The debate between Harris and Trump wasn’t close — and 4 other takeaways

Well, that was different from the June 27 debate between President Biden and Donald Trump.

If that June debate was a five-alarm fire for Democrats that eventually forced Biden from the race, after Tuesday’s debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s proponents should probably check the temperature in their own house.

What happened — and what could it mean going forward?

Here are 5 takeaways:

1. This debate wasn’t close.

The majority of the focus coming into Tuesday was about how Harris would handle her first-ever presidential debate with someone who had been on this stage many times. Could she answer questions about her position shifts; parry attacks from Trump, someone who tries to be the alpha on these stages; could she answer the attack that she’s light on policy; and could she appear “presidential”?

She may have seemed nervous at first, but she quickly found her voice and more than acquitted herself well. All of those questions were quickly dispatched:

• She explained her shift on fracking (“My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy, so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil”).
• Harris was far more dominant than Trump, from beginning to end. She called him “weak and wrong,” inverting the political cliché that “strong and wrong” beats “weak and right.” Harris answered questions, then redirected and baited him on a host of issues.
• She got under Trump’s skin — something he usually tries to do — by saying that people at his rallies leave “early out of exhaustion and boredom,” painting him as out of touch and a bad businessman for inheriting $400 million “on a silver platter and then filed for bankruptcy six times,” and chiding him for being “fired by 81 million people” in the