Trump-Harris debate: Taylor Swift endorsement, fact check, analysis

Top Trump supporter Rep. Byron Donalds is insisting the former president did not take Harris’ bait and is accusing her of having sidestepped every policy question she was asked.

“What was proven tonight is that she spent about 90 minutes not talking about the issues that the American people are concerned about. She spent 90 minutes attacking Donald Trump, trying to get under his skin,” he said, insisting: “It did not work.”

Trump, he said, “defended himself like any human being would, and then he got back to the issues at hand, which are what’s important to the American people.”

Latino leaders applauded Harris performance during the debate with her campaign applauding what she said and criticizing comments made by Trump toward Latino and immigrant communities.

Democratic strategist, Maria Cardona on her social media described Harris’ performance as “a masterclass in presidential debate.”

Immediately after the debate the Latinos con Harris-Walz, WhatsApp channel shared a message to the community: “Quien habla mucho, hace poco … sabemos lo tuyo, Donald” or in English, “He who talks a lot, talks a little … we know about you, Donald.”

The message received several laughing emojis reactions from members in the channel.

LULAC CEO Juan Proaño said he felt the debate did not help to move conversations forward to potential policy about issues such as the economy and immigration. Proaño said Harris did a better job addressing issues that specifically affect the Latino community but Trump was simply focused on rhetoric.

“It really was just all rhetoric in regard to the demonization of Latinos and immigrants,” Proaño said. “The fact that (Trump) would go on national television and repeat things like eating dogs putting the blame on Venezuelans. It just it really is very sad.”

“This is further evidence that the Democrat Party has unfortunately become a party of the wealthy elites,” said spokesperson Karoline Leavitt. “President Trump is going to continue to fight for hardworking Americans, the forgotten men and women of this country who don’t have the luxury of living in private gated communities and need their local law enforcement,” she said, insisting the endorsement wouldn’t matter.

“There’s many Swifties for Trump out there in America,” she said, herself included.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is joining the chorus of Trump supporters criticizing ABC News’ debate moderators. Appearing on NBC News moments after both candidates left the stage, Rubio said Harris was never pressed on inflation or her past suggestions of banning hydraulic fracturing.

“There are all kind of things the moderators never asked,” Rubio said.

He added that he wasn’t one to frequently criticize debate moderators, but that doing so was warranted in this case. Republicans have criticized Harris for “flip-flopping” on the issue, noting that Harris said in the 2020 campaign that she opposed fracking, a drilling technique that is widely used in Pennsylvania and other states.

Harris has since said repeatedly that she won’t ban fracking if elected, and she reiterated that in Tuesday’s debate.

Pop superstar Taylor Swift endorsed Harris in an Instagram post shortly after the debate ended.

“I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”

She signed the message “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady.”

“Whoever did debate prep for Donald Trump should be fired,” Chris Christie says on ABC News. He helped prep Trump for debates in previous election cycles and is now a Trump critic.

Trump campaign officials and his allies are criticizing what they say was a 3-1 debate moderated by ABC. Trump campaign spokesperson Brian Hughes accuses the moderators of only rebutting Trump and says there were trying to skew the result.

No surprise—Trump thinks he did well during the debate.”

People are saying BIG WIN tonight!” he posted on Truth Social, his social media site. He also complained about the moderators.

“I thought that was my best Debate, EVER, especially since it was THREE ON ONE!”

It had been anticipated that Tuesday night’s debate might be the only meet-up for Harris and Trump, but now the Democratic nominee says she’s “ready” for another one.

In a statement put out immediately following the debate’s conclusion, Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said the Democrat “commanded” the stage and “is ready for a second debate.”

“Is Donald Trump?” O’Malley Dillon asked.

Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on a possible second meeting. Trump initially balked at the arrangements surrounding the ABC News debate, saying he had made the agreement with Biden before the president ended his reelection bid.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro says that some voters had “brain fog” about how Trump was as president but that Harris reminded them of how it was in a big way.

Shapiro, who was on the short list to be Harris’ running mate, appeared briefly on NBC News moments after the debate ended. He said Trump “was all over the place” and a “rambling man full of nonsense” while Harris demonstrated leadership.

Pressed on if Harris offered enough insight into her policy proposals for a national audience who doesn’t know her well, Shapiro said Harris made it clear that she wants to move the country forward.

