SWithout sticking two pencils up his nose and muttering the word “wibble,” Trump’s appearance on the debate stage Tuesday night was never going to definitively prove to those who still had doubts that he is unfit for high office. Unlike Biden’s disastrous performance two and a half months ago, chaos is part of Trump’s appeal—and when his mind is muddled, it’s nothing more than business as usual. And yet, even for Trump, aspects of his debate performance in Pennsylvania on Tuesday came so close to the edge that the next day it seemed most astonishing that Harris had not performed so well, but that so many seemingly sentient people were still advocating for her deranged opponent.

Going into the meeting, I had the strangest sense of both the height of the stakes and the sheer entertainment value of the encounter. I wondered about Harris’ nerves—how someone deals with them in such a unique situation. In the opening moments of the debate, the vice president did seem nervous. But she calmed down, and after about 15 minutes, it started happening: As Harris’s tightly controlled temper rose to a fever pitch, Trump, his mouth pinched, his eyes lost in his head, became confused.

A reference by Harris to her endorsement of Trump’s alma mater, the Wharton School, and several senior Republicans including – confusingly for liberals! – Dick Cheney prompted a volley of “she”s from Trump. She, she, she, he said – always a sign of a losing battle against a female antagonist. “She copied Biden’s plan and it’s like four sentences, like Run Spot Run!” And off he went on his downward spiral.

The next day, consumers of American right-wing media were partially informed of Trump’s performance, but it was cobbled together with many excuses. Even this mild acknowledgement of Trump’s weakness, however, was a departure from the vociferous support of the Murdoch press in 2016. In the pro-Trump New York Post , the paper admitted that Trump was “shocked,” but whined about the dishonesty of the ABC News debate moderators. (They called Trump out on his lies about immigrants eating American pets and Democrats legalizing infanticide—there were times, on Tuesday night, when the task of debating Trump felt a lot like trying to debate a copy of the National Enquirer.)

There was a lot of doom-laden commentary on Fox News after the debate. Brit Hume said mournfully of Harris, “She came out in pretty good shape.” All Sean Hannity could think of was that the “real loser” was ABC. Jesse Watters said, “That was tough,” spoke in a way that most viewers wouldn’t think “none of these people won,” and noted, “All the memorable lines came from Donald Trump.” Which, of course, was technically true. (Aside from the pet-eating thing, my two favorite Trump lines were “Venezuela on steroids” and “I told Abdul, don’t do it anymore!” — an absolute Trump bombshell about making things hard for the Taliban.) Then Trump himself appeared on the network to accuse the debate of being “rigged” — a clear sign, regardless of the competition, that he had, in fact, lost.

At X, eugenics enthusiast and world’s richest man Elon Musk admitted that Trump had had a bad night and that Harris had “exceeded most people’s expectations.” This was grudging, but had the advantage over the reaction of other Trump supporters of actually acknowledging reality. He went on to say, “We will never get to Mars if Kamala Harris wins”—a fact that, assuming Musk himself plans to make the trip, would indeed be a detriment to a Harris victory.

In the British right-wing press, meanwhile, there were several feeble attempts to soften Trump’s failure, including the Daily Telegraph’s claim after the debate that it was “difficult to crown Harris the winner given how little she has said about her own platform.” Was it? Was it really so difficult to pick a winner between the woman who, if she loses in November, we can be fairly certain will not refuse to accept the decision versus the man who screams “Execute the baby!” and cites Viktor Orbán as a character witness? And yet the Daily Mail concluded: “Pathetic, both.”

Given the evidence before us, these moments of cognitive dissonance are becoming increasingly difficult to process. Because the truth is, of course, that Trump looked like a lunatic on Tuesday night. As he grew angrier, his shoulders slumped, his body contorted, and certain familiar phrases began to crop up in his speech. “I’m not, she is”; repeated uses of the word “terrible.” Of Biden, he said, referring to Harris, “He hates her; he can’t stand her.” For my money, though, his craziest moment wasn’t any of this, or even the pet thing, but when he veered off into a diversion about the horrors of solar power and then said, “Have you ever seen a solar farm? By the way, I’m a big fan of solar power.” During some of these tirades, Harris, despite the immense pressure of the moment, actually managed to look bored.

Much has been made of her calmness, and how her smirk—what the New York Post disapprovingly called her “dismissive laugh”—pushed Trump to greater depths of incoherence. But I think the best parts of the debate were when Harris got angry, too. As a candidate, she’s struggled with being hard to read and has been accused of being too scripted. But in the abortion portion of the debate, you could feel her leaping beyond the rehearsed lines, and you could feel the engine of her persuasion come to life.

She was angry—furious, even—when she said the line about a woman who had a miscarriage and was “bleeding in a car in the parking lot” because an emergency doctor was too afraid to treat her. I had the same flash of righteous indignation when she told Trump, in relation to Russia’s expansionist ambitions, “You worship strong men instead of caring about democracy.” She was, I sensed, a heartbeat away from challenging him with, “You want to kiss Putin on the lips, you do.”

And then her language shifted register, moving into a realm generally more palatable to Republicans than Democrats. “That’s immoral,” Harris said of Trump making decisions about women’s bodies. It was a striking moment, this use of a word that could just as easily apply to all the well-informed Americans and their allies in Britain who have continued to excuse Trump from the game thus far.

• Emma Brockes is a columnist for The Guardian

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