Mary McNamara

In Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris may or may not have increased her chances of becoming the 47th president. But she did what so many have tried, and failed, to do.

She de-normalized Donald Trump.

For years, various politicians and pundits have yelled themselves hoarse over the danger of normalizing Trump’s chicanery, casual mendacity, outrageous divisiveness and outright criminal behavior. For years, the media have attempted to contextualize a candidate/president/insurrectionist/candidate who often dismisses the most time-honored rules of American politics (including the peaceful transfer of power) and continues to feed his not-inconsiderable number of supporters a diet of self-aggrandizement and grievance.

Not surprisingly, outrage itself has become normalized too. For President Biden and now Democratic nominee Harris, every word, action and expression is analyzed with granular intensity. 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?

You get him a room and you make him do it on live television.

In less than two hours this week, Harris showed America that it is not normal for a candidate to be more concerned about the size of his rallies than he is about women bleeding out in parking lots because restrictive abortion laws have made doctors skittish about treating miscarriages. That it’s not normal for a former American president to praise dictators and deride NATO, to promote the racist lie that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs and cats in Ohio, to continue to insist that he won an election he lost. That it’s not normal for a man convicted of 34 felonies to claim to believe in law and order.

Harris set traps for Trump so obvious that a child, never mind a man who has participated in three sets of presidential debates, could have seen them a mile away. And, like a child, he walked into each and every one confident that he could talk his way out.

Which he definitely tried to do. During the debate, hosted by ABC and moderated by David Muir and Linsey Davis, Trump spoke for five more minutes than Harris, often pushing back against the moderators’ attempts to cut him off, and managed to get the last word on every topic.

But when that talk forced the moderators to step in and point out that um, no, infanticide is not legal in any state (after Trump once again insisted that some abortion-rights-advocating politicians are in favor of executing babies after birth) and that there have been no actual reports of Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats in Ohio (which even Trump’s running mate had agreed was false), it was difficult to see the former president as anything but, well, weird.

Along with the more mundane lies about skyrocketing crime rates (they are at record lows) and countries illegally sending mental-hospital patients into the United States (no evidence of this), Trump also managed to say things like: “She wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison” and “All I can say is I read where she was not Black, that she put out, and, I’ll say that. And then I read that she was Black, and that’s OK.”

For people who are too young to remember a time when Trump was just a rich guy who cheated on his wives, there was a time when remarks like these would have never been part of a presidential debate. And as Harris made clear with an admirable range of facial expressions and come-to-Jesus rejoinders, they should not be considered normal now.

This is precisely what Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, have been trying to do over the past two months: Persuade voters that Americans deserve a president who does not view the United States as a postapocalyptic hellscape over which to reign but as a place with problems that can be fixed if we start treating each other with respect.

That’s not just a vibe. Harris came to the debate determined to break through the almost decade-long attempt to defend, defuse or otherwise accept Trump’s norm-breaking words, actions and expressions by proving that it isn’t just dangerous. It’s absurd.

As Trump seemed determined to prove, he can’t keep himself from personal attacks (i.e., that President Biden secretly hates Harris, and Harris hates both Israelis and Arabs), or trying to gaslight voters (i.e., that overturning Roe made everyone happy and Trump had nothing to do with the Jan. 6 insurrection), or align himself with authoritarian figures (e.g., Hungary’s Viktor Orban). Even when avoiding all of the above is in his own best interest.

Harris did nothing more, or less, than allow Trump to be Trump, un-sane-washed, while offering a very clear alternative. Her first action was to introduce herself to him and shake his hand, a professional courtesy that clearly took Trump by surprise and one he did not extend to her. 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.

Harris, on the other hand, addressed Trump by his name or his title and often turned to speak to him directly. When, apropos of nothing, Trump offered the tired canard that Harris wants to “confiscate your guns,” Harris admonished him to his face: “Tim Walz and I are both gun owners,” she said, with an exasperated firmness. “We’re not taking anyone’s guns away, so stop with the continuous lying about this stuff.”

That moment alone was worth cheering for. Even as the nation reels from yet another school shooting, Trump continues to insist that any form of increased gun control will lead to people being stripped of their legally obtained weapons, despite the fact that, like Harris and Walz, most gun owners support some amount of more stringent measures.

Unlike Trump, who was easily baited into defending everything from attendance at his rallies to his negotiations with “Abdul … the head of the Taliban” (Hibatullah Akhundzada was and remains the leader of the Taliban), Harris appeared to take nothing personally. She responded to Trump’s repetition of remarks about whether or not she is Black not with a rebuke but with the reminder that most Americans are tired of divisiveness and just want to get along with their friends and neighbors.

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.” (Harris answered the same question by saying she will grow ACA and continue her and Biden’s success with capping out-of-pocket drug costs and capping insulin prices.)

After the debate, Trump claimed he won, but even the most dedicated sane-washers, including prominent Republicans, had to concede that Harris had dominated. Which made Trump’s familiar day-after drumbeat — the moderators were biased, the debate rigged — feel less infuriating than embarrassing.

Mary McNamara is an American journalist and television critic for the Los Angeles Times. She won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.