Highlights: Trump-Harris presidential debate analysis and fact-check

Lawrence O’Donnell speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

I’ve never been impressed by celebrity endorsements. I think they are helpful to the base that you already have. They tend to be people who the base already identifies with.

But Taylor Swift is someone who crosses it all. This is, I think, the most important celebrity endorsement we’ve ever seen in a presidential campaign, especially because it is so close and it can make that kind of difference.

The Harris campaign now has two perfectly timed and important endorsements: Joe Biden’s 27-minute timed endorsement after he stepped down — perfect timing, it just put a rocket on her to the nomination — and now this, about 27 minutes after the end of the debate.

The timing on it is absolutely exquisite. The wording of it is flawless and perfect. Right down to the cat lady stuff. For someone who’s never been impressed by a celebrity endorsement, this is perfect and powerful.

These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

How well did the debate go tonight in the eyes of the Democratic ticket? In pickup basketball parlance, Harris already wants to run it back.

Chris Hayes speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

I thought it was the best anyone’s ever done against him — both Republicans in Republican primaries and those big group brawls and one on one. Even though I think both Biden and Hillary Clinton acquitted themselves well against him.

The thing that she did — and it almost became like comical at a certain point — was she doing two things every time. Because we’re talking about how you negotiate this: how much him, how much you. What do I want to communicate about what I’m doing? And then in the midst of that, just this little lure for the fish. It could be John McCain. If you bring up John McCain, he’s going to litigate John McCain. It could be “very fine people” in Charlottesville. If you bring up “very fine people,” he’s going to swim upstream to go talk about very fine people. It could be suckers and losers. He going to go talk to go talk about suckers loser every single time.

She would communicate and then she would leave dangling this bait, and he would swim up to the bait. And the bait was always a thing that Donald Trump is obsessed with about himself: a grievance, a thing in the past, the well worn things that we’ve heard him go on and on about. Nancy Pelosi was the reason that January 6 got attacked, yada yada, and every one of them just served to reaffirm the fact that the guy is old and out of it and obsessed with his grievances.

These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

Joy Reid speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

Theatrically, what Vice President Harris did that I thought was very smart, was that when she was saying something about Donald Trump, particularly when she was talking about the way foreign governments that she has interacted with, think about him — she looked at him.

And he would not look at her. He would not look at her. He glowered into the camera. And that two-shot, I think, puts her at a stature so far above him. He looked weak and he looked afraid because he wouldn’t look her in the eye.

She said, you are a disgrace. And I’m not saying that I’m saying you’re a disgrace. I’m saying that the people that I speak with, that are heads of military leaders who have worked with you tell me that you are a disgrace. And in order to say “you” she has to turn to him and he can’t bear it. He can’t bear it.

These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

My colleague Allison Detzel posted some quick reactions to tonight’s debate from GOP insiders. But the collective conniption that right-wingers are having online right now is one sign that things might not have gone as Trump supporters had hoped.

Whether they’re blaming fellow right-wingers for filling Trump’s head with conspiracy theories or blaming the debate moderators for fact-checking Trump, there’s palpable right-wing agita over how things played out tonight. When Fox News’ Trump-loving Jesse Watters is essentially calling the debate a draw, that should suggest to you that MAGA world isn’t feeling too hot about Trump’s showing.

Trump leaned on a favorite trope of his, calling inconvenient facts fake and fraudulent throughout the debate. His criminal charges? “Fake cases.” The Russia investigation? “Fake.” The number of deaths in the Russia-Ukraine war? “Fake numbers.” The 2020 election? “Fraudulent.” FBI crime statistics? “Fraudulent.” Labor Department statistics? “Fraud.”

Rachel Maddow just said on air that she has never seen a starker contrast between two candidates in any debate in any political contest ever. I thought for a second about whether that’s true and had to agree. When Trump debated Hillary Clinton in 2016, he was definitely still blustering and lying through his teeth at every turn, but he at least managed to have some coherence and landed some sharp digs at Clinton in the process. In contrast, where Harris was poised and on message throughout the entire debate tonight, Trump was falling apart before our eyes, getting more and more upset as she burrowed deeper and deeper under his skin.

Nicole Wallace speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

We all know that maximum humility is required of us, particularly in the next 57 days. We do not know the outcome of the election, but if debates matter at all in the outcomes of said elections, it should be over.

Questions that were deeply personal Harris turned into questions not about herself, not about her campaign, not about the Democratic Party, not even about Donald Trump, but about the country. His synapses did not seem to be firing, but she got out her entire economic agenda.

The Trump campaign is going to plans B, C and D, you know. They’re dark and they’re dirty and they’re going to the types of things that Trump tweeted about: the threats, the retribution, the placement of allies on election boards, as they’ve done in the state of Georgia. Because this did not win Trump any new voters.

These comments have been edited for length and clarity.

Rachel Maddow speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

You could not have two more different candidates with two more different approaches to the task at hand here.

I had a television executive once tell me that everything you need to know about a live event on television, you can tell with that with the sound off. If you had the sound off for this debate, which I’m sure nobody did, what you would have seen was Trump looking physically hunched, angry, squinting; I never saw the whites of his eyes.

The entire debate, shouting, constantly interrupting himself, not just going down tangents, but being unable to finish a thought, seeming very frustrated, very angry, very negative and very tired. In contrast, Kamala Harris appeared to be sort of light on her feet, quite puzzled by him. The images of him squinting and hunching and having seeming to be having physical trouble squeezing the words out, certainly squeezing the sentences out, while she just looked at him, absolutely puzzled by where it was he was going — I think that visual may be as much of a takeaway as anything that was said.

