Philadelphia is nothing if not a fight town and back in the analogue years, when boxing commanded a prized place at the high table of American culture, Muhammad Ali’s old phrase was the one quoted above all others: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee”.
And as Tuesday night’s presidential debate in the National Constitution Centre deepened, it was impossible not to recall those words. Kamala Harris was both nimble and venomous in her baiting of Donald Trump.
The master of subjecting opponents to cruelty was, at times, reduced to a pitiful figure, angry and rambling over 90 minutes, which must have exceeded the wildest hopes of the Democratic strategists and loyalists.
The endorsement offered by Taylor Swift, which arrived via Instagram after the pop phenomenon had watched the debate, was the icing on the cake of a flawless night for Harris.
In the end, none of this may matter a jot. This has already been an election summer when Trump had his ear grazed by an assassin’s bullet on live television and when the sitting president, Joe Biden, vacated the race.
A mere debate will do well to stand against those momentous events. But at times here in Philly, a glum and addled Trump seemed to be pining for the days when he sparred against his old adversary.
“Where is our president?” he demanded at one stage, as if remembering Biden. “They threw him out of the campaign like a dog. We have a president who doesn’t know if he’s alive,” he railed.
“First of all, I think it’s important to remind the former president: you’re not running against Joe Biden, you are running against me,” Harris responded.
The exchange encapsulated the tone of the night. Harris was cool and sometimes cold, Trump, the more seasoned debater, repeatedly forced into denials and repeatedly falling into the traps she set for him. Harris used her range of facial expressions marvellously when listening while Trump, for whatever reason, stared straight ahead whenever she spoke.
It was the minor things that got under his skin, like when Harris took the “unusual” step of inviting the audience to attend one of her opponent’s rallies where, she promised, they would hear about fictional characters such as Hannibal Lecter “and you will see people leave his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom”.
It was an accusation Trump could not resist countering. But his retort was feeble. “People don’t go to her rallies and people who do go, she is bussing them in and paying to be there. We have the biggest rallies in the history of politics.”
The Democrat landed the takeaway line of the evening in her sharp response to Trump’s claim that he had the gumption to fire staff in whom he had lost faith. “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people and clearly he is having a very difficult time processing this. World leaders laugh at you and they say you are a disgrace.”
In trying to place the blame with Harris for the nightmare scenario about immigrants and crime that he has repeatedly painted at his rallies, Trump at one point repeated the notorious and unfounded rumours that in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian migrants were eating local pets. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the ... they’re eating the pets of the people who live there.”
When you are explaining, you are losing and when you are explaining about eating pets, you are definitely in a troubled place.
That was the task facing Vivek Ramaswamy when he appeared with other Republican grandees at the post-debate Spin Room forum. The former Republican presidential primary candidate normally glides smoothly if inconsequentially through interviews, but even he looked stunned when faced with the BBC’s Gary O’Donoghue flatly asking: “Do you think migrants are eating people’s pets?”
What had happened to the golden days of Milwaukee in mid-July, when the Republican Party believed the election was all but won? If the first debate – and the assassination attempt – heralded the tone of manifest destiny which informed that week, then this debate has the Republican alarm bells sounding.
“She shined, she looked incredibly presidential and she literally beat Donald Trump on every single issue in every moment of the debate,” said Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s former communications director turned arch critic, on the floor of the Spin Room afterwards.
“Does it change people?” he wondered. “I think on the margins it does. People saw an unhinged president Trump tonight: they saw a 78-year-old man who lost control of his verbal dexterity and of his ideas. Contrast that to someone who is ready for the presidency and is a great political athlete. She will win the race come November.
“I don’t think anyone should be in panic mode but if I were Donald’s Trump team I would be worried about his health,” he added, twisting the knife.
“Here’s the beauty of a debate. It takes the viewer about five seconds to see who is winning. And she bested him significantly tonight.”
What else would Scaramucci say? His enmity with Trump is hardly news. But it was a message repeated by jubilant Democrats.
It was nothing comparable to the collapse Biden endured in his June debate against Trump. But it was sufficiently concerning for Trump himself to make an unscheduled appearance on the Spin Room floor, an appearance which provoked chaotic scenes as the former president stood in a circle surrounded by hundreds of media people shouting out at him.
In that moment, it seemed like the masses of what he had previously decried as Fake News were the only people he wanted to talk to. It was impossible to hear him properly: he quoted some numbers suggesting he had done well and claimed Harris wanted a second debate.
“It was my best debate ever, I think. It showed how weak they are, how pathetic they are, and what they’re doing to destroy our country, on the border, with foreign trade, with everything. Now she wants to do another one, because she got beaten tonight, but I don’t know if we’re going to do another one.”
The Harris campaign did indeed call for a second debate within minutes of the closing credits. But it is difficult to imagine Donald Trump agreeing to one after this pummeling and it is hard to see if another television debate would serve any purpose.
The strict rules, with dead microphones and a dedicated slot for the big issues - the economy, reproductive rights, immigration, foreign policy - are deadened by the fact that the candidates can’t truly debate with one another.
A second date seems unlikely.
The build-up to Tuesday evening’s confrontation had felt intense around Philadelphia. In the hours before, on the street outside the National Constitution Centre, the messengers and soul-savers and the angry mingled with the police, the media, the tourists and the Philly downtowners out walking to dog to find the area had been appropriated for the evening.
And what a scene it was.
There was a guy carrying a sign warning that ‘Lukewarm Christians like Trump will burn in hell with all liberals’, a stall selling Kamala T-shirts with the slogan ‘Make America Great Again’, another prophet warning that a staggering medley of types, including but far from limited to ‘Atheists, Tomboys, Politicians, Soft Men, Women Cops, Drunks’ are also destined for the endless inferno. And all of this not a minute’s walk down the street from Declaration House, the site where Thomas Jefferson himself, as the sign read, penned the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
If this debate will indeed be recorded as an elemental battle for US democracy in the summer when it all seemed to teeter, then they could have picked no more evocative location. Philly wears its history with a regal unfussiness, which makes walking around the Old City all the more jaw-dropping an experience.
Its streets act as an unfussy tribute to the founding fathers and to the ideas and scrolls that brought everyone to this place for the debate, with the vast media circus and the breathless descriptions of how the candidates were spending their ‘final hours’ before it, as though this were that royal wedding from the summer of 1981 or, in a more macabre association, an execution.
The stage, we were told, would be “an intimate setting for two candidates- who have never met.”
Well, they are properly introduced now.
Whenever Donald Trump exited the City of Brotherly Love, it must have begun to dawn on him that only in his closing arguments did he begin to ask the question that, really, he could have levelled at Kamala Harris all evening: Why didn’t she do everything she has promised to do for the past three and a half years?
He hadn’t even pinned her down on that one. A night to remember; a night to forget.
- Listen to our Inside Politics Podcast for the latest analysis and chat
- Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
- Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date