Harris managed to outdo Trump on TV

There is a popular belief that the best way to watch a debate is to turn off the sound. This may seem completely illogical, because after all, it is a debate and not a silent film.

But the idea makes sense. This is a visual medium as much as an auditory one. How the candidate presents himself, reacts and responds is arguably more important than what he says. History is rife with evidence to support this: Nixon’s shadow at five o’clock, George H. W. Bush checking his watch, Al Gore’s strangely intrusive body language.

On this front, as on so many others, it is hard not to come away from Tuesday night’s presidential debate without being convinced that Kamala Harris has won a major victory.

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The vice president may have had a rocky start, with some nervousness showing as she moved left and right behind the lectern. But she quickly settled in, looking directly at the camera, smiling and speaking confidently. Her demeanor was calm and professional. She didn’t seem to step out of character or get upset. But she didn’t seem indifferent to her surroundings, either. When Trump lied, she shook her head. When he said something truly stupid, she smiled knowingly.

The defining image of the evening will be the wide shots of the stage: a sullen Trump, looking depressed and increasingly agitated, never once appears to look at Harris. She, instead, moved to the right as he spoke, turning toward him like a mother to an angry child, or to look at him in confusion when he lost his temper.

In the end, Harris beat Trump in television, which is a remarkable feat, and one that Trump will likely regret. For him, television is a gospel message.

Harris and her team are primarily responsible for this. Her preparations for the evening were evident throughout. She and her aides went into it with a plan to provoke Trump into overreacting. And he followed through — repeatedly fumbling sections of the debate that would have favored him (on topics like immigration, inflation, and Afghanistan) to move on to side issues that Harris tossed around like friends to a hungry shark (how much was his inheritance???).

In other words, it wasn’t just Harris’s preparations but Trump’s flaws that decided the night. He failed to stay focused or calm. He never said he would veto a national abortion ban, he hinted that he would try again to repeal Obamacare, and he refused to say that he wanted Ukraine to win. To be fair, he may think a veto shouldn’t be considered, that Obamacare should be repealed, and that the Russians are the good guys. But smart debaters can deftly sidestep these kinds of traps. Trump allowed Harris to position himself to his right on China and crime. He presented himself as a leader on “fertilization.” He bought into the online MAGA fever dream that dogs are being eaten by immigrants in Ohio. His closing remarks addressed energy policy in… Germany.

It wasn’t a very clever speech. And again, you didn’t have to turn up the volume to understand. The frustration was evident on Trump’s face. As the evening wore on, he went from a cadenced speech to something more akin to barking.

And this was made clear after the debate was over, when the second most interesting image of the evening was produced. It was of Trump walking out into the debate hall, the place where a candidate sends his aides to pressure the press — because God knows that’s the domain of the plebs, not the person running the debate.

A photo taken Semafor’s Shelby Talcott shows Trump staring out at the sea of ​​reporters, as they were kept at a distance by police on the scene. He stands alone, seemingly searching for what to say and who to address. There is no trace of triumph in his posture or his gaze. His presence was an admission of failure, and he seemed to own it: