By Jessica Bennett
‘She didn’t shout. She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t complain about having less time to speak.
But “she” — she being Kamala Harris, to use Donald Trump’s preferred name for her — managed to undermine him, provoking him into shouting, finger-pointing and sputtering, ranting about eating dogs and nuclear weapons with sweat on his upper lip. She remained calm and collected, emasculating him one subtle jab at a time.
I came into the debate prepared to watch for the subtleties of Trump’s sexism. He wouldn’t look at her. He refused to speak her name. He kept referring to “her boss(President Biden), diminishing her power. But by the end of the debate, I was tallying the ways that Harris had done the reverse: picking at his brittle ego, cracking the fragile facade of his blustering machismo.
She dismissed the size of his rallies. She mocked his “love letters to Kim Jong-un.” She called him “weak,” referred to him as “this fella,” and said Vladimir Putin would “eat you for lunch.” She talked about his multiple bankruptcies (code for him failing as a man and a provider) and noted that he had been “fired by 81 million people” and was clearly “having a hard time processing that,” like a gentle mother, patting her tantruming child on the head.
And she managed to do it without being shrill or angry or coming off as petty. Worst of all, she laughed at him. It wasn’t a forced, controlled or premeditated laugh. It was a real laugh. A big laugh. The sort of laugh she couldn’t hold in and made those of us watching laugh along with her.
“Talk about extreme,” she said, as he stared dead-eyed into the distance. She immediately hammered home all of the former generals and advisers who had declared him unfit for office. He could only fidget uncomfortably in response.
Eight years ago, the same man, perhaps less sleepy but no less angry, hulked over Hillary Clinton as she tried to ignore him and keep speaking. Now the woman running for this country’s highest office was no longer turning the other cheek. Instead, “she laid bare the smallness of Trump’s manhood” and asserted her own power, competence and confidence in the face of it. In the end, only a woman could do that for us.!”
