TThe bar was set low for him, but Donald Trump still failed to reach it. The former president has faced growing concerns within his party that he no longer has the energy, stylistic novelty or mental acuity to beat Kamala Harris, even as the polls narrow in the final weeks before the November election. He did little to assuage those fears on Tuesday, when he delivered a rambling, rambling, mendacious account of his own grievances in his first debate match against Kamala Harris — a pivotal moment in the presidential race that proved to be a disastrous humiliation for him.

Harris, looking nervous after a few seconds as the debate began, launched into a methodical attack on Trump, repeatedly calling him selfish, dishonest, and weak. She goaded him with attacks on his ego and his potential—including a transparent but enormously effective remark about people leaving her rallies early due to exhaustion—that sent him into paroxysms of nonsensical injury. Trump, who had initially tried to launch attacks on inflation, was quickly reduced to racist digressions, oblique defenses of his past comments and records, attacks on Joe Biden, who is not running against him, and old lies about infanticide, fantasies of “World War III,” bizarre comparisons of the United States to Venezuela, a pathologically racist fantasy about immigrants killing and eating white people’s pets, “transgender surgeries on illegal aliens in prisons,” and his false claims that he won the 2020 election.

Trump has had poor debate performances before, including against Hillary Clinton, whom he ultimately defeated in 2016. But there’s reason to suspect that his performance Tuesday could do real damage to his reelection chances in ways that will be hard to repair in the dwindling number of days before voters cast their ballots. The debate, the first since Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, was widely expected to be a contest over who would best define the Democratic nominee, a figure many mainstream voters say they don’t know much about.

But Trump failed to convincingly attack Harris, and instead spent much of the night arguing the ground his opponent had chosen for him. There was no bait she offered him that he wouldn’t take. He rehashed his previous remarks, reexamined grievances against former enemies, living and dead, claimed he had been wronged by vast forces beyond the public accounting, and indulged in elaborate conspiracy theories about his own righteousness and the depravity of his enemies.

It’s not a version of Trump that has resonated with voters in the past. In 2020, in his first debate against Joe Biden, Trump’s aggressive, frenetic, shouty performance prompted then-candidate Biden to utter an exasperated, “Will you shut up, man?” It was a moment of vicarious release for the American public, who could see their own exhausted frustration with Trump proxy on screen. In a less spontaneous, more deliberate performance on Tuesday, Harris repeatedly cast Trump as a tired relic from an unappealing past — and herself as a refreshing respite who can carry the country into the future.

Harris has been criticized by some in her own party for not having a sufficiently clear policy agenda, but that is more the argument for her candidacy than any white paper her staff puts out: She wants to make a meaningful break with the Trump era — not in a transition period or interregnum, as Biden did, but by ushering in a new generation of political leadership that can more decisively leave Trump behind.

Her performance at the debate was intended to convey the message that Trump’s idiotic cruelty was not as daunting, not as terrifying, not as inevitable as Americans thought — that it was laughable and small — and that it could be defeated.

Harris’ attacks hit Trump where it hurts: his masculinity. She repeatedly referred to U.S. military leaders who had worked with Trump, who she said had described him as “a disgrace.” She reframed his affinity for strongman dictators around the world as less a camaraderie than a naive, even childish fandom, suggesting that his respect for them is not reciprocated and that Vladimir Putin would “eat (him) for lunch.”

A friend with whom I watched the debate, an expert in psychoanalysis, described Harris’s tactics as “symbolic castration.” Trump responded almost as if it were real. He howled and raged, his anger lending credence to Harris’s portrayal of him as thin-skinned and weak.

Perhaps the highlight of the evening was Harris’ response to the second question of the debate, on abortion rights. Trump, whose position on abortion changes about as often as the tides, claimed that his contribution to ending Roe v Wade merely fulfilled “what the people wanted.” Harris responded with an eloquent, impassioned litany of the material hardships and indignities imposed on those who seek abortions — from women struggling to pay for the children they already have to those who have been victims of rape.

“They don’t want that,” Harris said of the state of affairs. “That’s immoral,” she said of the laws she calls “Trump abortion bans” — a moving reversal of the anti-abortion movement’s historic claim to the moral high ground. The moment was a stark reminder of her strengths as a candidate over Joe Biden, whose response to abortion in the June debate was barely coherent but downright demeaning to American women. Ultimately, Democrats appear ready to embrace their strongest case, and the interests of American women could be represented on the national stage with something like the seriousness and respect they deserve.

Early that night, in a rare moment of clarity and honesty, Trump spoke about his own policy plans. “I’m an open book,” he said. “Everybody knows what I’m going to do.” And that was true, though perhaps not in the way he intended. Trump is by now a thoroughly familiar and predictable character, someone who can always be relied upon to pursue narcissistic gratification and vulgar self-interest. If he’s an open book, Americans already know the ending. The Harris campaign is betting that they want to hear a different story.