aNewly inaugurated presidential candidate Kamala Harris delighted supporters in Atlanta in late July by appealing to Donald Trump in an attempt to turn the tide in the Democratic Party’s stagnating election campaign.
“It seems like Mr. Trump has a lot to say about me,” she told the crowd, before challenging him to a debate: “As the saying goes, if you’ve got something to say, say it to my face.”
On Tuesday, Trump did just that during the ABC TV debate, but which face did she want to wear? Throughout the 90-minute debate, captured on a split screen by the network, Harris displayed a range of facial expressions as Trump spoke, sneers and smiles and slow blinks that spoke as eloquently as he spoke.
A woman shaking her head amusedly as she takes notes. A woman with long eyelashes. A woman with a skeptical expression slowly squinting her eyes. A woman looking down her nose and assuming a commanding posture.
The economy under Biden is a disaster, Trump said. Harris shook her head, small and sad. He said she wasn’t getting credit for “the great job we’ve done with the pandemic.” He scoffed with amusement. Her economic plan is “like four sentences, like Run Spot Run.” He narrowed his eyes as if to ask what he was talking about, then tilted his head to the side as if to say, no, listen.
When Trump declared his opponent a Marxist, saying “her father was a Marxist economics professor and gave her a good education,” Harris went into full emoji mode, leaning back, squinting her eyes and putting her hand to her chin.
When she quipped that people were leaving his meetings out of boredom, and he retorted, she beamed that he’d taken the calculated bait.
By the time Trump declared that immigrants were “exploiting” rural Americans, Harris was openly laughing, mouthing “oh my!”
The vice president has clearly learned from her boss Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in his June debate with Trump, during which Trump not only stammered and stammered, but also appeared frozen, mouth agape, while Trump spoke, with a blank-faced Biden on camera next to him. With her microphone muted, Harris was determined to avoid the same scene.
Not everyone liked Harris’ approach; Republicans inevitably dismissed her performance as pantomime and inauthentic. But others declared the tactic a success. “Kamala Harris’s face kept saying, ‘Come on, Donald, throw a tantrum, and then the adults will talk,'” novelist Stephen King wrote in X magazine. “Ms. Harris was given more time than she had… but she didn’t need any more. Her face said it all.”
“Though he’s a former reality TV star, she clearly understood the power of the media,” The New York Times wrote. “Her expression was one of defiance.”