Debate Disaster: Trump’s Seething, Unhinged, Incoherent Onstage Meltdown

In their first and maybe last face-to-face encounter, Vice President Kamala Harris successfully got under Donald Trump’s skin early in their debate Tuesday night, putting him into angry rally speech mode where he spent the rest of the encounter shouting his usual lies and insults.

He claimed his top officials, from chief of staff John Kelly to defense secretary Mark Esper to joint chiefs of staff chair Mark Milley were all terrible people. “So when somebody does a bad job, and you take a guy like Esper, he was no good, I fired him.”

He claimed no one ever left his campaign rallies early: “People don’t leave my rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”

He brought up a debunked conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town were eating peoples’ pets: “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats!”

Eventually he even claimed that President Joe Biden disliked Harris because she was now the nominee instead of him: “I’ll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can’t stand her.”

Trump began the debate relatively calm, as he was during most of his debate against Biden in June, but lost that composure within 15 minutes of the start. He shook his head when Harris spoke, but seemed unwilling to look her way, he badgered the moderators into turning his microphone back on as they would try to move to the next question, and he lashed out against Harris personally.

“She’s a Marxist,” he claimed. “Her father’s a Marxist professor and he taught her well.”

From there, Trump’s lies came fast and at high volume. He falsely claimed that foreign countries pay U.S. tariffs, when in reality American importers and consumers do. He falsely claimed that