PHILADELPHIA — Kamala Harris repeatedly called Donald Trump a “disgrace.” She mocked his crowd sizes and questioned his mental fitness. And she said world leaders laughed at him behind his back, confident he can be manipulated with “flattery and favors.”
Throughout the 90-minute ABC News debate on Tuesday, Harris tried to put the former president on the defensive, using Georgia-themed examples to burrow under his skin.
When Trump falsely claimed he won Georgia and other battleground states in 2020, the vice president countered that the Republican was “fired by 81 million people” and that his embrace of election fraud lies is “deeply troubling.”
“We cannot afford to have a president in the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election,” she said, digging in deeper: “You did in fact lose that election.”
And when Trump accused Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis of pursuing an election-interference case for political reasons, bludgeoning her name in the process, Harris brought up Trump’s long history of threatening to use executive powers to punish his perceived enemies.
“This is someone who has openly said he would terminate — and I’m quoting — terminate the Constitution of the United States and that he would weaponize the Department of Justice against his political enemies,” Harris said.
“Someone who has openly expressed disdain for members of our military,” she said. “Understand what it would mean if Donald Trump was back in the White House with no guardrails.”
Trump often took the bait, leveling personal attacks against Harris. He claimed without evidence that President Joe Biden secretly “hates” his vice president and called Democrats “weak and pathetic.”
And he didn’t apologize for questioning Harris’ racial identity, though he also didn’t lean into his previous criticism of the nation’s first vice president of Black and Asian American descent.
“All I can say is I read where she was not Black, that she put out, and then I read that she was Black. And that’s OK. Either one is OK with me,” he said. “That’s up to her.”
Harris called it a “tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president who has consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people.”
In something of a surprise, no firearms-related questions came up throughout the debate, which took place less than a week after a shooting at a Barrow County high school left two students and two teachers dead.
But when Trump leveled a broader accusation that Harris and her allies want to confiscate guns, the Democrat issued a blunt response.
“We’re not taking anyone’s guns away,” she said, “so stop with the continuous lying about that.”
