Column: How Kamala Harris de-normalized Trump in less than 2 hours
LA TimesFormer president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are shown on a monitor in the spin room during the second presidential debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Trump’s familiar litany of untruths and increasingly nonsensical speeches is regularly glossed as “Trump being Trump.” MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell recently called out the New York Times and other media outlets for surrendering to “sane-washing,” which is how he described attempts to “edit Donald Trump’s crazy statements down to a shape that allows them to then make sense of them.” So what do you do with a man who believes that if you repeat a series of lies often and loudly enough they will somehow become truths? Throughout the debate, Trump referred to the sitting vice president almost exclusively as “she” or “her” — though he did manage to name Biden often enough for Harris to remind him, “Clearly, I am not Joe Biden.” He rarely if ever looked at her, choosing to glower at the moderators or the camera as if she were not there. She saved her anger and passion for when she spoke about women and girls suffering under increasingly restrictive abortion laws, the importance of supporting Ukraine and NATO and how many former military leaders who served under Trump now consider him “a disgrace.” If the debate was short on policy details, well, Harris offered more than Trump, who answered a question about healthcare by trashing the Affordable Care Act and then, when asked if he had an alternative, saying he had “a concept of a plan.” After the debate, Trump claimed he won, but even the most dedicated sane-washers, including prominent Republicans, had to concede that Harris had dominated.