An erratic Donald Trump offered one of the worst performances of his political career in the debate against Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, where it was impossible to broadly discuss public policy plans before a Republican ex-president who recited lies, conspiracy theories, or simply inconsistencies.
Harris put Trump on the defensive by attacking the former president’s enormous ego, most notably by telling him that people leave his rallies before they end out of boredom and because he talks about everything but the needs of Americans. The vice president was able to interject her public policy proposals amid Trump’s chaotic performance and repeatedly reminded voters that he offers a generational change of leadership and that it is “time to turn the page.”
Trump did turn to immigration even though the topic under discussion was another. But he did not answer the question of how he plans to deport more than 11 million undocumented immigrants, the centerpiece of his immigration plan in the Heritage Foundation’s extremist Project 2025.
Instead, Trump repeated a litany of lies that crime in the United States has skyrocketed because of immigrants, which is not true; that this is why crime everywhere in the world has gone down, because they have sent their criminals to the United States and Harris and Biden have let them in; that we have a new kind of crime: “migrant crime”; that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are “eating” residents’ pets.
Harris should have gone beyond the border issue and explained that the strip can be secured and the immigration system reformed to offer a path to legalization to millions of undocumented immigrants who have been living in this country for decades, something that Americans support. In that sense, it was a missed opportunity to establish a clear contrast with Trump’s extremism and to appeal to young voters, women, Latinos and other minorities directly or indirectly affected by the lack of immigration reform.
And while Harris wiped the floor with Trump in this debate, if there is a lesson for the vice president, it is that she should not leave anything to chance, as Hillary Clinton’s experience with Trump in 2016 made clear.
Harris came into this defining encounter well positioned among the multicultural and diverse vote. However, when all the voters in the country are added up, the gap between her and Trump closes. We will see what effect, if any, the debate has on that trend.
My Code’s Intelligence Center conducted a poll for La Opinión that found that 63% of Latino, African-American, ANNHPI and LGBTQIA+ voters intend to vote for Harris versus 32% who support Trump. But when it comes to the general universe of voters, the gap between the two narrows to 5 points, with 50% in favor of Harris and 45% for Trump.
Other national polls put the difference between the two at just one percentage point in Trump’s favour. And everything suggests a close election.
This is despite Trump’s disastrous performance at his rallies, and now in the debate, which show a Republican candidate who is deranged, incapable of completing a thought, or offering public policy plans, who lies through his fingers, who continues to insult his opponents and jump from topic to topic, from sharks to Hannibal Lecter in a kind of feverish nightmare from which we cannot wake up.
The incredible thing is that he continues to have the support of that recalcitrant sector driven by prejudice and anti-immigrant sentiment that Trump has known how to exploit.
Although I see more similarities between Harris’s candidacy and Obama’s, in 2016 no one thought that a candidate as incompetent as Trump could defeat Clinton, the first lady, senator and Secretary of State. The resentment that the presidency of the first African-American in the history of the United States, Obama, generated among what has subsequently been known as the MAGA sector, which blames minorities and immigrants for everything, even though analysis after analysis denies that immigrants steal jobs from Americans or lower their salaries, was not taken into account.
Now we have an African-American woman of Indian descent facing the same prejudice from Trump and his followers.
And although one would like to think that people learn the lessons and are able to discern between a capable and prepared person, and a buffoon, misogynist, mythomaniac, and convicted to lead the country, one only has to go back to 2016. And do not make the mistakes of the Clinton campaign of being overconfident, of not having a presence in key counties, cities, and states, or of ignoring what volunteers on the ground warned.
Clinton, let us remember, lost the presidential election to Trump by just 117,850 votes in three key states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, which the Democrats had not lost since 1992.
Despite Trump’s dismal debate performance, Harris cannot rest on her laurels.