He said strange things, like all Democrats wanted Roe vs. Wade overturned. He said that it is legal to kill children in the United States. He insisted that he saw something on television about eating dogs. That was one of the weirdest moments of the debate, saying he saw it on television. So therefore he knows it’s true, and so therefore what the police said about it can’t be true. Kamala Harris kept going back to her plan, her campaign, but also kept going directly at him. 

I’ve never seen a starker contrast in presentation from two candidates in any debate, in any type of contest, in any political race.

These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

Taylor Swift has endorsed Harris, writing in an Instagram post right after the debate that she will be voting for the Harris-Walz ticket in November.

“I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” wrote Swift, who also praised Harris for picking Walz as her running mate.

Swift said the recent fake AI images of her endorsing Trump made her realize “that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter.” 

Read more about Swift’s endorsement here.

Harris had some very strong moments in this debate. She painted an effective contrast between herself and Trump on several issues — including on abortion, Ukraine and the climate crisis — and, very notably, on temperament. The vice president poked at her opponent’s weaknesses while remaining calm as he attacked her. She easily turned his personal attacks on her race into an opportunity to pitch her leadership to voters. And her bewildered expressions as he rambled will almost certainly make the rounds on social media.

Trump’s standout moments, meanwhile, largely revolved around his most outrageous and racist false claims: that Democrats are so pro-abortion they’re executing babies, that immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets, that Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” His comment about having “concepts of a plan” when pressed on his proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act is also being widely mocked.

It’s a hard job to run a presidential debate, and I have to say that ABC News’ David Muir and Linsay Davis nailed it.

Yes, there were moments when things felt like they were going off the rails. The much vaunted “muted mics” were turned on more often than not. But compare and contrast tonight with the robotic reading out of questions from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash at the June debate. Muir and Davis were more than willing to fact-check Trump’s most egregious lies, even as he continued to ignore them, and asked questions that actually homed in on the question of which of the two candidates is better poised to be president.

Harris did well in the debate by describing situations that Americans are facing in concrete language. One time was when she described the Affordable Care Act by noting that previously “an insurance company could deny if a child had asthma, if someone was a breast cancer survivor, if a if a grandparent had diabetes.” Even more effective was when she was discussing abortion and described a woman being turned away by a hospital afraid of strict anti-abortion state laws “bleeding out in a car in the parking lot.”

This kind of direct, visual language is very effective in a debate like this, and Harris on the assault on abortion rights

Trump did not do it at all.

Trump’s closing statement was just as disjointed as ever, but one bit toward the top stood out to me.

“So she just started by saying she’s going to do this, she’s going to do that,” Trump began. “She’s going to do all these wonderful things. Why hasn’t she done them? She’s been there for 3½ years.”

Harris has been vice president during that time, not president. She is running to be president so she can implement her own policies. Hopefully that helps solve the mystery for him.

Trump did a relatively good job of remembering whom he was debating tonight, but then suddenly shifted back to 2022 during his final answer. While trying to make some kind of point about American manufacturing, he began talking about Biden corruptly getting money from China and Ukraine affecting his policies. The idea that Biden is head of a corrupt business family was at one point the cornerstone of the GOP’s attacks on Biden and the reasoning behind their obsession with Hunter Biden. All of the House Republicans’ investigations trying to prove those falsehoods fell apart. And once it became clear that Biden was no longer going to be the nominee, Republicans quietly dropped those supposed concerns, despite Biden still being in office for several more months. But Trump short-circuited and fell back on the talking points he’d been preparing for the last four years.

ABC News’ Linsey Davis asked if Trump still intends to get rid of Obamacare after failing to do when he was president. Trump tried to say that he was prevented from doing so by Democrats, so instead of killing it like promised, he saved it. What?

He then tap-danced around the fact that he still has nothing lined up to replace Obamacare, before Davis followed up.

Trump: What we will do is we’re looking at different plans. If we can come up with a plan that’s going to cost our people, our population less money and be better healthcare than Obamacare, then I would absolutely do it. But until then, I’d run it as good as it can be run.

Davis: So just a yes or no: you still do not have a plan?

Trump: I have concepts of a plan.

Oh, OK!

Trump chickened out after moderator David Muir asked him to explain why he believes it’s appropriate to spread bigoted lies suggesting that Harris only recently started identifying as a Black woman. 

Trump responded, “I don’t, and I don’t care.” After Muir interjected by saying “But those were your words,” Trump replied: “All I can say is I read where she was not Black.”

Yikes.

Harris took a bit of a different approach than she did when these lies were referenced during her CNN interview. Instead of merely dismissing this as Trump’s “same old playbook,” she used the question to highlight Trump’s history of bigotry, including his false claims that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and his promotion of the death penalty after Black and Latino teenagers — known as the Central Park Five — were falsely accused of a brutal assault in 1989.

It hasn’t come up much during this campaign, but the vice president is a gun owner. In the early months of the 2020 presidential campaign, Harris told reporters that “I own a gun for probably the reason that a lot of people do: for personal safety.”

Republican reaction to the debate is already pouring in. Here’s what GOP insiders are telling NBC News:

• GOP aide: “ABC [is] fact-checking Trump but not Harris.”
• Republican donor: Trump is “wild, uncontrolled.” While Harris is good at “pushing his buttons” and getting him angry.
• Trump ally: “[Harris] has avoided the issues and wants to make it about him.”

