Kamala Harris and Donald Trump spar in Philadelphia debate: She landed punches, and he took the bait.

The most highly anticipated 90 minutes of the presidential campaign are over and the mics are off — for good.

The first and potentially only matchup between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump was a Harris offensive from start to finish that brought out often angry, nonsensical responses from Trump in a closely watched moment with less than two months until Election Day.

Here’s what stood out to us from the debate between Harris and Trump at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

Harris directly took on Trump from the beginning of the night, casting the former president as the extreme candidate and goading him by talking about issues known to irk him, like supporters leaving his rallies early, world leaders calling him a “disgrace,” and the criminal cases against him. She called him “weak” and said 81 million voters had fired him. “Clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that,” she said.

On several occasions, Trump took the bait and lashed out, even with his microphone muted (though the moderators turned on his mic nearly every time he interjected).

In an early example, after Harris mentioned that “people start leaving his rallies early,” moderators asked Trump about immigration.

But rather than talk about what is one of his strongest issues, Trump went on a tangent about his campaign events, calling them the “most incredible rallies in the history of politics.” He falsely said Harris’ rally attendees were bused in and paid to attend and later claimed President Joe Biden “hates her. He can’t stand her.”

» READ MORE: Live updates: Harris and Trump debate in Philadelphia

Trump has tried to frame Harris as a weak candidate. But for 90 minutes, Harris had Trump on the ropes. She cast him as a self-absorbed leader who “adore[s] strong men instead of caring about democracy.” She said Russian President Vladimir Putin would “eat” Trump “for lunch.”

For Trump, one of the biggest questions going into the debate was whether he could stay disciplined and stick to the issues. There were many moments when Harris provoked him into showing his pugnacious side, which has alienated some voters.

Trump visited with media himself following the debate, a job typically reserved for campaign surrogates, not candidates themselves.

He ignored shouted questions about whether his presence indicated concern over his performance, claiming it was his “best debate yet,” and criticizing the ABC moderators, saying the debate was “basically three on one.”

Trump spent much of the debate casting Harris as too liberal, at one point calling her a “Marxist,” but the vice president was clearly making a play for the center. She said she and running mate Tim Walz are both gun owners, touted Republican endorsements, and referred to the “late, great John McCain,” the 2008 GOP presidential nominee.

Trump was far less focused on appealing to moderates. Perhaps most notably, Trump amplified a story from this week about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio, which has been thoroughly debunked. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump falsely claimed.

Harris responded to that bizarre claim by pivoting to her GOP support, rattling off the former Republican White House staffers who have endorsed her, including former Vice President Dick Cheney.

» READ MORE: What's at stake for the first time Kamala Harris and Donald Trump debate

When Trump refused to say if he would have done anything differently on Jan. 6, 2021, Harris suggested that Republicans turned off by Trump’s election lies could vote against him.

“It’s time to turn the page,” she said. “And if that was a bridge too far for you, well, there is a place in our campaign for you.”

And when Trump was asked about his statements suggesting Harris — who is Black and South Asian — recently “became a Black person” for political gain, the former president seemed to double down, saying, “whatever she wants to be is OK with me.”

Harris tried to use it as a unifying moment. She ticked through Trump’s history of racially divisive statements and said most Americans “want better.”

“We don’t want this kind of approach that is just constantly trying to divide us,” she said, “and especially by race.”

Asked at the top of the debate if Americans are better off economically than they were four years ago, Harris sidestepped the question and instead stressed she had a better economic plan for the future.

Polls show voters trust Trump more on the economy by about 10 percentage points, and Trump pounded the topic Tuesday, accusing Harris — by connecting her to the Biden administration — of causing inflation. Inflation has slowed since its peak but prices remain high.

“People can’t go out and buy cereal, bacon or eggs, or anything else” Trump said. “The people of our country are absolutely dying with what they’ve done.”

While the economy shows low unemployment, Americans remain frustrated with the inflated cost of everyday items. And in Pennsylvania, job gains have been slower than in other states.

Harris tried to counter by casting Trump’s economic plan as fundamentally for the rich. She said he plans to cut taxes for billionaires and corporations, and referred to his plan to levy an across-the-board tariff on all imports as a “Trump sales tax.”

Harris was asked about several issues she changed positions on, including a fracking ban, decriminalizing border crossings, and mandatory gun buybacks.

She reiterated her current positions, particularly her support for fracking, but didn’t offer much insight into what prompted her shifting ideology. Still, the anticipated focus on her flip-flops, which Trump has attacked, was a passing moment and not something that dominated the debate.

And if the economy was Harris’ toughest issue to tackle, abortion was Trump’s. Harris has been the White House’s most prominent advocate for abortion access, and it showed.

Trump said by appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, he gave people “what they wanted,” by returning decisions regarding reproductive rights to the states. Harris seized on that turn of phrase.

“Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health-care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot?” Harris said. “She didn’t want that.”

Trump struggled to respond, saying: “It’s a lie. I’m not signing a ban. And there’s no reason to sign a ban. Because we’ve gotten what everybody wanted.”

Asked whether he would veto a federal abortion ban, Trump wouldn’t say and he pushed back on comments his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, had made suggesting Trump would veto a federal ban.

“I didn’t discuss it with JD,” Trump said.

Trump spent much of the night attacking Biden and describing him as an absent president, saying “he spends all his time on the beach” and “we don’t even know if he’s the president.”

And Trump attempted to tie Harris to the president, saying: “She’s worse than Biden. In my opinion, I think he’s the worst president in the history of our country. She goes down as the worst vice president in the history of our country.”

He also blamed Biden for the crisis at the border and described immigrants in derisive terms.

“These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they’re destroying our country,” he said. “They’re dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality. And we have to get them out.”

Separating herself from Biden is a key challenge for Harris. He is widely unpopular but, as vice president, she cannot credibly criticize his administration. She has remained mostly aligned with Biden on policy but did cast herself as the candidate of the future.

“You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me,” Harris said during an answer to a question about the war in Ukraine.

She added later: “Clearly, I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump. And what I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country.”