Welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Abby Livingston.

The political class—including Donald Trump, himself—is still processing the repercussions of Fight Night in Philly, while Trump loyalists are already spinning like a drum to undercut Kamala Harris’s strong showing. Lucky for you, my Puck partners Dylan Byers, Peter Hamby, and John Heilemann huddled up to unpack all the most pressing plotlines and potential ripple effects.

But first…

• 🎧 Trump takes the bait: In case you missed it, in an emergency episode of Somebody’s Gotta Win, my partner Tara Palmeri and Julie Mason exchanged notes on their impressions coming out of last night, examining the key moment and offering informed speculation about what both candidates’ advisers are currently thinking. [Listen Here]

Peter Hamby: The debate was so strong for Kamala Harris on issue after issue. She was able to turn a Donald Trump attack back on Trump and put him on defense, and also to get him to ramble about, yes, right-wing claims that immigrants are eating dogs, and just a barrage of conspiracy theories.

And of course, there was the monumental Trump self-own at the very beginning of the debate, when they were talking about abortion and abortion rights. He was so caught between wanting to assuage social conservatives and the Family Research Council, but also assure suburban women that he doesn’t want to ban abortion nationwide. Everything he was saying was literally what Kamala Harris wanted him to say. He praised the Supreme Court justices for being brave and overturning Roe v. Wade, saying it was the right thing to place decisions about abortion rights with the states. Trump wasn’t able until later in the debate to get to the things he should have been talking about, like border security. He didn’t get to her flip-flops until 45 minutes in. It just showed his lack of discipline and how easily triggered he was by Harris and also the moderators.

John Heilemann: Dylan, please give us your 30,000-foot overview.

Dylan Byers: Obviously it was a big win for Harris. Through the media lens, she came equipped to do things in the visual medium that will be effectively repurposed for a viral social media environment. The way she looked at him, like, Are you crazy? Are you really saying that? He deployed Reagan’s “There you go again,” line against her, but her attitude toward him for 90 minutes was not just There you go again, but, Are you really this nuts? Are you really making it this easy for me?

There were so many one-liners that were effective and will carry well on morning television and social media. Inviting people to his rallies, and her line about, “I’ve only ever had one client: the people—and I never asked if they’re Republican or Democrat.” The racism, the housing, Central Park Five, Obama and birtherism, “81 million people fired you,” how people who worked for him said he was a disgrace, that he was weak… All the words he’s used toward other people over the past decade, she used against him and it really triggered him. It was so effective in getting inside his head and getting under his skin.

John Heilemann: Probably the only negative was that she looked nervous for the first 10 minutes. You didn’t know where it was going to go. But then the debate turned on Roe—when she got into that topic, she never looked back. She got stronger as the night went on.

I shouldn’t be amazed anymore about the stupidity of Trump’s lies, because he tells some lies that are so easily disprovable, but the one he continues to stick with is that everyone wanted Roe v. Wade repealed. He’s said it 1,000 times, and I’ve never figured out the logic of why he does that.

I felt like we heard several sounds last night. One was the sound of the gender gap, already historic, widening in that moment. Two, the sound of her finding her voice, and three, shortly thereafter, the sound of Donald Trump backing a bus up over J.D. Vance on the national abortion ban. The question that came up a lot in the postgame was why, when he was asked a simple question twice—would you sign or repeal a national abortion ban?—he would not answer it, and his very unwillingness to answer it speaks loudly to people who are concerned that that is his agenda in the long run.

Peter Hamby: That’s exactly right. I don’t know if Trump has clear ideological beliefs around abortion, necessarily, but it’s clear he’s a little twisted up by the white evangelical base, which he probably shouldn’t be. They’re with him no matter what. Though last Sunday, I saw Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council on one of the morning shows, and he was saying that Trump’s getting a little too wishy-washy on this stuff, that they want him to stand up for life.