Trump repeated false claims that Chinese companies are building “massive” automobile factories in Mexico in order to sell vehicles in the United States. At present, industry experts say they know of no such factories under construction, and there’s only one small Chinese auto assembly plant operating in Mexico. Chinese companies, though, have expressed desires to enter the lucrative U.S. market.

There’s no guarantee that Trump and Harris will debate again. But Harris’ team is definitely interested in another face off.

“That was fun. Let’s do it again in October,” wrote Brian Fallon, a campaign spokesperson, on social media.

Both Trump and Harris said “thank you” after they delivered their closing statements and the debate ended.

Doug Emhoff, the vice president’s husband, joined his wife on stage and waved. Trump exited alone. His wife, Melania, did not join him in Philadelphia.

The tech crew applauded.

For the last question of the debate, moderators asked Harris and Trump what they would do to fight climate change, but Harris said little and Trump said nothing actually addressing his plans on the issue.

Harris noted that Trump has said climate change is a “hoax,” and touched on the realities of extreme weather, but then pivoted to focus on clean energy and manufacturing jobs. Trump spoke exclusively on the latter and did not respond on his climate denialism or the moves he made to roll back environmental regulations while in office.

Trump misrepresented key facts of the Central Park Five case while defending a newspaper ad he placed about two weeks after the April 1989 attack in which he called for bringing back the death penalty. Trump wrongly stating that the victim was killed and that the wrongly accused suspects had pleaded guilty.“

They admitted, they said they pled guilty and I said, ‘well, if they pled guilty they badly hurt a person, killed a person ultimately,” Trump said. “And the pled guilty, then they pled not guilty.”

Trump appeared to be confusing guilty pleas with confessions that the men — teenagers at the time — said they made to police under duress. They later recanted, pleaded not guilty in court and were convicted after jury trials. Their convictions were vacated in 2002 after another person confessed to the crime.

The victim, Trisha Meili, was in a coma for 12 days after the attack but ultimately survived. She testified in court against the wrongly accused suspects, who are now known as the Exonerated Five. In 2002, Matias Reyes confessed to the crime and said he was the lone assailant. DNA testing matched Reyes to the attack, but because of the statute of limitations he could not be charged in connection with it.

Harris and Trump veered in different directions in their closing arguments. The vice president promised that she was focused on the future while Trump was stuck in the past. She emphasized that she has plans to help the middle class.

Trump criticized Harris for not implementing her plans while she’s in office. “Why hasn’t she done it?” he said repeatedly.

That’s a wrap on the Philadelphia debate between Harris and Trump.

It had been advertised as a 90-minute debate with two commercial breaks. All told, Tuesday night’s debate lasted for an hour and 45 minutes.

There isn’t a second debate between Harris and Trump scheduled, but one could be.

Harris says Trump is warning of a “bloodbath” if he loses the election, but she took his comments out of context.

Trump delivered the line at a speech in March in Ohio in which he was talking about the impact of offshoring on the American auto industry and his plans to increase tariffs on foreign-made cars. It was in reference to the auto industry that he warned of a “bloodbath” if his proposals aren’t enacted.

Trump left the stage during the last commercial break of the debate, but Harris remained, writing notes on paper on her podium.

Trump claimed that as president he saved the Affordable Care Act and tried to “make it as good as it can be.”

The former Republican president has long loathed the health insurance program, also called Obamacare. He promised to repeal it but could never make good on the promise.

Instead, he weakened it. His administration spent less money on navigators, for example, who help people enroll in the coverage. Enrollment dipped by millions.

It has since rebounded during the Biden years, also because the Democratic administration has expanded eligibility for the coverage and allocated billions of dollars toward subsidies to make the plans cheaper. The next president will decide whether to save those subsidies. They expire after next year.

As she tried to refute Trump’s accusation that she wants to take away owners’ guns, Harris revealed that she is a gun owner, too.

“Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking anybody’s guns away,” she said.

Harris first revealed the news in 2019. “I am a gun owner, and I own a gun for probably the reason a lot of people do — for personal safety,” Harris told reporters in Iowa. “I was a career prosecutor.”

One challenge for Trump’s attacks on the ACA: It’s gotten a lot more popular since it was passed in 2010.

A KFF Health Tracking Poll found earlier this year that 62% of U.S. adults have a favorable opinion of the Affordable Care Act, up from 46% in 2010.

