American Battleground: Cat people are still haunting Trump’s campaign after debate showdown with Harris

CNN
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Editor’s Note: This is the fourth of a five-part series that tells the story of the closing months of the 2024 presidential campaign, starting with the June debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. Read the first, second and third installments.

“Kamalaaaaaaaa!”

Oprah Winfrey is belting it out in her sweet home of Chicago, welcoming the joyous, raucous, unmerciful dismantling of former President Donald Trump that is defining this Democratic National Convention. “We are now so fired up, we can’t wait to leave here and do something!” she shouts to the rapturous crowd. “And what we’re going to do is elect Kamala Harris as the next president of the United States!”

The convention that had threatened to become a political wake as President Joe Biden’s campaign sank, has been reanimated by the rise of Vice President Harris. On the third full week of August, in the City of Big Shoulders, the party is flexing.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was edged out by Trump in 2016, proclaims, “We have him on the run now!” Biden, former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and Jason Carter, serving as proxy for his grandfather in hospice, former President Jimmy Carter, take turns lavishing praise on Harris and mocking Trump’s ego, lies and conspiracy theories.

Their presence is a reminder that no presidents, current or past, have ever endorsed Trump. Former first lady Michelle Obama claps back to the Biden debate when Trump said of immigrants, “They’re taking Black jobs, now.” She brings down the house by saying, “Who’s going to tell him that the job he is currently seeking might just be one of those ‘Black jobs’?”

Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz hypes the crowd while his 17-year-old son creates one of the most human moments in the whole bitter election, cheering, weeping and shouting, “That’s my dad!”

Finally, amid rampant rumors of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift or both showing up (neither did), only one thing is left.

“I accept your nomination.”

Harris, mindful of the historic nature of her candidacy and potential victory, steels her army of supporters for the closing months of battle and tries to reach anyone who might want to join them. Although heavily laced with savage attacks on Trump, her message is decidedly more optimistic than his.

“America, let us show each other and the world who we are and what we stand for,” she says, “freedom, opportunity, compassion, dignity, fairness and endless possibility.”

The ovation is deafening.

“I mean, the energy I saw on that floor last night was unlike anything I’ve ever seen at a convention,” says Mo Elleithee, executive director of the Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service. He also detects a subtle but important evolution in how Democrats are portraying Trump. “For a very long period of time, we elevated him to the status of demagogue, and what they did very effectively… was paint a picture for the American people of Donald Trump as just a small man… who has no depth, no substance, and is just full of gripes.”

And now Trump has a fresh complaint. Each night of the Democratic convention drew higher television ratings than the matching night of the Republican convention, and 26.2 million people watched Harris’ speech. The number is appropriate in this marathon election, and higher than Trump’s at 25.4 million.

Over the coming days, Harris will slowly improve her position in the polls while she continues grabbing headlines as the still new, intriguing arrival. In the tedious, long chase for the presidency, many have had their fill of Trump, while pollsters find a chief complaint about Harris is that voters have not seen her enough. It is the perfect equation to draw maximum attention her way, while depriving Trump of the spotlight. By the numbers, the race remains impossibly close but now Trump, like Biden before he stepped out, is on the statistical downside in many samples. Trump has gone from the best few weeks of his campaign so far, to the worst. Any ideas his camp had about easy victory are gone.

“They were not trying to expand the map anymore,” says CNN’s John King. “Trump thought almost that he could coast – do a couple of rallies a week, do TV ads, and ‘I’m good.’ Can’t do that anymore.”

And while Trump fans fret, their man gives every sign he still does not really think Harris will be a serious threat in the coming debate. He is about to learn otherwise.

In Philadelphia, a birthplace of American democracy, Harris is charging Trump before the first question. Striding past her podium, striking deep into his half of the stage, she thrusts an open hand out forcing him to shake.

“Kamala Harris,” she says as if she owns the place, “Let’s have a good debate.”

Then, prompted to start by ABC News hosts David Muir and Linsey Davis, Harris launches a fast assault on one of Trump’s strong points in the polls: the economy.

“I was raised as a middle-class kid,” she says, “and I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America.”

She talks about her policy plans to help people buy homes, start businesses and raise children. She portrays Trump’s keystone idea for improving the economy, a 20% tariff on imports, as a sales tax on families. Trump has barely moved, but when his mic comes on, he does precisely what Harris wants. He steps into a trap.

“First of all, I have no sales tax,” he says. “That’s an incorrect statement. She knows that.”

Harris has lured him into a pattern she will exploit all evening. When questions suit her, she will answer. When they don’t, she will jab the notoriously thin-skinned former president and let his seething outrage take the spotlight away from the troublesome subject. Trump’s debate prep team predicted and feared this strategy so much they brought in Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz to play tormentor in practice rounds with their candidate.

