The Narcissist Lost the Debate
Harris challenged Trump to talk about helping other people, not himself. He couldn’t do it.
DONALD TRUMP LOST TUESDAY NIGHT’S DEBATE for many reasons. In theory, some of his mistakes could be fixed. Some Republican politicians are blaming his debate prep team and suggesting that officials in his campaign should be fired.
But Trump’s problem is bigger than a bad debate. He can’t fire the person responsible for his bad performance, because that person is himself. And he can’t repair his many bad answers, because those answers were driven by a fundamental defect: He simply doesn’t care about other people.
That’s what Kamala Harris exposed. She used the debate to speak to Americans. She told them how she would improve their lives. You can argue with her plans or her level of clarity about them, but at least she described those plans and addressed them to voters. She said Trump had no such plans. She accused him of focusing on himself, not on people’s daily concerns.
To rebut that accusation, Trump needed to set aside his ego and speak to viewers about how he would help them. But he couldn’t do it. Instead, he bragged about himself—which just proved Harris’s point.
HARRIS’S FIRST ANSWER in the debate was about plans. “I was raised as a middle-class kid,” she began. “And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America.” She gave two examples: a $6,000 child tax credit and a $50,000 tax deduction for small-business startups.
Trump talked about what he wouldn’t do. He said he wouldn’t raise taxes. He disowned the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. And he claimed credit, preposterously, for all the jobs gained during the Biden administration. “I was the one that created them,” he declared.
That boast illustrated Harris’s point. In her next sentence, she drove home her message. “Donald Trump has no plan for you,” she told viewers, “because he is more interested in defending himself than he is in looking out for you.”
Again and again, Trump hurled insults and obvious lies—“She’s a Marxist”—but offered no constructive ideas. Then, half an hour into the debate, Harris said something that really ticked him off:
People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams, and your desires. And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first.
The correct response to this accusation—if Trump were a normal human being or even a sensible politician—would have been to talk about people’s needs and dreams. That would have shown that the accusation of self-absorption was false. Instead, the first words out of his mouth were: “First, let me respond as to the rallies.”
“People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics,” Trump declared. It was an almost comical affirmation of Harris’s point. And seconds later, he launched into a wacky right-wing conspiracy theory about migrants:
Look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. . . . In Springfield [Ohio], they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country.
David Muir, one of the debate’s moderators, pointed out that the city manager in Springfield had said the story wasn’t true. But Trump refused to listen. “Maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager,” he scoffed.
In his next answer, Trump brought up how many people had voted for him in 2020. “I got more votes than any Republican in history by far,” he crowed. “In fact, I got more votes than any president—sitting president—in history by far.”
When Muir noted that Trump had actually lost that election, Trump refused to accept it. “There’s so much proof” of fraud, he insisted. “I’ll show you Georgia, and I’ll show you Wisconsin, and I’ll show you Pennsylvania. . . . We have so many facts.” (These are lies or delusions—take your pick.)
IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS, Trump offered no solutions. He said his charisma would cure everything, starting with the war in Ukraine—which he would somehow end even before taking office, based on his personal relationships with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. But Trump’s main point was that if he were still president, none of the bad stuff—the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, the carnage of the pullout from Afghanistan—would have happened. In Trump’s mind, the world’s tragedies are just another illustration of the greatness of Trump.
When the debate turned to health care, Trump came up empty again. The other moderator, Linsey Davis, asked: “Tonight, nine years after you first started running, do you have a plan, and can you tell us what it is?”1
“We are working on things,” said Trump.
“You still do not have a plan?” asked Davis.
“I have concepts of a plan,” said Trump. “And you’ll be hearing about it in the not-too-distant future.”
The candidates’ closing statements reinforced the difference between them. Harris’s final words were about solving problems: “I intend to be a president for all Americans and focus on what we can do over the next ten and twenty years to build back up our country by investing right now in you, the American people.”
Trump’s final words, in a statement devoid of ideas, were about his political opponents: “The worst president, the worst vice president in the history of our country.”
A PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE isn’t just an argument. It’s a job interview. If you win the argument but come off as a jerk, you might lose the election.
When your opponent tells people that you care only about yourself, no amount of talking about yourself can answer that charge. You can’t argue your way out of the accusation. The only effective answer is to act in a way that disproves the accusation.
That’s what Trump failed to do. He failed because he’s incapable of it. And that, among many other reasons, is why he shouldn’t be president.
Correction (September 11, 2024, 8:00 p.m. EDT): As originally published, this passage misattributed two questions to David Muir that were asked by Linsey Davis; the attributions have been fixed.