The Most Satisfying Moment of the Harris-Trump Debate

 

It was about as close to perfect as Kamala Harris has come in a debate, and it was as close to self-parody as Donald Trump—who doesn’t comprehend parody—can manage. Harris repeatedly laid out the bait, and Trump couldn’t resist taking it, spiraling through rabbit warrens of gibberish about his crowd sizes and the Central Park Five and pet-eating migrants, all of which served to distract from whatever canned answers he had prepared. That mostly came later; first, before almost anything and after a slightly nervous start from Harris, whatever momentum Trump may have achieved was lost immediately when he attempted to answer an inevitable question about women and abortion. It ended there.

For over two years—since Roe v. Wade was reversed by a Supreme Court more interested in their feelings than your health care—women have waited for one crisp, cogent answer to the simple question: Who decides what happens to your body when you are pregnant? On Tuesday, Harris offered it flawlessly. It was a long time coming.

Indeed, one reason it felt like such a specific relief is because in the infamous June debate, President Joe Biden coughed up an excruciating rhetorical hairball when questioned about the fall of Roe: “I supported Roe v. Wade, which had three trimesters,” he temporized. “The first time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And a third time is between the doctor—I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state.” On this he sort of did get something right—abortion, as constructed in Roe, is a physicians’ rights issue. But it was not a satisfying answer by any means for the women who have been living out the consequences of Dobbs in states around the country.

In Tuesday’s debate, by the third question of the evening, Trump was offered a chance to explain his prior incoherent evasions around which abortions will be deemed lawful and what kinds of abortion bans he would endorse. The moderator, ABC News anchor Linsey Davis, ended the inquiry with the simple question: “Why should women trust you?”

Trump responded as he now unerringly responds to this question: with a pair of lies. The first is the now-familiar lie that Democrats support aborting babies “in the ninth month” and also are in favor of “executing babies” after they are born. Even before allowing Harris to respond, Davis stopped that set of lies cold: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it is born,” she said, before offering Harris a chance to respond more fully.

Harris was also tasked with responding to Trump’s second lie, which was subtler but stupider. Abortion has nothing to do with women, as he frames it, but with the “legal scholars” who get to decide what women need. Trump intoned his familiar pitch that “for 52 years they’ve been trying to get Roe v. Wade into the states,” and that “every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote.” The word “woman” appeared nowhere in his answer, by the way, because in his imaginary construction of the problem, the imaginary “scholars” get to decide for the rest of us. (Well, the scholars and “the genius and heart and strength of six supreme court justices.”) In other words, Trump’s answer to why women should trust him was quite literally that “scholars” and the Supreme Court got to decide—and they sent it to the states to decide. So trust Trump!

Harris’ response highlighted who loses because their bodily autonomy was vaulted over “into the states” after Dobbs:

“In over 20 states there are Trump abortion bans which make it criminal for a doctor or nurse to provide health care. In one state it provides prison for life. Trump abortion bans that make no exception even for rape and incest. Which—understand what that means. A survivor of a crime, a violation to their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next. That is immoral. And one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree: The government, and Donald Trump certainly, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.”

Then she explained what Trump’s make-believe legal scholars and handpicked Supreme Court zealots never cared to understand:

“You want to talk about, this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12 or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that. Understand in his Project 2025, there would be a national abortion—a monitor that would be monitoring your pregnancies, your miscarriages.”

Asked whether he would veto a national abortion ban, Trump would not answer. Asked why his running mate, J.D. Vance, said he would do so, Trump replied that he and Vance hadn’t discussed it. The vibe was that the matter is not even worthy of discussion between running mates; best left to the “scholars” and the “courageous” Supreme Court.

Harris’ rejoinder was to provide a still life in American women, post-Dobbs—a snapshot of the people whose lives have been disrupted and decimated by the former president and his handpicked Supreme Court justices who genuinely never cared about their dignity or autonomy:

“Nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion. That isn’t happening. It’s insulting to the women of America. And understand what has been happening under Donald Trump’s abortion bans. Couples who pray and dream of having a family are being denied IVF treatments. What is happening in our country, working people, working women who are working one or two jobs, who can barely afford childcare as it is, have to travel to another state, to get on a plane sitting next to strangers, to go and get the health care she needs. Barely can afford to do it. And what you are putting her through is unconscionable.”

And for millions of us, it was finally, oh my God, finally, the right answer, delivered cogently and passionately, without apology or triangulation. As Harris put it: “The majority of Americans believe in a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. And that is why in every state where this issue has been on the ballot, in red and blue states both, the people of America have voted for freedom.”

There is a robust minority of American voters so infatuated with Donald Trump that his solipsism affords them great comfort: If Donald Trump says Haitian immigrants in Ohio feast on domestic pets, it must be true; if Donald Trump says there would not be a war in Ukraine today if he were president, it must be true; if Donald Trump says that every single American expert, Republican or Democrat, believes that your most intimate health care decisions should be voted in the state legislatures, it must be true. For them, Trump’s abortion answers must feel like soothing reminders that Big Daddy knows all the things and that Viktor Orbán has his back, if there’s any remaining doubt.

But for an awful lot of Americans, and the majority of American women, to be fobbed off with debunked falsehoods about executing live babies, then razzle-dazzled with claims that you shouldn’t make your own miscarriage care or fertility choices, because the “scholars” and the “courageous” justices wanted your state legislators to decide in your stead, is not something that soothes. It’s a tactic so thin as to signal contempt. It ends up feeling like Trump is saying: I had eight years to prepare for this debate question and all I could manage is that you are invisible to me.

-Dahlia Lithwick, Slate