More broadly, recent AP-NORC polling gives Harris more of an advantage on the issue of health care. Americans trust her over Trump to better handle health care, 46% to 31%. About 2 in 10 say they trust neither (13%) or both equally (9%).

The debate had been advertised as 90 minutes, with two commercial breaks. But it was always possible that ABC News might go longer, and that’s exactly what’s happening.

So far, there’s been only one commercial break, too.

New York City Council Member Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated group of men known as the Central Park Five, will be speaking to journalists after the debate ends.

▶ Read more about Salaam

Trump again questioned Harris’ racial identity but then repeatedly said that he “does not care” how she identifies.

“I read where she was not Black… and then I read that she was Black,” Trump said. “I couldn’t care less. Whatever she wants to be is okay with me.”

Harris called it a “tragedy” that Trump, she argued, “has consistently, over the course of his career, attempted to use race to divide the American people.”

For years, Trump has been promising a better healthcare plan than the Affordable Care Act. Asked again during the debate, Trump was unable to explain what he would do on healthcare.”I have concepts of a plan,” he said. “I’m not president right now.”He said he would reveal the plan “in the not-so-distant future,” something he’s promised before.

Harris said Trump has a long history of racial division, going back to when his family’s company was investigated for refusing to rent to Black people decades ago. She also mentioned that he called for the death penalty for the “Central Park Five,” who were falsely accused of rape, and spread false “birther” theories about President Barack Obama.

“I think the American people want better than that, want better than this,” she said.

Trump has a fine line to walk on personal attacks on Harris tonight. A Pew Research Center poll found that about two-thirds of voters say Trump has been “too personally critical” of Harris.

Slightly fewer than half (45%) of voters say Harris has been too personally critical of Trump. Trump’s supporters are more likely to say he’s too critical of Harris (41% of Trump’s supporters say this) than Harris’ supporters are to say she’s too critical of Trump (12% of Harris supporters say this).

Anyone who’s watched a lot of presidential debates knows that a chunk of time is spent quieting down the crowd in between answers.

But no audience being present means that Harris and Trump are likely getting in more speaking time to the questions posed by the ABC News moderators – and reacting to their opponent’s responses.

As was the case with Trump’s June debate with Biden, rules dictate that there is no live audience present for his debate with Harris.

Trump claimed that under the Biden administration, “they had the highest inflation perhaps in the history of our country, because I’ve never seen a worse period of time.”

But in fact, inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, but it was much higher in the 1970s and early 1980s. Inflation reached a record high of 14.6% in March and April of 1980.

Both candidates have gone over their allotted time during their answers and responses, with Trump ignoring the time clock far more than Harris.

As the debate approached a commercial break around the one-hour mark, Trump continued to talk about Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. Moderator Linsey Davis cut off Trump with, “President Trump, thank you. We have a lot of issues to get to.”

Trump has repeatedly questioned the value of NATO, a Western military alliance of largely European countries and the U.S. and Canada that is committed to one another’s defense. Trump complains that many of its 32 members are not meeting their financial commitments to the alliance, claiming that they owe “dues” to the bloc.

On the campaign trail in February, Trump said that not only would he not protect those countries from Russian forces who have invaded Ukraine, he would encourage Russians “to do whatever the hell they want.”

NATO members do not pay “dues” to the alliance. They have committed to spending at least 2% of their gross domestic product on their own defense budgets. A record 23 NATO member nations will hit that target this year, according to estimated figured the alliance released this month.

Trump claiming that he could broker a peace deal on behalf of the United States between Russia and Ukraine before he takes office would create a number of problematic issues. Not least of which is that the U.S. has throughout history operated under the doctrine that there is only one president at a time and that foreign policy decisions are reserved for the current occupant of the White House.

A second issue could be that any Trump effort to negotiate an agreement between Putin and Zelenskyy would likely run afoul of a rarely prosecuted 19th-century law known as the Logan Act, which bars private citizens from conducting foreign policy.

Trump’s claim of millions dead in the Russian invasion of Ukraine is greatly exaggerated. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said that as of early this year, it had verified more than 10,500 civilian deaths since Russia invaded in February 2022.

