Vice President Kamala Harris took the ABC News debate stage with a mission: to cause a Trump meltdown.

She did it.

Former President Donald Trump also had a mission: control yourself. He failed.

Trump lost his cool time and time again. Goaded by predictable provocations, he caved in time and time again.

Trump was forced into broken-sentence monologues, and even an outright attack on the 2020 election results, repeating insane stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, outdated, personal, emotional, defensive and often incomprehensible.

Harris hit sore point after sore point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who served with him, the boredom and early departure of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Each blow was followed by a ouchTrump’s counterpunches missed. Harris answered them with smiling mockery and cool amusement. The debate was often a battle of eyelids: Harris’s wide open, Trump’s squinting and tightening.

Harris’ debate preparation seemed to have focused as much on psychology as on policy. She egged him on, trapped him, and baited him, and it worked every time.

Trump left the stage, still undecided voters in the dark about whether he would sign a nationwide abortion ban. He let them know that he did not want Ukraine to win its war of self-defense. He accused Harris of hating Israel, but then never bothered to say a single word himself in support of the Jewish state’s war of self-defense against Hamas terrorism. In his confusion and reaction, he seemed to have forgotten every debate strategy he might have had.

Something every woman watching the debate likely noticed: Trump couldn’t bring himself to say the name of the sitting vice president, his presidential opponent. To him, Harris was just a pronoun: a nameless, identityless “she,” “her,” “you.” It’s been said that narcissists deal with ego injuries by refusing to acknowledge the existence of the person who inflicted the pain. If so, that might explain Trump’s behavior. Harris hurt his feelings, and Trump responded by closing his eyes and pretending that Harris had no existence of her own, separate from President Joe Biden, whose name Trump could somehow pronounce.

Pinched, harassed, humiliated, Trump lost his balance and grip. He never got around to making an affirmative argument for himself. If any viewer was nostalgic for the early Trump economy before the collapse of his final year in office, that viewer must have been disappointed. If any viewer wanted a conservative policy message, any conservative policy message, that viewer must have been disappointed. When asked if he had developed a health care plan after a decade in politics, Trump could only reply that he had “drafts of a plan.”

Harris was in control almost from the start. She had her better moments and her worse, but she was human when Trump was wild. She had warm words for political opponents like John McCain and Dick Cheney; Trump had warm words for none other than Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian strongman who praised Trump for praising Trump. It was a beating on all counts, and no less a beating because Trump inflicted so much of it on himself.

At the very least, this display will put to rest Trump’s claim that Harris is a mindless nonentity unqualified to debate. Harris met Trump face to face in front of tens of millions of witnesses. She dominated and crushed him, using as her primary tools her self-control and her shrewd insight into the ex-president’s psychological, moral and intellectual weaknesses.

Does it matter that Harris won so decisively? How could it not? But it may matter more that Trump lost so miserably to a competitor for whom he could not utter a word of respect.