ANGELO LYNN

The presidential debate Tuesday night was notable for many reasons, but one stood out for us: Kamala Harris showed the nation and the world how easy it is to manipulate Trump. That Harris was able to continuously bait him into traps to put him off-message, reinforced her premise that foreign leaders like China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin can play him like a fiddle. Moreover, she used his unhinged rants of personal grievance to demonstrate why many U.S. military commanders and advisors who served in his first administration have said Trump is a “weak” leader, “unfit for office” and a “disgrace” to the country.

That Harris so effectively put Trump in his place, time and again during the debate, reinforces her punchline that Putin “would eat (him) for lunch.”

In the grand scheme of things that point is unlikely to affect many voters, but in a contest that will be decided by a few votes in a handful of swing states Harris’s ability to control the narrative and paint Trump as a laughable fool undercuts his highly curated (and ludicrous) MAGA image and will likely expand her reach into the undecided vote.

The debate was also notable because Harris was not well-known to many undecided and independent voters, making this an exception to the rule that voters this late in the campaign already know the candidates and are viewing the debate to cheer on their chosen side. The debate drew at least 58 million viewers, Nielsen reported, which is 6.5 million more than viewed the Trump-Biden debate. (For context, the highest rated NFL game on opening week drew 29 million viewers.) The residual views on social media after the debate will add millions more. The debate takes on added importance because the race is currently a virtual tie, including in most of the 7 swing states, so moving the needle even a little can mean a lot.

While neither candidate did so well, or so poorly, as to knock the other out of the race, Harris’s optimism compared to Trump’s dark vision of the country are what we think gave her the edge in the debate and in the election. Here are a few other points — related to falsehoods and fact-checking — that may dominate the campaigns over the next few weeks:

• Trump’s exaggeration of the economy during his term deserves pushback. His claim that the stock market “hit record highs” during his presidency is true, but it’s also true for most presidents as the stock market typically gains year over year. President Biden can make the same claim as the stock market has been much higher over the past four years than under Trump. And Trump’s final year in office as the pandemic hit was a disaster for the economy. Total nonfarm employment fell by 1.4 million jobs in March 2020 and a staggering 20.5 million jobs in April, creating a 22 million jobs deficit since the start of the pandemic and largely erasing the gains from a decade of job growth. The peak unemployment rate hit 14.8% in April 2020. In contrast, the U.S. has added about 16 million jobs during Biden’s first 43 months in office, compared to a 2.7 million job loss during Trump’s four years.

Trump also inherited a booming economy in 2017 and then goosed the economy with tax cuts that added trillions to the nation’s debt, while doing little to lift the middle class. It also greatly exaggerated the wealth gap.

Finally, the tariffs on China imposed by Trump didn’t dump billions of dollars onto China, as Trump claimed in the debate. Rather, it added to the cost of living (inflation) that American consumers are paying today. The tariffs aren’t all bad — because one goal is to bring manufacturing back home and reduce U.S. reliance on foreign-made goods, which is why the Biden administration has kept the initial set of tariffs in place — but American consumers (not China or other specific countries) are paying that price. That’s why tariffs are likened to a “sales tax” on goods consumers buy.

High inflation has been the biggest bugaboo of the Biden presidency, but it’s not so hard to explain: the pandemic caused a severe and sudden economic restriction in 2020 and 2021 that was met by both Trump’s and Biden’s economic stimulus programs. That infusion of trillions of dollars kept the economy healthy and avoided what could have been a severe recession. But the stimulus juiced the economy more than anticipated, plus the pandemic prompted a remote-work environment and consequential wage inflation that has taken two years to sort-out but leaving much higher wages particularly for lower-tier jobs. The Federal Reserve did its job by raising interest rates, which caused housing prices to jump (on top of housing shortages caused by the 2008 housing crisis, which the nation still hasn’t overcome.) Food and other consumer prices jumped in part because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the disrupted supply chains around the world related to the pandemic. That the Federal Reserve’s cautious plan to contain inflation is finally working — certainly longer than anyone wanted, particularly President Biden — is testament that the policy/strategy was mostly on target.

• Trump’s newest claim that he had “nothing to do with Jan. 6,” as he said in the debate, is fantastical and shows how willing he is to lie even in the face of glaring court evidence. The facts are reported in more than 100 court cases in which juries found radical members of the mob guilty of numerous offenses, including causing injury to more than 150 police officers. Trump had spent months promoting the “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him. (He lost over 60 court challenges that found the elections were fair.) His supporters nonetheless organized a large rally that day near the White House designed to pressure Congress to overturn his loss. Trump urged his supporters to march on the Capitol, where the rally turned into a violent riot. He reportedly watched the riot unfold at his White House office for more than two hours before sending a message to his supporters to abandon their siege. Trump faces federal felony charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election and similar charges in Georgia, which have not been dismissed but are pending.

