMP: ...But the people on television saying their dog was eaten...
FOLKENFLIK: So, you know, in past debates when people have tried fact-checking, they became part of the debate. In this instance, I'd say this was just a tempered measure.
MONTANARO: You know, and Muir's tone here was really a thing that stood out to me because it was pretty lightly fact-checked, right? And Republicans try to cast these fact-checks as biased 'cause there were four last night, all four were toward things that Trump had said. But it's just a reality of the fact that Trump just says more things, more often that are blatantly false, and he repeats them.
KELLY: David, stay with the question of bias, perception of bias. How is this being characterized in media coverage that you're tracking today?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, there are kind of three baskets, I would say, of coverage. You've seen folks who are basically partisans on one side or the other. I'd say you'd seen folks who are reflecting what we've heard from our colleague, Domenico, last night and today. And I'd say you'd see those who are so tempered as to be the point of kind of misrepresenting, saying, well, you know, they went at each other in a fiery debate. That didn't really capture what happened last night. But you know what did happen? Trump unified folks on, you know, say, all three major cable networks, including Fox's Brit Hume, because they were all trying to capture what Domenico got at. Here was Brit Hume, a former chief political anchor for Fox News and often a conservative voice. Here's what Brit had to say last night.
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BRIT HUME: Make no mistake about it - Trump had a bad night. He rose to the bait repeatedly when she baited him, something I'm sure his advisers had begged him not to do.
FOLKENFLIK: And, you know, we saw in what's called the spin room after the debate, that's where people representing various campaigns or candidates go in to try to tell reporters how they should think about it and frame it. Trump entered the room to do his own spin. He didn't feel he could trust surrogates to make up what he failed to do in the debate itself.
KELLY: Yeah. Domenico, hop back in, yeah.
MONTANARO: Yeah, no, and I was going to say, you know, David mentions this idea of the way that this has been framed, and sometimes I find that our colleagues really have a difficult time in trying to just say what they know to be independently, verifiably true. And it's been sort of dubbed sane-washing, which is sort of taking something that Trump says that might be incoherent, but then making it a subject-verb-object thing that then is seemingly more rational and understandable. Also, I have to say about the going into the spin room, not usually the thing that a presidential candidate who thinks they did well in a debate does.
KELLY: You would normally delegate that to your surrogates, yeah. OK.
MONTANARO: Yeah, that's why they're there.
KELLY: So, I mean, bottom line, big picture, will this debate change voters' minds? Will it help people who still haven't made up their minds make up their mind? Domenico?
MONTANARO: It certainly could. I mean, 30% of the people in our survey, in the NPR/PBS News/Marist survey, said that they, you know, are going to be looking at this debate as something that could help change their minds. But you have to realize that this is a very, very, very divided country. Republicans have had an opportunity for almost a decade to move away from Trump, and they have not chosen to do that. I would not expect that they would after this either.
You know, Harris has done everything right, you could argue, since getting in this race. She's tacked to the middle, raised half a billion dollars, staffed up, organizing in swing states. Now she out-debated Trump, and she really still could lose. I mean, this is not just, like, a could. It's still a coin flip because these seven states, the seven swing states we're watching closely, are more conservative than the rest of the country at large. And, you know, I think it is reflective of just how divided we are.
KELLY: That is NPR's Domenico Montanaro and David Folkenflik. Thank you to you both.
MONTANARO: You're welcome.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
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KELLY: This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlam with audio engineering by Neil Tevault. It was edited by Dana Farrington, Emily Kopp and Courtney Dorning. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
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KELLY: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.
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