The former president just blamed the poorly managed withdrawal from Afghanistan on Harris. Setting aside whether the vice president has much say in foreign policy, the withdrawal began, as Harris noted, when Trump bypassed the Afghan government to negotiate directly with the Taliban and even invited them to Camp David. An inspector general’s report found Trump’s 2020 agreement with the Taliban was “the single most important factor” in the collapse of the Afghan national defense forces.

Trump tried to accuse Harris of pretending she had nothing to do with Biden.

“She is Biden,” he said.

“Clearly I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump,” Harris responded. “And what I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country, one who believes in what is possible, one who brings a sense of optimism about what we can do instead of always disparaging the American people.”

She proceeded to call on an actual debate about the policies that the two of them are offering. In response, Trump again threw out lies about her wanting to take guns away from every American.

It was a very direct question from ABC News’ David Muir: “Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” But Trump refused to give a direct answer, instead launching into a meandering monologue, where he called for a negotiated end to the war without ever saying that democratic Ukraine should win. As a reminder, Vladimir Putin’s Russia launched its brutal invasion of Ukraine for no reason in February 2022. And many tens of thousands have died as a result.

The most that Trump has said about Biden so far was when he rambled about how he’d solve the Russia-Ukraine war within 24 hours. Trump claimed that Biden “had no idea” how to talk to Putin, and then went on a baffling tangent: “Where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s a president, they threw him out of a campaign like a dog.” Trump added: “We have a president that doesn’t know he’s alive.”

If you want more proof of how important Pennsylvania is to the Harris campaign, consider that she can recite this particular fact off the top of her head when discussing the war in Ukraine: “Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish-Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up” in Ukraine, she said.

When candidates are debating, who are they talking to: The moderators? Each other? Or the American people?

The answers vary, sometimes even within a debate. But in this debate, both Harris and Trump have largely talked past each other. A clue here is their use of pronouns. Both have talked about each other in the third person: “My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax.” Trump has avoided saying Harris’ name almost entirely, instead simply saying “she,” as in: ​​”She’ll never get the vote.” When they have said “you,” it’s been either to the moderators or the American public: “You will see during the course of his rallies, he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter.”

As my colleague Hayes Brown mentioned, Harris has consistently gotten under Trump’s skin. One consequence of that strategy is that Trump barely mentioned President Biden in the first hour of the debate.

Going into the night, Trump aides said tying the two together was a top priority. So far, he’s mostly failed.

The Democratic nominee’s lines on the issue were nearly identical to what she said in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. She condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself and the U.S.’ support for its ability to do so, and reiterated the urgency of a deal to release the hostages and for a cease-fire. 

She also fended off Trump’s insults against her by attacking him on national security: “I have, my entire career and life, supported Israel and the Israeli people. He knows that — he’s trying to, again, divide and distract from the reality, which is: It is very well known that Donald Trump is weak and wrong on national security and foreign policy.”

After Harris says world leaders are mocking Trump and military leaders think he’s a disgrace, Trump responded by touting a perhaps ill-advised endorsement: Hungary’s illiberal ruler Viktor Orbán. 

Trump claims Orbán said, “you need Trump back as president.” But I’m not sure there’s a large contingency of non-MAGA voters placing a lot of stock in that endorsement, given Orbán’s well-documented record of brutal authoritarianism.

Trump’s volume has been slowly but surely ratcheting up over the course of the first hour of the debate. He started off relatively calm, but as Harris has needled him on his rallies, his standing in the world, and his legal troubles, he’s blown up. There’s no sign of him calming down as the debate hits the home stretch and as a result, his answers have begun falling apart, drifting into the same disjointed, incoherent ranting that Harris invited people to watch at his rallies. 

It’s to Harris’ credit that her team has been telling the press for days now that her strategy was to push Trump’s buttons enough that he loses focus. That’s just what we’ve seen as she has kept her poise, the stray smirk or baffled face aside, as she’s stuck with her talking points and digs. In contrast, Harris has brushed off all of Trump’s attacks, leaving him to bluster even harder at her and the moderators alike.

In recent weeks, Trump had seemed to back off of his baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen, telling a podcaster that he “lost by a whisker.” Asked about that at the debate, Trump responded: “That was said sarcastically.” (ABC News moderator David Muir noted that he had not detected sarcasm.)

Trump’s backtracking on his false claims had hurt him among his supporters. One of them, white nationalist Nick Fuentes, noted the criminal charges for people who attacked the Capitol after Trump’s statement: “It would have been good to know that before 1,600 people got charged.”

Trump repeated the false claim that Democrats are encouraging illegal immigration in order to get more votes, painting migrants crossing the border as people who “don’t even know what country they’re in.”

“Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote. They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in, practically,” he said. “And these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.”

Noncitizen voting is already illegal and incredibly rare.

Harris just hit Trump on stoking the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and noted: “This is not an isolated situation.”

She also mentioned Trump’s reference to “fine people” on both sides of the deadly neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and his references to a potential “bloodbath” if he loses in November.

Trump made this same claim during his debate with Biden back in June. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Trump was likely referring to a recent post from Snopes.com, the fact-checking website, that parsed Trump’s statement to give him the benefit of the doubt: “In a news conference after the rally protesting the planned removal of a Confederate statue, Trump did say there were ‘very fine people on both sides,’ referring to the protesters and the counterprotesters. He said in the same statement he wasn’t talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be ‘condemned totally.’”

That might be technically true, but it ignores that the protesters were there in the first place because they were white nationalists who boosted the “great replacement” conspiracy theory. It also ignores that Trump was doing his best to please everyone, especially the right-wing extremists that carried him to the White House.

