The Moment Trump Couldn’t Resist Bungling

She looked faux-fascinated, as if coaxing him into thinking he was onto something — nodding, head-tilting, performatively squinting, smiling a little, then a little more — a reel of soon-to-be memes, screaming silent bemusement with a hand on her chin.

He looked miserable.

The initial question, at least, should have been fertile terrain for former President Donald Trump: a prompt for Vice President Kamala Harris about immigration, a vulnerability for her, and how she might diverge on the subject from her boss, whose policies on the border have often come under withering criticism.

Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times

But by the time Trump got to talking, he had something else on his mind: rally attendance.

Also cats.

It can be said that Harris was well prepared in leading him astray. After blaming Trump for helping to tank a congressional border bill, Harris unboxed an attack line that seemed handcrafted by a team of Trumpologists to enrage him, distracting him with his own vanity.

“I’m going to actually do something really unusual,” she said, addressing the audience at home. “I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies. Because it’s a really interesting thing to watch.”

Smirking, provoking, Harris ticked through some common Trump digressions, like windmills and the fictional killer Hannibal Lecter. Trump’s eyes narrowed, and his head cocked to the left.

“And what you will also notice,” she said, as Trump bobbed a bit, pendulum-like, “is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

On those two nouns, Trump’s eyes shot up. Harris completed her thought: “The one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”

And then, Trump talked about Trump.

The former president, a merry anarchist of a debater since his first campaign, can generally be relied upon to touch every stove, sound every air horn. This is a man who once stared into an eclipse.

Yet in an evening rife with missed opportunities and curious rabbit holes for Trump, this was the exchange where he seemed to lose his way — the temptation he could not resist, no matter how many allies might have hoped he could hear their pleas to double back.

As an ABC moderator, David Muir, strained to redirect the conversation, asking Trump about the immigration bill that Harris had brought up, he was not interested.

“First, let me respond as to the rallies ...”

Soon, Harris’ right hand returned to her chin.

When Trump was done litigating his rally crowds (“We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics”) and conspiracy-casting about hers (“People don’t go to her rallies — there’s no reason to go — and the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there”), he turned to a widely debunked yarn about Haitian immigrants in Ohio abducting and feasting on their neighbors’ pets.

“They’re eating the dogs!” he said. “The people that came in — they’re eating the cats!”

Harris threw her head back. She clasped her hands. Muir refuted the claims as Trump glowered.

“I’ve seen people on television!” he protested. “People on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food!’”

Harris shook her head, projecting the deep concern of a disappointed relative. She laughed for a moment.

“Talk about extreme,” she said, a bit risk-averse after already getting what she had wanted. A different candidate — Bill Clinton, Trump — might have let fly a ferocious zinger, unrehearsed and unmerciful. She let it rest.

But she did have something else to add, culled again from her roster of buzz-phrases that make Trump see matador red.

Might viewers like to know, she wondered, about the Republicans who have endorsed her campaign? Republicans like Liz Cheney, the former member of Congress and relentless Trump nemesis?

Trump yanked his head skyward. Now he was pretending to laugh, unconvincingly.

c.2024 The New York Times Company