Who won Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s first debate?

I joined a panel of commentators at The Guardian to assess the Harris/Trump debate of September 10, 2024.

For the entirety of this debate, Donald Trump never once uttered Kamala Harris’s name, a sign of enormous disrespect. What he did do was try to shush Harris with a “quiet, please”, silence her with an “I’m talking now. Does that sound familiar?” (an apparent reference to her famous line during the vice-presidential debate four years ago), and brazenly state that President Biden “hates her. He can’t stand her.”

Harris smiled confidently at the ludicrous barbs.

Meanwhile, Trump reacted to his own statement that he lost the 2020 election “by a whisker” first by stating: “I said that?” and then by saying he was “being sarcastic”. Asked about his ideas for healthcare for Americans, he replied with: “I have concepts of a plan.” Challenged on his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he responded with: “I had nothing to do with that except they asked me to make a speech.”

Trump was flailing. Under pressure, he took no responsibility for his past actions and instead threw invective and invented facts as he went along.

Harris prevailed. She came out swinging, pointed her attacks on Trump’s record, and presented a future that wasn’t based on fear but on opportunity. She intelligently called Trump “someone who would rather run on a problem rather than fixing the problem”.

But her policy positions were also clearly leaning to the right of the Democratic agenda. She called for many more agents patrolling the border (rather than real and comprehensive immigration reform), defended the right to abortion by extreme examples of injury (such as incest) rather than an ordinary woman’s right to choose, and offered no policy change for Palestinians beyond “working round the clock” for a ceasefire. In other words, more of the same.

Harris won the debate. Her performance and ideas are better. But many of those ideas, shared by both parties, need rethinking.

You can read comments from all the panelists here.