While viewers watching at home can’t hear or see all of the candidates’ off-mic moments, a group of reporters seated roughly 50 feet from the podiums can. 

Here’s some of what these pool reporters have heard and seen from Trump and Harris so far:

• 9:10 p.m. — “That’s just a soundbite, they gave her that to say,” Trump said when Harris said he “doesn’t have a plan for you.”
• 9:14 p.m. — “That’s not true. that’s not true,” Harris said while shaking her head when Trump said the U.S. barely makes semiconductor chips anymore.

Instead of actually answering the question in a way that might help him, Trump instead decided to pretend that he had nothing to do with the Stop the Steal movement. “They asked me to show up and make a speech,” he claimed, as though there weren’t meetings in the White House about the importance of the rally to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to throw the election to his boss. He also went off on a weird tangent about immigration and blamed then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for the lack of security that day. All in all, an appropriately inappropriate answer that makes clear he regrets nothing about Jan. 6 except that it didn’t keep him in office.

While trying to attack Harris on fracking, Trump pushed one of his wildest claims of the debate so far: “She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” Trump recently made a similarly bizarre claim about schools providing gender-affirming surgery on minors.

At her 2020 debate with then-Vice President Mike Pence, Harris famously stopped her debate opponent from interrupting him by saying “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.”

Trump just borrowed the same line as Harris was shaking her head while he was attacking her for having flipped some of her positions during her political career.

“Wait a minute, I’m talking now, if you don’t mind, please, does that sound familiar?” he said

Harris took Trump to task for lying about crime rates supposedly rising in America by reminding everyone about the litany of crimes he’s been charged with or otherwise taken to court for:

For those wondering, Harris was referring to the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, Trump’s felony convictions in his hush money case in New York, and the federal and state charges against him over his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump pleaded not guilty in all of the cases.

In response, Trump once again lied to claim that all of the criminal cases around him, including those in New York and Georgia, were coordinated by the Justice Department.

We’re about 45 minutes into this debate, and the contrast with the first presidential debate could not be clearer. Harris’ very effective and strong answer to a question about abortion was miles better than the answer President Joe Biden gave during his doomed face-off with Trump earlier this summer.

This is how Biden began his answer on abortion at that debate: “For 51 years, that was the law. 51 years, constitutional scholarship said it was the right way to go. 51 years. And it was taken away because this guy put very conservative members on the Supreme Court. Takes credit for taking it away.”

What a difference two months make.

Moderator David Muir fact-checked Trump for yet again spreading lies about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. Trump really wants Americans to believe this lie, evident by the fact he kept trying to talk over Muir, but Muir quoted the city manager in Springfield, who said there’s no evidence of such claims.

The moderators have been very carefully fact-checking Trump on his most egregious claims, briefly stepping in between responses to note that there is no state where it is legal to kill a baby after birth, that there have been no credible reports of pets being harmed in Ohio, and that overall violent crime is down. This is always tricky in a debate, where the moderators are trying to recede into the background, but so far they have done a good job of rebutting the claims concisely and without affect.

Trump said the moderators should ask Harris if she would “allow” third-term abortions as president. Harris audibly responded, “Come on,” which was strange, because we’d been told the opposing candidate’s mics would be turned off when the other was speaking. Apparently the mics are, at least momentarily, hot again.

In what may be the sickest burn of the night, Harris invited people watching the debate to go to watch one of Trump’s rallies:

What makes this answer all the more impressive is that she gave it after being asked a question about immigration, an area that is supposed to be one of her weaknesses.

After debate moderator Linsey Davis pointed out that Vance said the former president would veto a national abortion ban, Trump not only denied it, but blamed Vance for the miscommunication. “I didn’t discuss it with JD,” said Trump.

“We hardly make chips anymore because of philosophies like they have and policies like they have,” Trump said, falsely accusing the Biden administration of killing U.S. semiconductor production.

In reality, a report from the Semiconductor Industry Association released this year found that the United States’ global share of semiconductor production is expected to triple by 2032, fueled largely by investments laid out in the CHIPS Act that Biden signed into law in 2022.

Trump’s response to Harris on abortion inadvertently made a pretty strong case for voting for Democratic senators in November. He responded by saying that Harris can’t promise to restore the rights previously guaranteed by Roe v. Wade because she would never get it through a “50-50” Senate. Of course, the Senate doesn’t have to be evenly split if voters in, say, Michigan, Montana and Ohio vote for Democrats.

Trump just called Harris a “Marxist,” a word that has not been regularly used in presidential debates since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Marxism is a word that has an actual meaning in the real world, and Harris is not in fact proposing to reconstitute society along the lines of collectivism and state ownership of industry.

Trump also claimed that Harris learned Marxism from her father, an economist who focused on inequality. Not that it matters, but for the record Harris was primarily raised by her mother and her relationship with her father seems quite complicated.

One of the biggest complaints about the Biden administration is that he failed to deliver on cutting student loan debt. But as Trump just reminded those watching at home, Biden tried multiple times to issue policies that would have done so if it weren’t for conservative judges and justices blocking him. In trying to distract from his own weakness on abortion, he instead made a strong case for Democrats who might have been disillusioned over student loans to vote for Harris.

Take a look at this photo of Harris listening to Trump. Note her hand resting on her chin, to show engagement. Her bemused and contemplative expression was neither mocking nor showing deference. It’s truly something to behold.