And Trump is keenly aware that Kamala has about a 13-, 14-point lead among women right now, which far surpasses Hillary Clinton’s margin with Trump back in 2016, and is about on par with Biden when it comes to women. I think the abortion topic helped her turn on afterburners. And this is also what happened in the Vice President’s office: During the first couple years she was sort of listless. Obviously, the border thing has been litigated to death, but she really found her voice when they handed her the abortion rights portfolio after Dobbs. I spent time with her at a rally she did in Phoenix, and it’s just in her comfort zone. She knows how to talk about it, she knows how to talk to women, and she felt extremely comfortable in that moment. She was a little lucky that abortion was the second topic of the debate.

Dylan Byers: There were, of course, times in this debate where she was asked a question and did not necessarily answer the question, and chose instead to launch into some well-rehearsed rhetoric. But I think she understood in the Trump era, you lose a debate by getting put on your back foot and getting into the weeds while answering whatever specific questions the moderator asks you. And from the very first question, she decided she was going to take the questions where she wanted them to go, and in every case, she said something that was in her comfort zone. It’s the age-old trick for anyone being interviewed: You don’t answer the question you’re being asked, you answer the question that you want to answer.

John Heilemann: And that’s even more important in a micro, meme environment, right? Because most people are just going to see the chunks. No one’s grading you on Marquess of Queensbury rules. It’s only about what messages you’re trying to drive, and Harris knows how to do it.

Peter Hamby: She had a bunch of people in debate prep, and a lot of voices in the room over the last few weeks. What’s your view on how it all came together for her during prep?

John Heilemann: I think she took it seriously. She’s good in this environment, she had a lot of material to work with. Someone will write a book someday about what happened to Joe Biden’s debate prep. And maybe there was no debate prep that could save him. But people have given a lot of credit to Ron Klain, including me, for being a master debate prep person. But the secret of many of Ron’s debate preps was his able second chair, Karen Dunn—who’s a high-powered, very brilliant lawyer in Washington, D.C.—and she ran this debate prep, just like she effectively ran Hillary Clinton’s debate prep alongside Ron, Biden’s debate prep in 2020 alongside Ron, etcetera. She’s the second-most experienced, and second-most legendary debate prep person out there, and she doesn’t get the credit that Ron used to, because he was such a big personality.

Dylan Byers: You know, we spent so much time in the media talking about, oh, Trump’s so hard to debate, we don’t know what he’s going to do, he’s so unexpected, unpredictable. But he falls for this stuff every time, even if it’s so obviously the playbook. So you bait Trump and off he goes talking about his rallies. And then he gets flummoxed and starts falling back on these familiar tropes to scare Americans out of their minds—talking points that vary from something as grandiose as World War III to something as conspiratorial and fake, frankly, as immigrants eating dogs. And in so doing, he makes himself incredibly vulnerable to sounding crazy. Kamala let him hang himself with his own rope. It got to the point where you have the moderators come in and fact-check and say, Now we can’t let it be said on ABC News that Haitian immigrants are eating dogs in Springfield, Ohio.

John Heilemann: And who knows how much it will matter in the end, in terms of votes. But talk about wasted opportunity. That’s a lot of minutes that Donald Trump’s ranting about shit that’s not getting any work done for him in this debate. If he was supposed to be tying her to Joe Biden’s record or proving that she’s a fraud and a phony on the flip flopping, he’s not getting any of that work done there. It’s a massive opportunity cost.

Peter Hamby: Stephanie Ruhle tweeted that Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were roughly at parity in terms of minutes talked, but holy hell, what message came through in any of that? There were times when Harris was actually just content, and you could see it in the split screen. She was sitting back and letting him talk, like, Donald, keep talking. Some of these post-debate snap polls are suspicious, but after the Biden Atlanta disaster, the CNN snap poll after the debate showed that 67 percent of people said that Trump won. Last night, the CNN post-debate poll showed the inverse— 66 percent of voters said that Kamala Harris won.

