How Kamala Harris denormalized Trump in less than two hours

In Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris may or may not have increased her chances of becoming the 47th president. But she accomplished what so many others have tried and failed to do.

She has denormalized Donald Trump.

For years, various politicians and pundits have been screaming themselves hoarse over the fear that Trump’s cheating, casual mendacity, outrageous divisiveness, and blatantly criminal behavior are being normalized. For years, the media has tried to contextualize a candidate/president/insurgent/candidate who often flouts the most time-honored rules of American politics (including the peaceful transfer of power) and continues to feed his not insignificant number of supporters with self-aggrandizement and complaints.

Not surprisingly, outrage itself has become the norm, with both President Biden and Democratic nominee Harris’ every word, action and expression being scrutinized with the utmost intensity. Trump’s familiar litany of falsehoods and increasingly nonsensical speeches, meanwhile, are routinely dismissed as “Trump being Trump.”

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell recently accused the New York Times and other media outlets of engaging in “sane-washing,” which he described as attempts to “reduce Donald Trump’s crazy statements into a form that allows them to then understand them.”

So what do you do with a man who believes that a series of lies, if repeated often and loudly enough, somehow become the truth?

Get him a room and let him do it live on TV.

In less than two hours this week, Harris showed America that it is not normal for a candidate to be more concerned about the size of his rallies than about women bleeding to death in parking lots because restrictive abortion laws have made doctors nervous about treating miscarriages. That it is not normal for a former American president to praise dictators and deride NATO, to spread the racist lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio eat dogs and cats, and to continue to insist that he won an election he lost. That it is not normal for a man convicted of 34 felonies to claim he believes in law and order.

Harris laid traps for Trump so obvious that even a child, let alone a man who has attended three presidential debates, could have spotted them from a distance. And like a child, he walked into each one, confident he could talk his way out of it.

And he definitely tried. During the debate, hosted by ABC and moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis, Trump spoke five minutes longer than Harris, often resisted moderators’ attempts to cut him off, and managed to have the last word on every issue.

But when that speech prompted the moderators to step in and point out that, um, no, infanticide is not legal in any state (after Trump insisted once again that some politicians who support abortion rights are in favor of executing babies after birth) and that there were no actual reports of Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats in Ohio (which even Trump’s running mate would say is false), it was difficult to see the former president as anything other than, well, weird.

In addition to the more banal lies about the skyrocketing crime rate (it’s at a record low) and countries illegally admitting patients from mental hospitals to the US (for which there is no evidence), Trump also managed to say things like, “She wants to perform transgender surgeries on illegal immigrants in prison” and “All I can say is, I read that she wasn’t black, that she did it, and that’s what I’m saying. And then I read that she was black, and that’s OK.”

For people too young to remember when Trump was just a rich guy who cheated on his wives, there was a time when such remarks would never have been part of a presidential debate. And as Harris made clear with an admirable range of facial expressions and condescending responses, they should not be considered normal today.

And that’s exactly what Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, have been trying to do over the past two months: convince voters that Americans deserve a president who sees the United States not as a post-apocalyptic hellscape to rule over, but as a place with problems that can be solved if we start treating each other with respect.

That’s not just a sentiment. Harris came into the debate determined to break through the nearly decade-long attempt to defend, defuse, or otherwise embrace Trump’s norm-shattering words, actions, and statements by proving that they aren’t just dangerous. They are absurd.

As Trump seemed determined to prove, he can’t resist making personal attacks (e.g., that President Biden secretly hates Harris and Harris hates both Israelis and Arabs), manipulating voters (e.g., that overturning Roe made everyone happy and Trump had nothing to do with the Jan. 6 insurrection), or allying himself with authoritarian figures (e.g., Hungary’s Viktor Orban), even when it would be in his own interest to avoid all of that.

Harris did nothing but let Trump be Trump, who is out of his mind, and offered him a very clear alternative. Her first act was to introduce herself and shake his hand, a professional courtesy that Trump obviously surprised and did not extend to her. Throughout the debate, Trump referred to the incumbent vice president almost exclusively as “she” or “her” — though he called Biden by name often enough for Harris to remind him, “Of course, I’m not Joe Biden.” He rarely if ever looked at her, instead glaring at the moderators or the camera as if she weren’t there.

Harris, on the other hand, addressed Trump by his name or title and often addressed him directly. When Trump, without any context, spouted the hackneyed canard that Harris wanted to “confiscate your guns,” Harris admonished him to his face: “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners,” she said with exasperated firmness. “We’re not taking anyone’s guns away, so stop lying about this stuff all the time.”

That moment alone was cause for celebration. Even as the country continues to reel from yet another school shooting, Trump continues to insist that any form of tighter gun control will result in people’s legally acquired weapons being taken away, even though most gun owners, like Harris and Walz, support stricter measures to some extent.

Unlike Trump, who was easily lured into defending everything from attending his rallies to his negotiations with “Abdul… the head of the Taliban” (Hibatullah Akhundzada was and is the leader of the Taliban), Harris didn’t seem to take anything personally. To Trump’s repeated comments about whether or not she was black, she responded not with a rebuke but with a reminder that most Americans are tired of division and just want to get along with their friends and neighbors.

She saved her anger and passion for conversations about the women and girls suffering under increasingly restrictive abortion laws, the importance of supporting Ukraine and NATO, and the fact that many former military leaders who served under Trump now consider him “a disgrace.”

While the debate lacked policy details, Harris offered more than Trump, who responded to a question about health care by disparaging the Affordable Care Act and then, when asked if he had an alternative, said he had “a concept of a plan.” (Harris responded to the same question by saying she would expand the ACA and continue her and Biden’s success in capping drug costs and insulin prices.)

After the debate, Trump claimed he had won, but even the most dedicated reasoners, including prominent Republicans, had to admit that Harris had dominated. Trump’s famous whining the next day – that the moderators were biased and the debate was rigged – thus seemed less annoying than embarrassing.

It’s really time to stop lying about this stuff.