Trump just repeated one of his favorite and most fallacious claims about abortion, which is that Democrats want to enable “late-term” abortions in the ninth month — which is extremely rare and would be performed only under an extreme medical emergency — and even after a child is born, which is technically infanticide and already illegal across the U.S. Moderator Linsey Davis fact-checked that briefly before Harris’ turn to speak.

Trump has brought up this false claim often in an effort to paint Democrats as “extreme” on abortion, with neither data nor facts to back it up.

Trump said that he did an excellent job with the pandemic, which struck during his last year as president. Just a reminder: When Covid struck, more than 22 million people were pushed out of the job market, and Trump ended his presidency with a net loss of 3 million jobs, as Politico pointed out. Trump, who disbanded the White House pandemic response team in 2018, also oversaw more than 400,000 deaths from Covid, for which he squarely blamed China.

Trump once again claimed that many of the migrants crossing the southern border are coming from countries that are emptying their insane asylums and mental institutions. That is not only incredibly factually incorrect, it’s also got many people (including me) wondering if he’s confusing political asylum — the act of seeking refuge from repression in your home country — with the concept of insane asylums. 

Harris wasted no time in bringing up Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led plan for a second Trump term that is full of unpopular ideas like criminalizing porn and abolishing the Department of Education. Although the plan was drafted by multiple former Trump aides, he responded by again claiming he had nothing to do with it. His most believable line about the 920-page proposal, though, was that he hasn’t read it.

As we all know by now, the Harris campaign gave in to the Trump campaign's demand for a candidate's mic to be muted while it's the other candidate's turn to speak. We also knew ABC News has the discretion to unmute the mics if they think there's an exchange worth continuing.

Roughly 10 minutes into the debate, the mic has been unmuted to let Trump respond to Harris' statement that Trump has "no plan for you."

In an attack on immigrants, Trump made references to debunked stories about immigrants taking over apartments in Aurora, Colorado, and eating household pets in Springfield, Ohio. Both claims were spurred by right-wing social media users and have been refuted by local law enforcement in both cities.

Trump takes umbrage at the term, but there’s no denying that his plan to jack up the tariffs on basically everything coming into the country would be passed on to American consumers and in turn re-raising inflation. It also happens to be basically the only policy idea that he’s got.

Asked if Americans are better off than four years ago, Harris stresses that she’s the only candidate on stage who grew up in a middle-class household. She promotes her “opportunity economy,” noting the plan she’s pitched to give people a hand buying new homes and launching small businesses.

Harris and Trump shook hands after all, with Harris taking the initiative to walk onto Trump’s side of the stage and thrust her right hand out.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his independent presidential bid last month and endorsed Trump, is one of the GOP nominee’s high-profile surrogates tonight. His presence at the debate is almost somewhat tragic; Kennedy had failed to qualify for the June debate with Biden and Trump despite fighting tooth-and-nail for a spot. Tonight, he finally gets to participate in a debate — not as a candidate onstage, but as a Trump surrogate in the spin room.

This second presidential debate is similar to the first one in Atlanta, in that both were scheduled to take place in cities that Trump has falsely accused of helping cheat him out of victory in 2020.

In pushing bogus allegations of election fraud, Trump has:

• Claimed that “bad things happen in Philadelphia.”
• Said that city officials “used Covid to cheat.”
• And said that “Philadelphia was one of the most egregious places anywhere in the world” when it came to the 2020 election.

Deranged nonsense from Trump, to be sure. But in the Atlanta-based debate with Biden, he wasn’t asked to answer for his baseless attacks on the city’s democratic processes — or, by extension, the voters who participated in them. Let’s hope things go differently in Philadelphia tonight.

Alex Wagner speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

I was talking with some senior members of the Harris campaign and they told me the vice president didn't do any debate prep today. She spent the day relaxing. Her husband is in the area, we can assume that they are just chilling — for lack of a better term. They feel confident. 

However, they did admit that they believe that she needs this a big win tonight, maybe more than Trump does. They acknowledge that the bar is just a lot higher for a woman and a woman of color on a stage like this, at a moment like this.

So I think that there’s kind of quiet confidence, but certainly not overconfidence, about what might take place tonight.

These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

One of the hardest things for a journalist watching a debate is imagining what you don’t know. After watching Trump campaign rallies and listening to Harris speeches, there are a few lines tonight that we will have already heard. But those may hit differently for voters hearing them for the first time. Policy questions are also important, but it’s unlikely we’ll learn anything new about what either candidate would do in office.

For that reason, my favorite kind of debate question centers more on judgment and how they approach decision-making. One example from a piece on the questions I’d like to see asked that ran today is for Trump: “What is a mistake that you made during your first term and how would you handle it differently?”

Read more below.

It’s likely that Trump will either be asked or try to bring up one of his efforts to overcome the massive drag that abortion and other women’s health issues have had on his campaign. Last month, he told NBC News that he would support federal funding for IVF. NBC News reported today that his proposal has produced “a mix of skepticism and outright opposition” in Washington, one that is “across the party spectrum, from center-right to far-right lawmakers.” I wouldn’t put money on Trump being able to offer up any new details on this half-baked scheme, but it’ll be fun to watch him try.

There is a vast chasm between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party over how to tackle gun violence, and it’s reflected in their presidential nominees’ positions, too. Gun violence has come into sharp focus once again after last week’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, in which four people were killed and nine others were injured. 

After the shooting, Harris called it a “senseless tragedy” and said: “We have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all.” Trump, on the other hand, shifted the focus to the 14-year-old shooting suspect, calling him “a sick and deranged monster” and making no mention of firearms whatsoever.

