The night Donald Trump choked like a dog (Kamala's version)

In their Philly debate, a poised, presidential Kamala Harris turned Donald Trump into a raving Fox News grandpa and lost Taylor Swift.

by Will Bunch | Columnist
Published Sept. 11, 2024, 12:20 p.m. ET

Fighting for the future of America barely a football field away from the room where it all began 248 years ago, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump came here to Philadelphia for a high-stakes faceoff that, in the end, produced no unforgettable lines like “you’re no Jack Kennedy” or “there you go again.” But here’s the thing that I — and probably most of the 70 million or so Americans watching on TV — will remember long after we cast our ballots in November.

The look.

For 100 gobsmacking minutes, the Californian who would be America’s first woman president was all of us, as the split screen showed Harris’ highly expressive face ranging from bemused puzzlement to barely suppressed laughter to blinking eyeballs of shock, as the 45th president of the United States dourly ranted about made-up “migrant crime” statistics or falsely claimed that Democratic states allow doctors to murder newborn babies. Harris dominated the screen with her look of utter pathos — a kind of a sorrow and pity for both the mental state of her 78-year-old opponent but also, in a way, for the nation that has come to this bizarre moment in our history.

As I watched on a big screen at South Philadelphia’s Dock Street Brewery at a boisterous watch party that blended women’s basketball fanatics with left-wing activists, I kept thinking of those hilarious Trump-satire videos by the comedian Sarah Cooper, where her lip syncs of POTUS 45’s most inane rants are spliced with quick cuts to Cooper also acting the part of the shocked onlooker. Like Cooper, Harris captured the zeitgeist of the 2024 election by looking across the room at the National Constitution Center with her unspoken message: Can you believe this ... stuff?

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Viewers of a certain age probably heard Humphrey Bogart playing lieutenant commander Queeg, convinced that his frozen strawberries were stolen while revealing that the former captain of the ship was bat-guano crazy all this time. The tirade about QAnon-level internet conspiracy theories about Springfield, Ohio was debunked in real time — and kudos to him — by ABC’s David Muir, and there’s also a richer irony here. Throughout Trump’s endless time in the public eye, he has revealed himself as a sociopathic dog hater, even falling back on a line that someone “choked like a dog” as his fiercest insult.

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