Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris emerged victorious from her debate with a visibly agitated Donald Trump on Tuesday night.

Harris repeatedly got under former President Trump’s skin, setting up verbal traps, in both her answers to moderator questions and her rebuttals of Trump’s statements, intended to bait the three-time Republican Party nominee into veering off script.

Trump rushed headlong into many of those traps by repeating a number of falsehoods, peddling conspiracy theories, and offering long, rambling responses to questions.

Both candidates were obviously prepared for the debate, armed with one-liners or attacks on their opponent.

Harris, for instance, attempted to undercut Trump’s “strongman” image, poking at the former president’s often-fragile ego by claiming world leaders were laughing at him, that military leaders had called him a disgrace, and suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin would “eat [Trump] for lunch.” 

Harris also claimed Trump had been “fired” by 81 million voters — the number who voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 — and ridiculed Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his loss. “Clearly, he’s having a very difficult time processing that,” she needled.

Other zingers employed by Harris were attacks on Trump’s ego, including the claim that people who attend his rallies leave “early out of exhaustion and boredom” — which agitated the former president, who has obsessed over the size of crowds at his campaign rallies.

Harris attempted to undercut Trump’s image as a successful, self-made billionaire business mogul by claiming he inherited $400 million “on a silver platter and then filed for bankruptcy six times.”

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Trump, meanwhile, sought to use one of Harris’s former debate retorts from 2020 against then-Vice President Mike Pence — “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking” — against her. He deployed the clearly rehearsed line during one of his attacks on Harris’s record, which prompted Harris — whose microphone was muted at the time — to object to his characterization of her.

“I’m talking now, if you don’t mind, please,” Trump said. “Does that sound familiar?”

Another seemingly pre-rehearsed line came when Trump attacked Harris’s economic plan, claiming her policy positions are no different from those of Biden, who exited the presidential race in late July and endorsed Harris after delivering a disastrous debate performance in late June.

Trump cast Harris’s plans as overly simplistic, saying her economic policy was as short as “four sentences,” summarizing it as “Run, Spot, run.”

What appeared to be another pre-rehearsed line was a Trump statement that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” combining two issues that fire up Republican-leaning voters.

Trump delivered the line while trying to cast Harris as a “radical left liberal,” referencing a CNN story, dropped a day before the debate, regarding Harris’s response to a 2019 questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union.

In the questionnaire responses, Harris reportedly affirmed her support for allowing state funds to cover health treatments deemed medically necessary for incarcerated transgender individuals and publicly supported cutting funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

While the two issues are separate, they have been conflated as the same issue within right-wing echo chambers. 

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In a takedown of what he called a “hit piece” by CNN, legal expert, journalist, and former Metro Weekly alum Chris Geidner, the author of the Law Dork Substack, attacked the piece’s author, CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski, for turning the question of whether trans people should receive medically necessary care while in government custody into “an engagement-bait trifecta of hate.”

He also criticized other on-air personalities, including Erin Burnett, for inviting Kaczynski on to repeat the assertions from his piece. 

“This is also not a particularly complicated issue,” Geidner wrote. “The government has obligations to provide necessary medical care for those who it forces under its control — whether due to imprisonment or immigration detention — and often faces challenges related to the failure to provide needed care. When deemed medically necessary treatment for a person’s gender dysphoria…gender-affirming medical care is, at the end of the day, medical care.”

At one point during the debate, Trump dove into the conspiracy theory pool, parroting claims that an influx of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are abducting Americans’ domestic pets and using them as food.

“They’re eating the dogs!” he shouted, sounding somewhat unhinged. “They’re eating the cats! They’re eating the pets of the people that live there!” 

While local authorities say the Haitian migrants have placed an additional strain on city services, they say there is no concrete evidence to support Trump’s assertions.

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Additionally, the initial rumors did not involve anything about dogs but rather claimed that Haitian migrants may have been hunting ducks in public parks. Still, right-wing mouthpieces have used the allegations to develop and share memes of cats and ducks and cast a Trump presidency as the only thing standing between the beloved animals and their impending doom. 

(Despite saying his office had “received many inquiries” about Haitians abducting pets, even Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance acknowledged in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that it was possible “all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”)

Republican and right-wing pundits are apoplectic that debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis had the gall to fact-check Trump in real time.

Former journalist-turned-conservative pundit Megyn Kelly went on a foul-mouthed rant after the debate, accusing the moderators of failing to fact-check falsehoods spouted by Harris, and characterizing the debate as a “3-on-1” debate against Trump.

Others predicted that ABC’s viewership would decline due to boycotts by conservatives and even speculated that ABC reporters might be barred from the White House should Trump win the election.

Generally, in politics, if you’re complaining about the debate moderators, you’ve lost the plot.

In June, after Biden’s wretched debate performance, people on the political Left accused CNN of bias and criticized debate moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper for failing to fact-check the candidates in real time.

While CNN has shaped more of its coverage in a way to appeal to more conservatives — hoping to shed its previous liberal reputation and capitalize on the success of right-wing news organizations — it’s a cardinal rule of politics that if you’re scrambling for answers or justifications, you’re likely losing.

In the end, the debate featured the party nominees of the country’s two main political parties engaged in a sparring match, a verbal back-and-forth in which both tried to stick to their political talking points — often avoiding answering questions directly — and deliver biting one-liners at their opponents’ expense.

It is unlikely, in such a polarized nation, that the debates will move the needle or shift a significant number of “undecided” voters into one political coalition or another. 

However, given the level of outrage expressed uniformly across right-wing media and on social media, the win has to be given to Harris.