Further underscoring Trump fans’ support for firearms is reporting from NBC News that his official campaign volunteers in Georgia are hosting a debate watch party tonight at Adventure Outdoors, a retailer that markets itself as the “world’s biggest” gun store. An organizer of the watch party said that the venue was chosen “weeks” before the school shooting.

One problem with the Trump era has been the lack of serious policy discussion from the right on serious issues. When climate change is brought up, for instance, Trump tends to dismiss the science behind it and go on asides about electric boats or windmills killing birds.

It wasn’t always this way. In 2008, Republican nominee John McCain put forward a detailed plan for fighting climate change. Mitt Romney was a lot more cautious in his approach, but he still had a record as governor to look back on. But Trump pretty much sits the issue out.

Bigoted conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer reportedly was seen exiting Trump’s plane in Philadelphia, which might offer some insight into Trump’s tactics this evening. Aside from being known for promoting white nationalism and Islamophobia, Loomer has used her podcast and social media platforms lately to lob overtly racist and sexist attacks at Harris.

Trump has kept Loomer in his inner circle despite concerns voiced by his allies. Maybe he’s using her for inspo.

Look, there’s not much about 2020 that was “great” or even “good.” But you know what was truly amazing? The fly that landed on then-Vice President Mike Pence’s head.

And for two blessed minutes during that vice presidential debate — the last debate that Harris took part in — we got to forget how much of a nightmare the nation had endured with the pandemic and instead got to collectively wonder how the heck Pence managed to let a fly that big just crawl around on him for TWO MINUTES without trying to get rid of it.

The unusual circumstances around Harris’ nomination meant she missed the phase in the primary where a candidate normally spells out what they would do.

So it turned some heads today when Harris updated the policy page on her campaign website to spell out more of her positions on taxes, home ownership, health care and other issues. The timing of the move was almost surely tied to the debate, since it allows her to point to specifics if asked about any of these issues, while also giving Trump and the moderators less time to go over them.

Still, Harris’ policy ideas are still pretty broadly sketched out. We know that she thinks first-time homebuyers should get up to $25,000 to help with down payments, for example, but not whether there are any caps on the program or how it would be paid for.

Chris Hayes speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

I think the main tactical question for Harris — and I don’t think it’s an easy one — is how much you engage Trump. This guy is going to say crazy stuff, he’s going to ramble, he’s going to say nasty things and he’s going to lie about you. So how much of the energy going there?

That is a very difficult tactical question because he will do things like lie about what immigrants have done. So is Harris going to let those lies hang there? At every moment she’s going to have to make a tactical decision on how to respond. Trump is a hard guy to debate for that reason. 

The most important lane for Harris to take is to talk to the camera and say to the people at home: “I’m Kamala Harris, I want to cut your taxes. Trump wants to raise them. I want to move forward. He wants to go back. I’m looking out for you and I’m thinking about what we can do for you. He’s looking out for himself.”

The Harris campaign has set that message frame pretty well already. They’ve been hammering it in ads. This is an opportunity for people to hear it from her.

These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

After a hearing Friday in his appeal of E. Jean Carroll’s first civil trial verdict, Trump bashed Jessica Leeds, a woman who has accused Trump of groping her on a plane in the late 1970s and who testified during Carroll’s first trial. Trump has denied sexually assaulting Leeds and said Friday that she wouldn’t have been “the chosen one.”

Leeds held a press conference of her own on Monday, where she rebutted Trump’s comments. She didn’t announce a defamation lawsuit against him as some expected, but she’ll likely pay close attention to tonight’s debate.

As Lisa Rubin wrote for MaddowBlog today:

Jen Psaki speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

The thing I’ve been thinking about all day is that Harris is a prepper, a studier. It’s something we all admire about her. 

But she’s never met Trump before. She’s never debated him before. He’s a circus performer and she’s not. It’s a very different kind of skill set and muscle than she’s had to use in past debates. He’s not Mike Pence.

So for me, what I think is most important for her is to be in the moment. She needs to come back to the message of I’m fighting for you, and he is fighting for himself. And that, to me, is the message frame. I think it’s about reminding people who she’s fighting for.

These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff, who has been hitting the campaign trail hard in the past few weeks, will be at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to support Harris tonight, NBC News reported. It’s unclear, however, if Melania Trump will be a no-show at the debate again; she didn’t attend the June debate, and she has not made any appearances on behalf of her husband’s campaign, save some private fundraisers. 

She has not been totally absent from the public eye, though — the former first lady has been plugging her upcoming memoir by posting mysterious clips on social media that seem to allude to a conspiracy against her husband.

Joy Reid speaking on MSNBC moments ago:

This is an interesting moment for Vice President Harris. Most people don’t generally know much about the vice president, so she’s in this unique position of being relatively unknown. 

Harris’ only job tonight is to make people who are not yet decided feel comfortable with the idea of her as president. I think that’s really all she has to do. She doesn’t need to do a knockout blow. She doesn’t have to do anything extraordinary. 

She just needs to make the small percentage of Biden voters who aren’t there yet feel like, okay, I’m good with her. She also needs to convince the small number of undecided voters, who are going to decide the election, to believe that she’s not too radical or whatever it is that is stopping them from closing the deal —  that’s her job.

Donald Trump has a ceiling and I don’t see anything that he could possibly do whilst tweeting out cat memes, threats and weird stuff from Truth Social to add to his number. She just needs to close that gap, and that’s all her job is tonight. 

These comments have been slightly edited for length and clarity.

