‘The End of Our Country’: Trump Paints Dark Picture at Debate

For most of the 90-minute debate between former President Donald J. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the former president bellowed into the microphone, practically spitting at moments as he took the bait time and again and got knocked off his goals.

Instead of repeatedly tying Ms. Harris to President Biden and forcing her to own their record, Mr. Trump came off as angry and scattered as he painted a dark portrait of an America ravaged by crime, overrun by dangerous undocumented immigrants who eat pets and at risk of falling into the hands of an opponent he falsely called a Marxist.

“Our country is being lost,” Mr. Trump said, timing its latest decline to the moment he left the White House. “We’re a failing nation. And it happened three and a half years ago. And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War III.”

He brought up Springfield, Ohio, and reiterated a debunked claim that his campaign has been pushing that Haitian immigrants there have been eating pets. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “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 during a discussion of abortion, Mr. Trump claimed, falsely, that some states with Democratic governors favor being able to “execute” babies after they are born. “In other words, we’ll execute the baby,” he said. No state allows infanticide.

Fear-mongering, and demagoguing on the issue of immigrants, has been Mr. Trump’s preferred speed since he announced his first candidacy for the presidency in June 2015, and he has often found a receptive audience for it. He won his first election in 2016, and lost his second, without dramatically changing his approach; both races