“They were exasperated,” CNN’s Kristen Holmes hears from the campaign. “They really put a lot into getting him ready for this and the one thing they told him that he couldn’t do over and over and over again was, ‘Don’t take the bait.’ And he took the bait.”

Relentlessly, Harris skewers Trump about his “lies, grievances, and name calling.” She ridicules his “same old, tired playbook.” She rips his plans for almost everything as pure folly or, worse, secret tax breaks for the wealthy. Trump gamely tries to counter with the positive messages so many Republicans want him to promote. “We had the greatest economy,” he says, “we did a phenomenal job with the pandemic…and people give me credit for rebuilding the military.”

But Harris taunts Trump as if he is a chained bear, forcing him to dance with her words and expressions.  The New York Times will describe her arsenal of poses and silent retorts as “an arched brow. A quiet sigh. A hand on her chin. A laugh. A pitying glance. A dismissive shake of her head.” Trump just glowers.

For Democrats, she is revealing the unstable, fragile, easily manipulated Trump they want voters to see, remember and fear. His refusal to even look at Harris through most of the debate raises other suspicions.

“I think he was trying to avoid getting triggered,” says former Harris aide Ashley Etienne. “I know the one thing that really gets him unhinged is having a woman challenge him.” Trump has long saved his most personal, verbal attacks for women, calling them nasty, dogs, pigs, ugly. Strong women in particular, including Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and now Harris, seem to set him off.

Still, he trudges grimly on, circling persistently toward the matter of undocumented immigrants. “They’re dangerous,” he says. “They’re at the highest level of criminality. And we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast.” Never mind that most of his claims about the immigrant community are inflammatory and false. The subject never fails to ignite his base and it was the cornerstone of his whole improbable, original bid for the presidency.

It is also a weak point for Harris. Although she was never the “border czar” Trump claims, the Biden administration’s difficulty limiting the flood of people from Mexico and points south is fair game. When the moderators ask what she would do differently, she lights into Trump’s squelching of a bipartisan border deal in Congress, and then throws a haymaker.

“I’m actually going to do something very unusual,” she says, “and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies, because it’s really interesting to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer, and what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

For Trump, who brags, obsesses, and routinely inflates the size of his audiences, it is an unforgiveable insult.

“People don’t go to her rallies, there’s no reason to go,” he says when asked to respond to the comment about the legislation he killed. “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” He reels off into an unmoored string of consciousness about how America has failed under Biden and Harris, how World War III is on the way, and when he finally works his way back to immigrants, he unspools a quote that will survive as one of the most absurd statements ever made in a presidential debate.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he says, leaning forward and punching the words, “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there!”

After that, nothing else matters.

The problem began when Miss Sassy went missing.

The pet cat belonged to a woman living in the moderate-size town of Springfield, Ohio, which had been dealing with a heavy influx of legal – yes, legal – immigrants. The woman told police she suspected some of them, Haitians, had taken Miss Sassy and cooked her for dinner. The story was shared online, jumped into the right-wing echo chamber, and soon the former president and his running mate were calling it fact.

Springfield’s Haitian community fell under suspicion. Dozens of bomb threats were leveled at the town’s schools, hospitals and government buildings. State and local officials, including Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, said the cat tale was unequivocally false. So did media outlets that dispatched reporters to check into it. Miss Sassy turned out to be hiding in the woman’s basement.

But even though she was alive, the Trump campaign went on murdering the truth.

They plowed ahead with spreading the mythological Haitian cat killings as proof of the problems of immigration, no matter how clearly or how often it was debunked. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, would eventually be cornered live on CNN by Dana Bash, only to say it was ok if he indulged in fiction about the people of his state. “If I have to create stories so that the American media pays attention to the suffering of the American people then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”

No one disputed that Springfield was struggling to handle the large immigrant population. But several townspeople and officials also pointed out that the Haitians were generally hard workers and had substantially invigorated the area’s economy.

Springfield’s mayor said, “We need help, not hate.”

Trump would not admit his mistake, nor the overwhelming assessment that he had been badly beaten by Harris in the debate. Hopping on Fox News, Trump insisted “we did great” and attacked the moderators for calling out his most blatant lies. “It was three to one, it was a rigged deal… when you looked at the fact that they were correcting everything and not correcting with her… every time I spoke, and my stuff was right, they’d correct you.”

Fact check: Trump’s deceits were mentioned only a handful of times during the debate even though CNN’s fact checker in such cases, Daniel Dale, found Trump made 33 definitively false claims compared to one by Harris. As Dale puts it, “This was a staggeringly dishonest debate performance from Trump. Just lie after lie on subject after subject.”

For Trump’s acolytes, that truth does not matter either. They take up the three-against-one trope with fervor. But in the backwash of the debate, some Republicans will not toe the Trump line.