The Trump campaign seems to have set itself up for a debate moment about kittens, should either side choose to go there. In recent days, a number of MAGA-aligned social media accounts have spread the baseless claim that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pet cats, as well as ducks and geese. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, amplified the bizarre claim on X, then posted the tweet equivalent of a giant shruggie about whether it’s actually happening. Meantime, the Arizona Republican Party is going all in. 

I’m not sure that creating news just before the debate is a sound strategy. But that’s what Trump did this afternoon by urging Republicans to refuse to fund the government with a new continuing resolution unless they’re able to attach laws addressing the GOP’s debunked allegation that noncitizens are a threats to sway federal elections.

Harris has repeatedly denounced Trump for pressuring Republicans to kill a bipartisan border bill, and she has framed him as a chaos agent who is unserious about effectively running the government. And Trump’s suggestion that Republicans should be willing to allow a government shutdown unless Democrats pass laws aligning with his deranged conspiracy theories arguably just gave her another gift to help her drive that point home.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who lost the presidential race to Trump in 2016, talked debate strategy with Harris in recent days, NBC News reports, citing three people familiar with their discussions. 

Clinton specifically told Harris that Trump may try to “bait” her and suggested the vice president should try to turn that back on Trump, the sources told NBC News. Harris and Clinton have reportedly been in touch several times since Biden dropped out of the race in July.

Clinton was the last Democratic nominee to shake Trump’s hand on the debate stage. Biden and Trump didn’t shake hands in 2020 because of Covid-19 and the two men didn’t shake hands during their debate in June. Will the debate handshake be revived tonight?

While it hasn’t been as much of a drag on her as Biden, Harris is likely not looking forward to being in a rough place if asked about Israel’s ongoing bombardment of Gaza.

If moderators bring up the topic, it will likely force her to comment on the protests against the U.S. supplying Israel with weapons the Israeli government is using on Palestinian civilians.

Trump is more likely to try to position himself as being more pro-Israel than Harris. The latter though is probably better for her, as Trump has managed to sound antisemitic in his attempts to court the right-wing evangelicals who back Israel.

If Social Security and Medicare come up tonight — as they should, given that Trump has said there’s “a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting” — don’t be surprised to hear Trump claim that undocumented immigrants are killing the programs.

“They’re filling up and loading up Social Security, Medicare, with illegal immigrants that have come into our country,” he lied to Sean Hannity at a Fox News town hall last week.

Trump has it completely backward. As experts at the Center for American Progress Action Fund point out, immigrants — documented and undocumented — contribute to both programs via payroll taxes and don’t receive benefits. Whatever your views on immigration policy, immigrants of all statuses help both programs’ finances. If Trump wants to find the real threat to entitlements, he can start with his own party.

In high-profile situations like tonight’s debate, Trump usually gets at least one question about whether he will accept an election loss or condemn violence, even though the answer is almost never just “yes.” If he’s asked tonight, expect Trump to say something about how of course he would accept a loss if it’s legitimate, but, of course, Democrats are cheating, etc.

In the most illuminating debate moment in 2020, he responded to a question about whether he would condemn the Proud Boys by saying they should “stand back and stand by.” A former official for the group said they saw a surge in membership afterward. Without the ability to press Trump on his answer directly, these kinds of questions aren’t particularly helpful, since he tends to use his time spreading more misinformation.

Not long ago, inflation was the biggest political threat to Democrats’ fortunes this fall. But while Trump still peppers his stump speeches with references to prices going up “like nobody’s ever seen before,” the reality is that inflation has cooled significantly. A slowdown in hiring reportedly has the Federal Reserve preparing to cut interest rates for the first time since beginning to raise them in 2022. Meanwhile, economists are seeing signs that the so-called “vibescession” is abating. 

The president, who is acutely aware of how consequential a bad debate performance can be, told reporters while departing the White House for New York City this evening that he has talked to Harris, but declined to share his advice for her. 

“She seems calm, cool and collected. I think she’s going to do great,” he said. “And I’m not going to tell you what advice I gave her.”

How long into the debate will we have to wait until “the weave” makes an appearance? That’s the name Trump gave to the meandering and nonsensical diatribes that have become typical during his public speaking engagements. The former president has tried to portray this as a rhetorical technique rather than what it actually is: a glaring example of his inability to stay on message with coherent talking points. I’m predicting one weave per debate question.

Tonight’s debate is in Philadelphia, just a few blocks away from Independence Hall. The candidates have spent plenty of time in Pennsylvania, and they likely will spend a lot more there between now and Election Day. Both campaigns have circled the state as key to victory, as NBC News has reported, with each side pouring massive amounts of resources into winning the Keystone State.

The immediate aftermath of a debate can be like trying to review a movie while the credits are still rolling. You have a general sense of the thing, but it’s hard to pin down exactly what worked or didn’t work. But there is one moment that will matter, and it’s whatever clip goes viral the day after the debate.

The potential audience for a 15-second clip on social media of Trump or Harris mangling an answer or going off-script is orders of magnitude larger than the one watching the debate. Over time, it will also color the memories of even those who watched the whole thing. With Trump on the stage, there’s likely to be several contenders for the most viral moment, but we’ll see which one sticks.

While Harris has been hunkered down in Pittsburgh for the past five days for intense debate practice with aides — one of whom is impersonating Trump, The New York Times reported — Trump has taken a different tack. He is not engaging in traditional debate preparations and is instead holding policy sessions with advisers to review Harris’ record and anticipate her attacks, according to reports.

