Trump fumed and his face turned red. Then the debate got weird.
Kamala Harris laid the bait for Donald Trump by attacking the most precious thing to him in the world — his rallies.
“He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about how windmills cause cancer. What you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. The one thing you will not hear him talk about is you,” she said, in a moment that was likely rehearsed for days.
Trump’s eyes widened and his face dropped. He could no longer hear the moderators above the ringing in his ears.
“Let me respond just to the rallies,” he said, ignoring a question about the border. “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics,” he went on.
The man who has spent every debate of his life burrowing beneath the skin of his opponents was finally on the receiving end of it.
From that moment on, his voice rarely fell below a shout. His sentences were disjointed. His syntax was confused. His face was red. His brow was furrowed. He leaned forward towards the empty space in front of him.
The worst was still yet to come.
In perhaps the strangest moment of the debate, or of any presidential debate in US history, Trump stumbled from a defense of his rallies to the sharing of an online conspiracy theory about Haitian migrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs — the people that came in — they are eating the cats. They’re eating … they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” he said.
When the moderator, ABC’s David Muir, said there had been no credible reports of pets being harmed, the former president responded with an answer that might have prompted a wellness