In the end, her face said it all.
Before Kamala Harris and Donald Trump met in Philadelphia last night, they agreed to rules stipulating that each candidate’s microphone would generally be muted while the other was speaking. The rules were meant to ensure, among other things, equal air time. Predictably, Trump ignored them. He talked out of turn, again and again, forging ahead until ABC’s production staff relented, turning on his mic to let him have his say. As a result, the debate ended with, by one estimate, a five-minute difference in speaking time between the two participants. The vice president spent more than half of the debate quite literally silenced. Nevertheless, she communicated.
Harris is known for her ability to turn onstage reactions into discourse; she did that to great effect as a senator and while debating Vice President Mike Pence in 2020. Last night, when unable to reply to Trump’s claims, she met them instead with a range of expressions: indignation, amusement, perplexity, pity. Trump is a man of many words, but it does not follow that the words he speaks will be coherent, compelling, or true. On the contrary: They might be so unhinged that the only reply they deserve is a look of baffled incredulity. Over the course of the debate, the former president claimed that Democrats favor the execution of newborn babies; that President Joe Biden secretly hates Harris; that immigrants are eating people’s pets.
The claims are gaudy fictions—and the debate’s moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, tried to clarify that fact, maintaining poker faces while dutifully informing viewers that, for example, officials in Springfield, Ohio, have seen no evidence of the alleged pet-eating. Harris’s reactions were fact-checks too. They denied Trump’s assertions the dignity of a check in the first place. They refused to take the former president at his word. They refused to normalize him or entertain his antics. Instead, they turned his claims into silent questions: You … really want people to believe that immigrants are eating puppies?
The pollster Frank Luntz, analyzing the debate on social media last night, suggested that Harris’s reactions to Trump were liabilities. The vice president, he argued, needs to “train her face not to respond,” because the response itself “feeds into a female stereotype and, more importantly, risks offending undecided voters.” This was wrong in every sense. Harris’s many reactions to Trump flipped the gender dynamics to her advantage. Her wordless responses were language by another means, eloquent in all they left unsaid.
But Harris’s expressions were more than memes in the making. They were also distillations of a broader strategy for interacting with an opponent who is capable of saying so much and so little at the same time. Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, once argued that the best way to fight the media is to “flood the zone with shit.” Trump long ago abandoned Bannon, but he has maintained the strategy: The former president floods the zone with words, and this is the source of much of the chaos he has sown. Few people—few institutions—have known quite how to react.
Harris’s silent assessments of Trump restored a bit of order. The Washington Post, analyzing the debate through the body language of each candidate, broke the event down into individual images and moments of reaction: “Harris put her hand to her chin,” “Trump looked straight ahead,” “Harris used her eyes.” The snippets were blunt to the point of absurdity, but this was the idea. In a debate as in everything else, the reactions matter. They reveal a lot about who someone is—and isn’t.
Luntz’s analysis, wrong in so many ways, was correct in one: It was true that the split screen, for Harris, was also a tightrope. The vice president had to react without seeming reactive. She couldn’t seem angry. She couldn’t seem too flippant or too indignant. While TV viewers had a variety of reactions available to them (face-palms, high-fives, fetal positions), the woman onstage had limited possibilities. But she used them to her advantage. If her strategy was to goad her opponent into revealing who he is, she succeeded.
And her success was written on his face. Trump’s expression, at the debate’s outset, was frozen into a stoic glare. As Harris baited him, though—and as he repeatedly took the bait she offered—his composure frayed. He began grimacing and puckering and glaring. He seemed, at several moments, to lose control of his emotions. He seemed, indeed, to become a little hysterical—and appeared far from presidential.
Any jury, a good lawyer knows, observes more than the witness on the stand. They watch everything in the courtroom, gathering their evidence and making assessments. Last night, Harris gave Americans something to see. She let Trump talk. And then she widened her eyes at the spectacle.