Trump and his campaign even seem to be approaching the debate like it’s a boxing match. His senior adviser, Jason Miller, suggested that preparing to debate Trump was like “trying to prepare for Floyd Mayweather or Muhammad Ali.” Trump himself quoted Mike Tyson when talking about his debate prep last week, saying: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

As we all know, Biden’s age and mental acuity became the focus of the June presidential debate and ultimately led to the president withdrawing his re-election bid. But tonight, 78-year-old Trump will be going up against a nominee nearly 20 years his junior.

As Zeeshan Aleem wrote for MSNBC Daily earlier this month:

Trump’s deteriorating ability to clearly communicate is a consequential feature of his 2024 candidacy. That deterioration may not have been as salient when Trump, 78, had 81-year-old President Joe Biden as an opponent. But it’s all the more clear as he now faces off against 59-year-old Vice President Kamala Harris. Questions about Biden’s mental acuity were rightly raised in this election cycle. Questions about Trump’s mental acuity should be raised, too.

Read more below.

A new KFF health tracking poll released today suggests the Harris-Walz campaign has been successful in setting the stakes of the presidential election for voters, particularly on the issue of abortion. In a survey conducted in late August and early September, 61% of voters said the presidential election will have a “major impact” on abortion access, compared with 51% in March when Biden was the presumptive nominee.

The margin of sampling error for the full sample is plus or minus 4 percentage points, according to KFF.

The Harris campaign has announced that it will be flying a drone show over the Philadelphia Art Museum starting at 8 p.m. ET that will “echo some of the popular messaging” of the campaign, including the ad about crowd sizes.

The opportunity in this debate belongs to Harris, as there are voters who say they still do not know much about her or her policies. Trump has a record of playing fast and loose with the truth both on and off the debate stage.

Harris will have to make in-the-moment decisions about when she responds to Trump’s bluster — with words or her facial expressions — and when to ignore him and talk about her plans. She can still increase her support, while Trump has a ceiling.

Yes, voters feel like they know who Trump is, and they rejected him and his policies in 2020. Harris has the opportunity to remind the American people of that by contrasting her joyful and positive vision for the future with Trump’s dark view of retribution. 

Read more below.

When an incumbent president is seeking re-election, the challenger often faces the “commander-in-chief test.” The public knows one of these people can be president, but they may wonder if the challenger can rise to the demands of the job.

While the situation is a little different this year, most of the audience for tonight’s debate already has an opinion on whether Trump met that test. But there is a portion of undecided voters who want to know if Harris can do it.

The Democratic National Convention last month was one moment for Harris to show that, and she did well. But the debate will be a chance to see her in a less controlled environment, to see how she reacts in real time to a challenge, and to see her on the same stage as a former president.

The truth is, most challengers pass the test, though they don’t necessarily win the election as a result. But Harris has a lot of room to grow her support at tonight’s debate by seeming presidential — outlining her vision for the country, showing a command of the facts, responding smartly to Trump’s attacks. 

As a former president, Trump does not have as much to gain.

The format for tonight’s face-off will mirror the June debate between Trump and Biden. The 90-minute debate will forgo formal opening statements for questions from moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC News.

Each candidate will have two minutes to answer. The other candidate will then have two minutes to offer a rebuttal. There will be a further minute for follow-ups for each side. Trump and Harris are prohibited from having notes or props, and they will not be allowed to talk to staff during the two commercial breaks.

Most notably, as my colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim noted, candidates’ microphones will be muted when it is not their turn to speak. Harris’ camp had sought to change that rule, but Trump’s campaign knew better than to have him in front of a hot mic. However, ABC may turn on both mics if there is a sustained exchange, and there will be reporters in the room to cover any notable remarks not caught on microphones.

Finally, the candidates will each close with a two-minute closing statement. Trump won a virtual coin toss last week and chose to speak last.

Trump did not take the witness stand in his hush money case earlier this year, but he’s going to face cross-examination from a skilled prosecutor after all. A former district attorney and California attorney general, Harris has shown her ability to cut to the chase in past debates and during Senate hearings with the likes of then-Attorney General Bill Barr and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

She will be much better at rebuttal than Biden, who whiffed on responses to Trump answers on subjects such as abortion and taxes. But she’ll also want to let some things slide. Trump makes so many factually dubious statements that she could spend her whole debate time just correcting him without spending any time outlining a positive vision of her own.

For weeks, the Harris campaign had been pushing ABC News to keep the microphones on after a candidate’s allocated speaking time ends. Its calculation was that the mics would allow viewers to hear Trump’s outbursts onstage, essentially letting him dig himself into a hole.

The Democrat’s campaign ultimately agreed to the muted microphones just six days before the debate, though not without telling ABC News that she would be “fundamentally disadvantaged” by the format.

Harris will likely still “try to create moments in which Trump might lash out as he has in the past,” NBC News reported. The Harris campaign told CBS News last week that if there is significant crosstalk onstage, the microphones may be unmuted, and if not, the reporters in the room will relay notable moments.

Part of Harris’ extensive debate prep reportedly included how she will handle derogatory personal attacks that Trump may level against her on the debate stage. The Republican nominee has shared deeply sexist insults about Harris on Truth Social, and he has questioned her racial identity, falsely claiming that she suddenly “became Black.”

Trump is known for making below-the-belt comments about his rivals, and he tends to become more vicious with his insults when agitated — a weakness that Harris has been preparing to seize on, NBC News reported, citing multiple sources familiar with her debate prep.

The debate, which will be held at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, will start at 9 p.m. ET and run for 90 minutes. It will air on ABC. NBC and MSNBC will also air the full debate live, with special coverage beginning at 7 p.m. ET.

Read more below.