Kamala Harris and Donald Trump met in a fiery debate – their first of the 2024 US presidential election.
They debated policy but personal attacks also dominated the 90 minute event in Philadelphia.
Kamala Harris frequently rattled the former president with personal attacks that threw him off message and raised the temperature of this highly-anticipated contest.
She said people leave Trump rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom” – he said people don’t go to hers in the first place.
Donald Trump criticized Kamala Harris’s record on immigration and the border, and also her shifting policy positions – Harris blamed him for “Trump abortion bans” and the January 6 attacks on the Capitol.
The pattern for much of this debate was Harris goading her Republican rival into making extended defences of his past conduct and comments. He gladly obliged, raising his voice at times and shaking his head.
Americans should go to a Trump rally, Kamala Harris said during an early question about immigration, because they were illuminating.
“People start leaving the rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” she said.
That barb clearly rattled Donald Trump, as he then spent most of his answer – on a topic that should have been one of his main areas of strength – defending his rally sizes and belittling hers.
Donald Trump went from there to an extended riff on a debunked report that Haitian immigrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating their neighbour’s pets.
But Harris turned the topic to Trump’s proposed across-the-board tariffs, which she labelled a “Trump sales tax”, and then brought up Project 2025, the controversial independent conservative plan for a future Republican administration.
As he has in the past, Trump distanced himself from the project and defended his tariff plan, noting that the Biden administration had kept many of the tariffs in his first presidency. They were valid points, but it kept him from hammering the vice-president on inflation and consumer prices.
Snap polls suggest Kamala Harris won the debate, but Donald Trump says afterwards that she “lost very badly”.
With the election taking place on November 5, Kamala Harris is slightly ahead in national opinion polls – but key battleground states are very tight.
A snap CNN poll of voters watching said that Kamala Harris performed better and betting markets said the same.
This is a snapshot that could be momentary but the Harris tactic of putting Trump on the defensive was clear early in the evening when the topics covered were the economy and abortion.
Public opinion surveys indicate many Americans are unhappy with how the Biden administration – of which Harris is a key member – has handled inflation and the economy.
