With an assist from ABC, Kamala Harris won the presidential debate in Philadelphia.
The moderators vigorously, and at times misleadingly, fact-checked Trump. He was right that Harris has in previous years come out for kicking 180 million Americans out of their private health plans and for confiscating guns. (The key word in “mandatory buybacks” is the first.) They did not challenge her, letting her claim that his reference to a postelection “bloodbath” was about civil strife rather than damage to the auto industry. They asked him more pointed questions than they asked her. Her vouching for Biden’s acuity and vigor, for example, drew no queries.
But nobody forced Trump to go down the many blind alleys he took. He didn’t have to defend the January 6 rioters, claim that he won in 2020, or get in a dispute about crowd sizes — or, for that matter, name-check Sean Hannity and Viktor Orbán as fans of his. Anyone cheered by those comments is already an active supporter of Trump.
Harris did not have a good answer when asked whether Americans are better off than they were four years ago, or what she would do differently from Biden, or why she had flip-flopped on many issues, or even — and here we should give credit to the moderators for the question — whether she would draw any limits on abortion. But Trump did more to raise doubts about himself than about her. The race is still close, and her defects still glaring, but he did neither himself nor his supporters any favors.