“First of all, it’s important to remind the former president: You’re not running against Joe Biden. You’re running against me.”

Vice President Kamala Harris went into the debate with a clear plan: let Donald Trump defeat himself. Harris baited Donald Trump for nearly all of the 1 hour and 45 minutes of their first and potentially only debate on Tuesday night – and Trump took every bit of it. While Trump spouted lies, used his usual juvenile name-calling, and and had temper tantrums worthy of a two-year old, Harris sat back and laughed, quite literally at times. She used every trick to bait him into getting defensive, cause him to lose his temper, and calling Trump out on his lies.

Harris was occasionally mocking, but she didn’t resort to the name-calling and stuck to the truth. I thought her nerves got the better of her in the beginning. I could hear the nervousness in her voice. She needed to take a deep breath and not try to get her whole answer out in one breath. It didn’t take her long to do so, and she stayed calm but authoritative. She looked like a leader. She looked healthy, young, and sane. As much as I like Joe Biden, he looked sickly in the last debate, for good reason because he was sick. Trump looked like an old raving lunatic. If you’ve ever encountered one of those street preachers who rant about “the end is near,” then you’ve seen how Trump performed, but with much more juvenile behavior.

Harris got under former Trump’s skin with a mocking comment about the attendance at his campaign rallies during Tuesday night’s ABC News presidential debate in Philadelphia. “I’m going to invite you to attend one of Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch,” Harris said, looking straight into the camera. “You’ll hear about Hannibal Lecter, how windmills cause cancer, and what you’ll also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. The only thing you won’t hear him talk about is your needs, your dreams and your desires.”

The vice president had prepared extensively for their debate and peppered nearly every answer with a comment designed to enrage the former president. She told Trump that world leaders were laughing at him, and military leaders called him a “disgrace.” She called Trump “weak” and “wrong.” She said Trump was fired by 81 million voters – the number that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020. Trump was often out of control. He loudly and repeatedly insisted that a whole host of falsehoods were true. The former president repeated lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election. He parroted a conspiracy theory about immigrants eating pets, and lied about Democrats supporting abortions after babies are born – which is murder, and illegal everywhere.