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

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 face-off 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 female 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 Democratic states allow doctors to murder newborn babies. Harris dominated the screen with her look of utter pathos — a kind of 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?

Especially when everything is on the line for the American Experiment concocted right here in Philadelphia.

There’s no question that the poised and prosecutorial vice president won the debate — as reflected in almost every instant poll (63%-37% in CNN’s flash survey), focus group (a 23-2 rout for Harris in a Washington Post gathering), and virtually every pundit but for a few MAGA die-hards. At the South Philly watch party, the liberal-leaning crowd giggled and occasionally broke into an uproarious laugh track at Trump’s answers, which made what was supposed to be a momentous night feel like watching a rerun of The Beverly Hillbillies on TV Land.

But whether this was enough to move the needle in a nation that is tribally and hopelessly divided 50-50 on barely movable fault lines from educational attainment to geography remains to be seen. It was clear from the opening handshake (more on that in a moment) that the debate strategy concocted by a Democratic former district attorney was less about her upbeat but mostly vague middle-class agenda and more about baiting Trump to incriminate himself on the witness stand, with the unbearable lightness of his nonsensical agenda and bald-faced lies.

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When Harris goaded Trump that his beloved campaign rallies are actually incoherent when they’re not totally boring, she got her Perry Mason moment.

A clearly rattled Trump insisted that “we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics,” then reverted to Vladimir Putin’s favorite talking point that a President Harris would start World War III, before finally falling back on the kind of conspiracy theory that is the true essence of his angry, aggrieved MAGA movement.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!” the former president exclaimed. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats! They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”

Viewers of a certain age probably heard Humphrey Bogart playing Lt. Cmdr. Queeg, convinced that his frozen strawberries were stolen while revealing 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.

As someone known to sometimes file his column from a Delaware County dog park, I can assure you that canine choking is another Trump-fried fiction. Dogs don’t actually choke, but Donald Trump did Tuesday night in front of 70 million people. The brilliant cross-examination by Harris produced his absolute worst nightmare. The man who was once keeper of the nuclear football was exposed as America’s Fox News-besotted grandpa, eagerly gobbling up the latest unhinged racist rumors that his neighbors were posting on Nextdoor or Facebook.

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“I’ve seen people on television,” a humiliated Trump insisted to Muir.

No wonder America’s most popular woman — especially with young voters whom Harris needs to fire up by November — took to Instagram the moment the debate ended to post her endorsement. Taylor Swift wrote that Harris 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.”

The Pennsylvania native who twisted the knife into Trump’s running mate JD Vance by signing her post as a “Childless Cat Lady,” and who is famous for her songs of revenge against her exes, clearly respected Harris’ efforts to craft a breakup song between Trump’s decades of misogyny and the America he wants to keep dominating. Swift’s endorsement came after the nation heard Harris’ remake of “I Knew You Were Trouble (Kamala’s Version).”

Game recognizes game.

The beatdown of Trump was so thorough that it covered up Harris’ flaws, which were there if you paid close attention. She continues to offer canned speeches instead of answering questions about her own agenda; it was telling that her response to Tuesday’s “Are we better off now than four years ago?” was almost identical to her “What will you do on Day One?” in August’s CNN interview — and that neither addressed the actual question. At the Dock Street watch party, attendees told me they hoped to hear a new approach to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza — and there were audible groans when they didn’t get that.

But policy stuff wasn’t what really mattered at the end of the night. Under the white lights of the South Philly tap room, the mostly millennial and very urban debate watch crowd told me again and again that what won the debate for Harris was her command of the room — which came across the second she strolled over to the recalcitrant Trump and forcefully shook his hand, booming out “Kamala” with the right pronunciation — and her poise that never wavered.

“I think I saw more from her ability just to handle tough situations, keep her cool, stay calm, stay collected — which I think is what America wants to see ... Kamala showed she has the poise to be a leader,” Jah, a 34-year-old worker in the cannabis industry who didn’t want to give his last name, told me.

“I think she won in the first five minutes — her demeanor, her presence in being so beautiful and young. And him? ... ehhh,” added Julia Angstrom, a 68-year-old retiree and former Democratic committee person, the next voter I spoke with. Then she and about 200 other watchers drifted away into the darkness of Washington Avenue, convinced — just like Swift — they had just seen the 47th president of the United States, Kamala’s version.

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