Kamala Harris and Donald Trump face off: Takeaways from the debate

WASHINGTON — The first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump on Tuesday gave both candidates the platform to lay out their competing visions for the country, with each presenting a starkly different view of the state of the nation.

Trump, 78, staging his third Republican bid for the Oval Office, cast the nation as "failing" and "in serious decline."

Harris, 59, who replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee this summer, billed herself as offering "a new generation of leadership" and pledged to be a candidate "focused on the future."

With polls showing the candidates in a statistical dead heat, both campaigns were looking for breakthrough moments. Harris took aim at Trump — noting his swirl of legal challenges and criminal indictments since leaving office — while Trump cast Harris as inexperienced.

After the debate, Trump made a stop at the debate "spin room," a space typically reserved for campaign surrogates to talk up the candidates to reporters. Asked why he decided to come to the room, Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity — "I just felt I wanted to. I was very happy with the result."

But Lawrence Levy, executive dean of Hofstra University’s National Center for Suburban Studies, said Trump likely did little to persuade suburban swing voters who helped drive his 2016 victory.

"If Donald Trump had a plan to appeal to moderate suburban voters who decide national elections, he abandoned it quickly for the sort of angry diatribes that may appeal to the MAGA loyalists who flock to his rallies but drove away swing voters in 2020," Levy told Newsday after the debate.

Here are five takeaways from Tuesday’s presidential debate:

Harris taunts Trump

Trump’s 2016 Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, publicly offered advice to Harris before the debate from her own experience debating Trump — "Bait him," she told the New York Times.

The vice president goaded Trump throughout the night, taking jabs at his campaign rally speeches, listing his recent legal challenges and asserting that other world leaders would mock Trump behind closed doors.

"I'm going to actually do something really unusual, and I'm going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump's rallies, because it's a really interesting thing to watch," Harris said. "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."

Trump shot back that he has the "most incredible rallies in the history of politics."

His response then veered toward repeating an online conspiracy theory accusing Haitian migrants in Ohio of abducting and eating pets. Officials in Springfield, Ohio, have called the reports untrue and unsubstantiated, according to media reports.

"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs! The people that came in, they're eating the cats!" Trump said. "They're eating the pets of the people that live there."

Robert Rowland, a professor of communications at the University of Kansas who has written a book about Trump’s rhetorical style, said Harris succeeded in "getting him to take the bait."

"He sounded angry," Rowland said. "It’s difficult to predict popular reactions ... but I don’t think most people like anger unless it’s directed at a foreign enemy."

Trump stands by abortion decision

Trump repeated his support for the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning decades-old federal abortion protections.

Trump, who appointed three conservative justices who voted to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision protecting abortion rights, argued without evidence that "everyone" wanted abortion access to be regulated by states.

Asked if he would veto a national abortion ban if approved by Congress, Trump did not answer the question directly, instead pivoting to attack the Biden-Harris administration on its push to offer student loan debt relief.

Harris, who has made abortion access a key issue of her campaign, said she would veto any national ban, and argued the Supreme Court’s decision was endangering the health of women.

"Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, [are] 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," Harris said.

Trump won’t concede 2020 defeat

The former president continued to falsely assert that he won the 2020 election against President Joe Biden.

He suggested without evidence that recent migrants and immigrants arriving to the U.S. were attempting to vote in the upcoming election.

"We have to have borders, and we have to have good elections," Trump said. "Our elections are bad. And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote."

Harris noted that she was at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the day a mob of Trump supporters stormed the building to disrupt the certification of the election

"Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people. So let’s be clear about that," Harris said, referring to the popular vote count. "And clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that."

William Howell, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, said Trump’s claims of winning the election would likely not help woo undecided moderate voters.

"If the game is to try to win over a set of people who are undecided and moderate in their partisan and ideological dispositions, it’s not clear how he reeled many in from that camp," Howell said in a phone interview.

Opposing views on Ukraine

Harris, who supports providing U.S. and NATO aid to Ukraine to fight Russia, sought to portray Trump as beholden to Russian President Vladimir Putin, while Trump sought to depict Harris as a weak negotiator on the world stage.

"I will get it settled before I even become president," Trump said of negotiating a peace agreement between Ukraine and Russia. "If I win, when I'm President-elect, what I'll do is I'll speak to one, I'll speak to the other. I'll get them together."

Harris took aim at Trump’s close relationship with Putin while he was in office, saying Putin "would eat you for lunch."

"You adore strongmen instead of caring about democracy," Harris said after Trump also noted his support from Hungary’s authoritarian leader, Viktor Orban.

Border security battle

Trump attacked Harris for the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the record number of migrants seeking asylum at the U.S. southern border, while Harris took aim at Trump for helping to kill a bipartisan border security bill by urging Republican lawmakers to oppose it.

"They've had 3½ years to fix the border, 3½ years to create jobs, and all the things we talked about. Why hasn't she done it?" Trump said.

Harris criticized Trump for his role in blocking the bipartisan deal: "He’d prefer to run on a problem rather than fixing a problem."

Howell, with the University of Chicago, said Harris missed an opportunity to deliver "a clear forceful explanation for why the Biden administration didn’t move sooner to reduce the inflow of undocumented residents across the southern border."

"They moved in the last six months to take a number of executive actions," Howell said, "but we didn’t hear an explanation for why they didn’t act earlier."

By Laura Figueroa Hernandez

laura.figueroa@newsday.com@Laura_Figueroa

Laura Figueroa Hernandez is the White House correspondent and previously covered New York City politics and government. She joined Newsday in 2012 after covering state and local politics for The Miami Herald.