CHRISTIAN WHITON: The Big Trump-Harris Debate Informed Little, Changed Less

Former President Donald Trump debated two newsreaders from ABC News along with  incumbent Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night. Amid methodically lowered expectations ahead of the debate and softball questions, Harris did a serviceable job of masking her radical views and responsibility for the disasters that the Biden-Harris administration has created. Trump also held his own in what was largely a painful debate for all involved, especially the viewing audience.

First the optics, which drive most of how people perceive any TV performance. The split screen and muted microphones did no favors to Harris. When she spoke, Trump mostly stood steadily and faced the moderators. When Trump spoke, she grimaced, gawked at him, frowned, bounced around, and blinked wildly (a sign of stress). She looked like an activist prosecuting attorney skilled at slinging talking points, not a president. The angry Donald Trump whom Democrats hoped would return from his first unfortunate debate with Joe Biden in 2020 was absent.

Second, on substance, there wasn’t much. Harris offered three dud proposals for people who want to buy homes or start businesses, each of which were oddly absent from the past four years of the administration she helps lead and her preceding career in the Senate. Otherwise, she graced the audience with bromides like: “I was raised as a middle-class kid.” “My passion is small business.” “Let’s chart a path for the future and not go back to the past.” “Let’s turn the page and move forward.” And: “Can we please just have discourse about how we are going to invest in the dream of the American people.”

These were weaved with Harris’s now familiar aggrieved black woman act and schoolmarm persona that are just as off-putting to a large subset of voters as Trump’s casual imprecisions and insults are to another.

The real debaters of the night were ABC’s newsreaders: David Muir and Linsey Davis. If an alien from another planet had come to America and watched the debate, he would have assumed the issues voters care most about are federal regulation of abortion, the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, the contested 2020 presidential election, the racial identity of one’s opponent and climate change. These were the issues that the ABC presenters thought warranted much attention. Surely, it is a coincidence that these are also the topics on which the Harris campaign would like to dwell instead of the looming economic, fiscal and national security fiascos created by the Biden-Harris administration’s policies and decisions. The presenters successfully interrupted Trump when he tried to pivot to issues about which Americans actually care.