Thin-skinned Trump took the Harris bait... and lost

‘She’s kicking his ass, one Republican consultant who used to work with Trump told Andrew Feinberg in the aftermath

- Andrew Feinberg

Twenty-four minutes into Tuesday night’s presidential election debate, Donald Trump fell straight into a trap Kamala Harris laid out for him.

She was answering a question on immigration, a subject central to Trump’s political rise and his remaking of the Republican Party, when she noted that he’d pressured Congress into killing a bipartisan border security bill.

Harris could have left it there. Instead, she did something curious: she invited voters to attend one of his signature political rallies, calling them “a really interesting thing to watch” because many Trump supporters now leave them early “out of exhaustion and boredom”.

It was a calculated line, clearly meant to rile the notoriously thin-skinned ex-president. It was one that her campaign telegraphed earlier in the day with a television advertisement featuring Barack Obama’s joke at last month’s Democratic National Convention about Trump’s “obsession with crowd sizes”.

And it was a line Trump’s campaign should have prepared him to face. All he had to do was keep his cool. But as soon as it was his turn to speak, Trump took the bait Harris had laid out.