Most Americans (61%) say NATO membership as a good thing for the U.S., according to an AP-NORC poll conducted in February. About one-quarter are neutral, and only about 1 in 10 say it’s very or somewhat bad. And most U.S. adults (56%) say they would favor deploying U.S. troops to defend a U.S. NATO ally if it were attacked by Russian forces.

As Harris and Trump debate foreign policy, an August AP-NORC poll found that neither has an advantage when it comes to handling of the war in Ukraine. About 4 in 10 Americans said that they trusted each candidate to do a better job of handling the war.

Trump has at several points questioned official government measures to make his arguments.

On the economy, he accused the Biden administration of misrepresenting job creation numbers. He accused the FBI of manipulating crime statistics—and stood by his false claim even when fact-checked by ABC’s David Muir. He’s repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged against him.

And now he is arguing that death tolls in Ukraine are “fake numbers.”

Harris is sticking with familiar lines on how she’d handle the maelstrom in the Middle East, including steadfastly backing Israel’s defense while also pressing for Palestinian statehood.

Trump for his part says the Middle East was at relative peace under his watch and argued Iran-backed Hamas would have never launched the audacious Oct. 7 attack that sparked the war in Gaza if he was president.

“It would have never happened,” Trump said. “Iran was broke under Donald Trump. Now Iran has $300 billion because they took off all the sanctions that I had. Iran had no money for Hamas or Hezbollah or any… spheres of terror.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin did wryly claim last week that Harris was his preferred candidate, but intelligence officials have dismissed the comment as not serious. U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russia favors Trump, who has openly praised Putin, suggested cutting funds to Ukraine and repeatedly criticized the NATO military alliance.

Brian Fallon, a top campaign adviser to Harris, shared on X as the debate neared the hour mark: “Harris is optimistic and strong.”
“Trump is angry and weak.”

Trump repeats his frequent boast he would have a peace done between Ukraine and Russia within a day if he is elected. But he doesn’t say how.

The fear of supporters of Ukraine is that the kind of deal Trump is talking about would amount to Ukraine’s U.S.-backed, democratic government capitulating to the harsh demands of its larger neighbor. Russian President Vladimir Putin has insisted Ukraine must give up vast amounts of territory and give up on joining NATO. That’s simply as a condition to start talks to end Russia’s 2 1/2 year invasion of Ukraine.

Neither Harris nor Trump had a particular advantage when it comes to who Americans trust to more handle the war in Gaza, according to an August AP-NORC poll.

This topic is a potential point of weakness for Harris within her own party, though. Only about 6 in 10 Democrats trust Harris over Trump to do a better job handling the war in Gaza, her lowest rating of the issues asked about in that poll. About one-quarter of Democrats say they trust neither Trump nor Harris on this topic.

Trump says he was speaking sarcastically when he acknowledged recently that he did indeed lose the 2020 election.

“I said that?” Trump says when presented with his comment from a recent interview with Lex Friedman that he had lost “by a whisker.” He said the same thing at a Moms for Liberty event without a hint that he was joking.

Trump has spent years refusing to accept his loss, even though there is no evidence of the fraud that he insists took place.

“That was said sarcastically,” he says. “I don’t acknowledge that at all.”

It’s past the halfway mark of the Harris-Trump debate, and here’s where we are on what’s been discussed – and what hasn’t.

Harris and Trump have talked about issues related to the economy, abortion, fracking, crime and immigration, to which Trump has pivoted several different answers. There was also a question about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol, as well as Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

There hasn’t been much discussion about the environment, climate change, foreign affairs, the military or Biden’s departure from the campaign, less than two months ago.

With Trump continuing to deny any responsibility for the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, Harris used the discussion to ask for the votes of people disgusted by both the mobs and Trump’s role in the insurrection.

Harris looked directly at the camera to say, “There is a place in our campaign for you.”

She asked for support from voters who “stand for rule of law” and want to “end the chaos.”

Donald Trump is repeating his false claim that he beat President Joe Biden in the 2020 election, saying “there’s so much proof. All you have to do is look at it.”

The election was not stolen. The authorities who have reviewed the election — including Trump’s own attorney general — have concluded the election was fair.

Trump and Harris may differ on immigration, but most economists actually credit immigration with helping the U.S. economy. In the past three years, in particular, most economists credit an increase in immigration with helping fill jobs that many employers were having trouble filling in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. With more workers available, the U.S. economy has been able to produce more, which has helped bring down inflation.