“Let me just say there are those on the right who have convinced themselves, dogmatically so, that it was actually a great debate for Donald Trump,” conservative commentator Erick Erickson says on his YouTube channel. “Those are the people who have the version of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ where they can never abide criticism of their god. There is a level of idol worship there.”

Trump could have foreseen the threat Harris would bring.

As much as he disdains the expertise of those whose careers are all about public service and navigating the byzantine ways of government, four years in the White House should have taught him the lesson every previous president has learned: In politics, experience matters. Running for office over and over, climbing the ladder, winning and losing all bring skills that help on the debate stage. Certainly, a candidate must have a basic ability to communicate, but that talent is almost always keener when sharpened on the stone of repetition. Throw in Harris’ years of managing legal arguments and Trump’s recent exposure to the art of prosecutors, and there was every reason for Trump to be braced for a big-league encounter.

But in a burst of Shakesperean hubris, Trump and his team seemed to have gone into the debate under the sway of their own propaganda, which focused on Harris’ early months in the White House when she was often portrayed as feckless. Ignored were her long, successful years in politics, scratching her way through California’s massive and tangled political environment, duking it out in the US Senate where her questioning of Trump’s own Supreme Court nominees were master classes in rhetorical combat. CNN’s Phil Mattingly, who covered Harris in the Senate, spoke with a senior Trump campaign adviser just ahead of the debate. “I said ‘Look man, if you get 2019 Senator Harris standing across from him, she can cut him up if you’re not ready.’ And the individual laughed like it wasn’t even considered a possibility.”

Ironically, CNN’s Alayna Treene observes that Trump blew his debate to pieces just as he was asked about his favorite subject. “That answer specifically was about immigration,” she says, “which was supposed to be his best answer of the night. So that’s what really frustrated a lot of people. That was one of the worst moments of the night, if not the worst moment of the night for him, and it could have been the best moment.”

The main lesson Team Trump takes away from the showdown with Harris is that they don’t want it to happen again. She says she wants another debate. Trump quickly says he has no interest, offering a hodgepodge of reasons including that a proposed October 23 date is “too late.” CNN’s Chris Wallace goes on ABC’s “The View” and offers another explanation.

“My gut feeling is that (first) debate, on some, level scared Donald Trump,” Wallace says, “and he realized… giving a platform to Kamala Harris is a bad idea, which is why he’s not going to do another debate which would attract 50, 60, 70 million people.”

Harris’ husband, second gentleman Doug Emhoff, is more succinct. “He got his ass kicked.”

Trump will also eventually bail out of an interview with CBS’s venerable “60 Minutes,” a stop for every major party nominee for decades. His campaign will say nothing was ever officially scheduled, despite contrary statements and evidence from CBS. Among Team Trump’s other complaints posted on X, “They also insisted on doing live fact checking, which is unprecedented.” CBS anchor Scott Pelley responds on air, “We fact check every story,” and notes that Harris has agreed to be interviewed.

The bad news for Trump keeps coming. Within days of the debate, a second apparent attempt on his life is thwarted at one of his Florida golf courses. Trump is out for a round when the Secret Service says an agent spots an armed man allegedly lying in wait. The agent fires. The man runs. He is picked up a short time later, charged, and pleads not guilty.

Trump and his allies blame Biden and Harris. As they see it, Democrats are creating a violent atmosphere by talking so much about Trump’s role in January 6, his disdain for the rule of law, his praise of authoritarian rulers and his stoking of fury and resentment among his followers with his never-ending lies about the 2020 election. “Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at,” Trump says, “when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country — both from the inside and out.” He also jokes about how the assassination attempts are interrupting his golfing habits.

Democrats are neither amused nor convinced.

But perhaps the sharpest sting he felt in the immediate days after the debate comes not from another exchange with the opposing party but from a popstar. Trump had posted an image of Taylor Swift, apparently generated by artificial intelligence, that implied she was offering her endorsement to his presidential bid. He added to the picture, “I accept!”

Now the ruse has unraveled.

Swift, perhaps the most well-known woman on Earth at the moment, has posted on Instagram: “Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site… It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation… The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth. I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

She signed it, “Childless Cat Lady.”

Trump races a response to Truth Social: “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT.”

To many political observers, Trump appears to be smoldering with anger, frustration and fear while Harris romps. “He’d never been out of the driver’s seat in any of his presidential races for as long a period as he was… that absolutely drove him crazy,” CNN’s Jeff Zeleny says.

Analysts have written too many times that if he doesn’t win this election, his long-delayed trials could rev up again, his business empire could crumble, his wealth could be drained, he could go to jail and into the history books as a colossal political failure. He could be seen as how he so often scorns others: weak, foolish, a loser.

And he, Harris, and the whole waiting world know time is running out. If Trump is to reverse his fortunes, it must happen now. The final weeks will decide it all.

Coming Friday: The fearsome finish