• Trump unhinged: When Harris mocked the size of Trump’s rallies and suggested crowds leave early because they’re bored and uninterested, he jumped into a deranged screed that should make the nation question his sanity. “In Springfield (Ohio),” he said, “they’re eating the dogs. The people (Haitian immigrants who live there legally) that came in — they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” When the moderators pushed back to say they had called Springfield officials who debunked the stories as online falsehoods repeated only on Trump’s social media platform and other rightwing conspiracy outlets, Trump backed off but still insisted it was true. Such a belief in outlandish conspiracy theories, and that’s far from the first, should make voters question Trump’s ability to reason.

• The nonsense that Democrats are encouraging illegal immigrants to come into the country to vote is a popular Republican talking point, and one Trump claimed in the debate. It has no legs. First, there’s no evidence of non-citizen registrations that would have any impact; second, people who are not U.S. citizens already face fines or imprisonment for voting in federal elections under a 1996 law. Further proof was collected by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has championed stiffer election verifications and maintains a database of “proven” instances of voter fraud over a 40-year period. In that database, which totals just 1,546 cases, the Heritage Foundation has documented 68 cases of noncitizen voting going back to the 1980s. Incidents of undocumented immigrants are even rarer, with the Heritage Foundation finding only 10 instances over that same four decades. To say those numbers are not statistically relevant is an understatement.

• Crime is not through the roof. Though Trump and Republicans like to claim it is, it’s another Republican falsehood. The truth, according to FBI analysis, is that violent crime has decreased 15.2% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, with an even greater decline of 18% in big cities. It’s the lowest level of violent crime in decades. Violent crime in 2020 under Trump’s last year in office was higher than at any point during Biden’s term. If facts matter, this is just another reality that doesn’t fit the GOP’s “wishful thinking” or, more bluntly, party propaganda.

• Abortion: Trump’s flailing response to the political disaster caused by his appointment of three ultra-conservative justices who helped overturn Roe V. Wade just keeps getting worse. Flustered, his exaggerations of the Democrat’s position are so off-base as to discredit anything he says on the issue. Reality: his base is anti-abortion, so is the Project 2025 platform his own allies drafted, and it’s obvious Trump is desperate to stop the hemorrhaging but can’t.

For those who care about where Harris-Walz and Democrats stand on late-term abortions, they agree with the conditions as set under Roe v. Wade, which allowed states to prohibit abortion in the third trimester (the 7^th, 8^th and 9^th months) so long as they made exceptions to save the health and life of the mother. According to federal data, less than 1 percent of all abortions take place after the 20th week of pregnancy; 93 percent are at or before 13 weeks.

Harris also holds the position that people don’t have to sacrifice their opposition to abortion, which is a very personal decision, to also believe the government has no role in telling women how to govern their bodies. That’s an opening for those opposed to abortion to nonetheless support her position of keeping government out of the bedroom.

As for Trump’s garbage line that most legal scholars wanted abortion to come back to the states, that’s hogwash. One or two conservative scholars did; most everyone else didn’t and supported Roe v Wade.

•  Trump said he “saved” Obamacare. False. Arizona Sen. John McCain did. During his first year in office, Trump asked Congress to pass legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act. At the time, Republicans controlled Congress. The Republican-controlled House approved the bill. But, writes the New York Times, “in a dramatic moment on Capitol Hill, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican and nemesis of Trump, cast the decisive vote to defeat Trump’s proposal.” Trump also tried numerous times to pass legislation to weaken the popular health care program, but none were successful. Asked what he would do to Obamacare if elected to another term, Trump said he’d replace it with a better bill, but not before they came up with a plan. Did he have a plan? No. While Project 2025 advocates to scrap Obamacare, their only vague proposal is to turn health care over to private plans and let buyers beware — a surefire plan to benefit those who are wealthy, and sock everyone else.

• Trump brags about “rebuilding the military” but it’s a gross exaggeration. While he did increase the defense budget during his four years in office by around $225 billion (inflation accounts for a good chunk of that), he also promised to build a 350-ship Navy and to expand the Army. According to the New York Times, he did neither. The Army today is at its smallest size since 1940, the Times reports, adding that the year the ex-president left office, the Navy was down to 294 ships. Efforts to expand the number of Air Force squadrons received no presidential push and went nowhere.

• Trump said in the debate he had “nothing to do with Project 2025,” but his key supporters are its authors. CNN documented that 140 people who worked for the Trump administration had a role in Project 2025. Some were top advisers to Trump in his first term and are “all but certain to step into prominent posts should he win a second term.” As Trump has failed to detail or outline any other policies outside of what’s central to Project 2025, as Tim Walz says, “if you take the time to write a playbook, you probably intend to use it.”

• Harris did misspeak when she claimed the Biden-Harris administration had grown manufacturing jobs by over 800,000. The correct number is 739,000 new manufacturing jobs, due to recently revised numbers by the Labor Department. During Trump’s four years, the nation lost 200,000 manufacturing jobs.

There’s so much more, and just 55 days left to digest it.

Angelo Lynn