I’m not here to talk about who won the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, or who should run the country after our regularly scheduled but hardly assured peaceful transfer of power on January 6, 2025. Instead, let’s break down the debate in terms of lion taming, rules of debate order, ABC News moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis and their simultaneous success and failure on the job Tuesday night, sarcasm’s political toxicity and rewards, and the power of the non-verbal reaction shot, as old as video and television and the moving image itself.
Lion taming: With Donald Trump in the mix, enforcement of the agreed-upon rules of debate format never had a chance, partly because ABC, as would any media company in this juicy presidential debate context, established the rules with the likely hope they’d crumble soon enough. Up against a faltering Joe Biden on June 27, working with the same debate format rules, Trump had little trouble. On Tuesday, again with no audience in attendance, Trump played ball for a few minutes. And then Harris opened her bait shop for business, and her opponent took the bait, and before long rally attendance figures began dancing in Trump’s head and for all we know, he could only think of his idol, Frank Sinatra, not singing “My Way” (to which Trump danced at his election victory party back in 2016) but instead “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” By then, Trump was not having it anymore with the rules, which brings us to …
Rules, flouted: Honestly this isn’t a matter of politics for me, it’s a matter of me turning into my father, like a Progressive Insurance ad. What happened to the shutting-off of the microphone, whoever went over the stated time limits? Watching last night, I was muttering-growling-hollering things like shut it off shut it off! SHUT the mike OFF! when one-minute answers ran over 1:30 or 1:45. Trump knows that the most and loudest big-footing often wins. For the record: My late father, a near-lifelong Republican until the 2020 election, wasn’t a yell-at-the-screener, but I remember watching with him when Nixon resigned on TV. He didn’t like liars or cheaters, and Nixon was both, so he made an exception that night. And then we played cribbage.
The moderators’ success and failure: ABC’s Muir and Davis did so much so well in predictably slippery circumstances, asking a judiciously even-handed set of pre-prepared and reasonably tough questions of both candidates, and when time allowed, fact-checking and correcting demonstrably false rumors of Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio, and other subjects. Among the major networks’ recent debate moderators, these two managed both speed and insight. The failure came with the unwillingness to fully shut down or push back against the candidates.
As for the charge from the right that the debate was three against one instead of one against one (with the two occasionally fact-checking moderators going after Trump but not Harris), CNN’s Abby Phillip put it best in a post on X, saying: “Just fyi: When there is asymmetrical lying, there will be asymmetrical fact checking.”
Sarcasm: Thanks to Trump, I do not like it anymore, even though I’m a user myself, and realize that sarcasm is irony’s less interesting cousin. When Muir asked Trump about his recent public statements about losing the 2020 election, his answer was that he was kidding. “I said that sarcastically.” Can’t you take a joke?
My favorite line of Trump’s on Tuesday night ignored sarcasm altogether. Asked by moderator Davis about whether he had a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, Trump answered no, but “I have concepts of a plan.” And there we were, suddenly in the middle of David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross,” parsing the rhetorical difference between “talking” about a plan and “speaking” about it.
The reaction shot: During much of Tuesday’s debate, we saw the opponents divided visually in a split-screen side-by-side frame, the speaker speaking, the listener listening, and more was revealed in the listeners’ part of that frame than anything spoken aloud. Politicians can bluster their way through all sorts of verbal evasions, or knowledge gaps, or word salads that become word entrees followed by word desserts. But watching Harris and Trump in nonverbal performance mode, registering disdain, astonishment, disinterest and, occasionally, moments of un-strategic, unchecked honesty told the story behind the story. When Trump pretended not to listen, in close-up, to Harris’ needling, artfully pitying reference to his rallies’ visually verifiable walkouts, the impact nonetheless was right there in his narrow gaze, the nearly audible clench of his jaw, the huffy intake of breath. Meantime Harris’ variously amused or aghast or, yes, subtly sarcastic “huh, interesting lie you have there” listening faces edged into Sarah Cooper reaction-shot territory. She knew what she wanted, and she got it.
Live from Philadelphia — this was Tuesday night.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.