By any affordable metric, Vice President Kamala Harris soundly beat former President Donald Trump in Tuesday night time’s presidential debate.
She did it by demonstrating superior data not solely of coverage, however of her opponent’s psychology. Harris found out precisely how one can get Trump indignant, how one can trick him into veering off beam, and how one can preserve the talk on favorable terrain.
To place it extra bluntly: Harris manipulated Trump into spiraling at a number of factors throughout their first (solely?) debate.
Let me provide you with an instance. Early on within the debate, the moderators tried to press Harris on President Joe Biden’s unpopular immigration report, asking her if she would have completed something in another way from her present boss — a subject favorable for Trump.
Harris answered the query — however then took a seemingly unrelated shot at Trump’s rallies.
“I’m going to ask you to attend certainly one of Donald Trump’s rallies as a result of it’s a extremely attention-grabbing factor to observe. You will note throughout the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He’ll discuss [how] windmills trigger most cancers. And what additionally, you will discover is that folks begin leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and tedium,” the vp stated.
This gave Trump a selection; both prosecute Harris on immigration, a problem the place she’s weak, or go on a rant in protection of his vaunted rallies. You possibly can guess what he selected.
“Let me reply as to the rallies,” Trump stated. “She stated individuals begin leaving. Folks don’t go to her rallies. There’s no cause to go. And the those that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there.”
That started a tailspin: a sequence of bizarre tangents, together with a humiliating rant concerning the utterly pretend downside of Haitian migrants supposedly consuming canine in Springfield, Ohio, punctuated by immense concern concerning the honor of Trump rallies. He by no means actually acquired again to what he ought to have been doing — attacking Harris on migration throughout the southern border.
By needling Trump the place it hurts — the rallies he cares about a lot — Harris managed to get him off steadiness, and he truthfully by no means actually recovered.
Harris deployed this technique repeatedly.
Throughout an change on crime, Harris introduced up Trump’s personal prison conviction — main him to go on a diatribe about “political prosecutions” as a substitute of successfully pushing Harris on her flip-flops on crime coverage.
She introduced up world leaders calling him a “shame,” pushing him into bragging about his relationship with Hungarian “strongman” (in Trump’s phrases) Viktor Orbán, maybe not a callout that the swing voters of Michigan, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania have been clamoring for. She needled his closeness with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, blasting “what you suppose is a friendship” with a “dictator who would eat you for lunch.”
Every time, Trump took the bait — dropping management of his mood and going off message, whereas Harris regarded on what will need to have been glee.
In hindsight, this technique might sound revolutionary, nevertheless it speaks to one thing well-known about Trump’s psychology.
Overlaying overseas coverage throughout the Trump years, one concern I heard loads from nationwide safety professionals was that Trump could possibly be simply manipulated: His well-known vainness and narcissism made it straightforward for overseas powers to extract coverage favors via private flattery and lavish receptions. This appears to elucidate, a minimum of partially, how Trump went from hostile to pleasant with overseas leaders like Kim Jong Un and Xi Jinping.
But when overseas leaders may determine how one can manipulate Trump’s self-absorption, so too may his home opposition. Harris performed on that immense pleasure Tuesday night time.
This tactic wasn’t the one cause she received the talk — see her sturdy reply on abortion, amongst different issues — nevertheless it was an important one.