John Heilemann: Well, I’m glad you raised the Biden debate thing, Peter, because I thought about it all night. Republican consultant Alex Castellanos taught me that you should watch a debate in real time, and then go back and watch with the sound off. If you watch this debate with the sound off, you had Trump, who refused to look at her through most of the debate, glowering, and when he was speaking he was looking angry. Meanwhile, Harris was often laughing and smiling, whether he’s speaking or not, and kind of laughing at him, looking at him all the time, engaging. Of course, the split screen with Donald Trump destroyed Joe Biden. I remember John Stewart afterwards pointed out Biden with his mouth hanging open and asked, Did nobody in debate prep take any pictures and show him what it was going to look like with his mouth agape? The split screen with Harris was killing Trump. She’s younger, she’s at ease, and he looks angry and pissed through the whole thing. And angry and pissed is not, generally, the way to win presidential elections.

Peter Hamby: The body language you see in the spin room after the debate is always telling. You sent Dylan and I this photo, and then you tweeted it, and it immediately went viral, of Matt Gaetz and Stephen Miller shuffling into the spin room, slump shouldered, looking sad and defeated. Our pal, Tim Miller was at the spin room, and he interviewed Lindsey Graham, who said the debate was a disaster for Donald Trump. I assume the body language for the Harris people in the spin room, from your perspective, was the exact opposite.

John Heilemann: I would say that. And I would say that Gavin Newsom’s erection could be seen on Mars. All those people down there were feeling the energy, the body language—everything was exactly as you said, Peter.

But to go back to the split screen, I’m always struck by Trump’s darkness, the apocalyptic, end-times rhetoric. There’s obviously a big market for that in America, but that wasn’t the case for George W. Bush. It wasn’t the case for Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t the case for Bill Clinton. It wasn’t the case for Barack Obama. In the Biden debate, Trump was calm, and he almost looked mournful watching Biden struggle for the first 30 minutes. He later kind of turned into an asshole, but the first 30 minutes, he was quietly watching Biden not be able to perform, and almost looked sympathetic. And I think that worked in Trump’s favor. In this case, I think the visuals have helped create the polls that Peter’s talking about.

Dylan Byers: The visuals matter so much. Trump’s demeanor and temperament in this debate, and the way he came off visually, was a result of Harris getting under his skin. I think there was a point during the first debate when Trump came to the conclusion that Biden was really falling apart, and then let him hang himself. And he’d probably been reminded by his advisors before going on to keep calm and try to project some semblance of presidential behavior. I think the flip side happened here. I think Harris came out with a strategy to try to emphasize that anything coming out of Trump’s mouth was ridiculous.

Her history as a prosecutor, I think, conditioned her to be a much more effective debater, perhaps more than even her own team gave her credit for. There was probably a lot of nail biting when she was walking out on stage, and a lot of celebrating after the fact, but in retrospect, her best moments as a politician were when she was in that prosecutor role. An dthis was such a perfect time for her to embody that role again.

John Heilemann: She hasn’t made the “defense of democracy” central to her campaign as Joe Biden did. But during this debate, she really went there, enumerating a sort of greatest hits of Trump’s most dangerous, terrible moments: Charlottesville, January 6.

Peter Hamby: She did really well there. And flowed naturally from her “country-first” convention speech. It hits two kinds of people: First, of course, your MSNBC resistance moms. But she also shouted out John McCain, and her support from the Cheneys, which hits moderate swing voters, suburban dad types, who might be on the fence. Numerous polls show that one of Harris’s biggest challenges and vulnerabilities is that people continue to see her as too liberal, and so being able to thread together this pro-democracy message, where she sounds like Joe Biden, but also the patriotism element is smart and appeals to a wider range of people. You know, maybe it’s just like Sarah Longwell and 10 other Never Trump conservatives. But, then again, maybe those people decide the election—the people who do hold John McCain in high esteem, who do think that Liz Cheney is brave and patriotic. And, you know, I thought I thought she nailed that.