This Was the Beginning of Donald Trump’s Final Unraveling

Let’s cut to the chase: “I have concepts of a plan” was the defining moment of this debate and is going to go down in presidential debate lore as one of the most pathetic lines in debate history. For the record, it was about health care—specifically, the long-awaited but never arriving Republican replacement for Obamacare. David Muir asked him if he had a plan to finally deliver what conservative lawmakers spent well over a decade failing to solve. And he uttered the imperishable words.

Kamala Harris was really good Tuesday night—really, really good. She accomplished everything she needed to accomplish. She sliced and diced him. She dangled bait and he leapt at the hook. But as good as she was, Trump was more bad than Harris was good. Or maybe he was bad because she was good: That is to say, she wrong-footed him time after time after time in ways that President Joe Biden did not, throwing him off his game, staring him down, speaking directly to him, challenging him, saying “you” and pointing right at him. She spanked him. Said Stephanie Ruhle, in a judgment Trump would consider crushing: “She beat him at the business of television.”

In sports, when Team A looks shaky, the announcers don’t often point out that Team A looks shaky because Team B is just so goddamn good. Well, that’s what was happening here. Harris was consistently sharp, and Trump was consistently tripped up. As Tim Walz put it on MSNBC post-debate, as the night went on, “Donald Trump got angrier and smaller and more irrelevant.”

It’s still true that he got in a few good licks here and there. He landed a punch or two on the border. And now, simply by virtue of having been the president for four years, he knows some stuff that he didn’t know in 2016. It’s true, for example, that crime is down in Venezuela, although it’s not because all the bad guys of Venezuela are coming here. But it isn’t true that he shut down the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline. That’s still happening.  

But overall, Trump was just, well, sad. He needs to reach for a world leader who vouches for him, and the wheel lands on…Viktor Orban? He tries to argue that his “very fine people” on both sides at Charlottesville comment was taken out of context and debunked, he points to…Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity and “Jesse” (Watters, I guess—he didn’t finish the sentence, as was the case with so many of his sentences). And while “I have concepts of a plan” was the worst and dumbest sentence he uttered, a close second would have to be, “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” The only thing he left out of that sentence is that she plans to steer the catering contract to Comet Ping Pong.

Was this Trump’s Biden moment? He wasn’t quite as bad as Joe Biden was back in that June debate. But the mere fact that I was forced to consider that question speaks volumes. His age, his narrow-mindedness, his mental incontinence all came aggressively to the fore in a way that would have been impossible against Biden. A younger, smarter, more energetic candidate standing 10 feet away just laid it all bare.

Oh, wait. Have I not mentioned “they’re eating the dogs”? I could. Not. Believe. He actually said that. “But people said it on television!” Dear God.

Meanwhile, Harris knocked her abortion answer out of the park. Trump was left blubbering and lying about Democrats supporting abortions after birth—along the way confusing the governors of Virginia and West Virginia, which many Americans may not think of as a high crime but was another indicator of his addled state. On almost every question, almost every exchange, she won, or at least earned a draw on the issues that favored Trump (the border, Afghanistan). This happened because on almost every question, he said something weird or incoherent. A couple of times, what Trump said was so far removed from even his tenuous concept of reality that the debate moderators had no choice but to factcheck him live.

What happens next? Well, the Taylor Swift endorsement that came in about half an hour after the debate ended could be a little harbinger. Don’t laugh. Swift’s cultural power is enormous. Enormous. Last year at about this time, it was a Swift Instagram post that was credited with a massive wave of voter registrations. She had not, at the time, picked a favorite. And by the way, she was born and raised in…Pennsylvania—just FYI.

Over the weekend, the Harris-Walz campaign sent out a press release saying that after the debate, they were going on a barnstorming tour of every media market in every swing state. If that’s accurate, that’s a big investment and a big deal. In Pennsylvania, it doesn’t mean just Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. It means Harrisburg and Erie and Wilkes Barre-Scranton and Johnstown-Altoona. In Michigan, it means Detroit and Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor and Lansing and Saginaw. This is what Democratic campaigns absolutely need to do—not just go to Philly and punt, but blanket the state and hit the smaller cities where presidential candidates rarely venture. (Wednesday, which is September 11, she’s memorializing those lost in the terrorist attacks, but lo and behold, one stop takes her to…Johnstown.)

What will Trump do? Complain about the moderators? About how rigged this was? He’s likely just going to reinforce everything that was unappealing, worn out, and out-of-touch about him at the debate. Of course there’s a chance Trump will turn it around. But we may have just witnessed the beginning of a downward spiral that’s going to get weirder and worse over the next 55 days. Pass the popcorn.