It was about as close to perfection as Kamala Harris has ever come in a debate, and it was about as close to self-parody as Donald Trump—who does not understand parody—gets. Harris repeatedly laid out the bait, and Trump couldn’t resist taking it, spiraling through warrens of nonsense about his crowd sizes and the Central Park Five and pet-eating migrants, all of which served to distract from whatever canned answers he’d prepared. That usually came later; first, for almost everything and after a slightly nervous start from Harris, any momentum Trump might have gained was immediately lost when he tried to answer an inevitable question about women and abortion. That was it.

For more than two years now – since Roe vs. Wade was overturned by a Supreme Court more interested in their feelings than in your health care. Women have been waiting for one clear, compelling answer to a simple question: Who decides what happens to your body when you’re pregnant? On Tuesday, Harris delivered it flawlessly. It’s been a long time coming.

One reason it felt like such a specific relief is that President Joe Biden coughed up a painful rhetorical hairball in the infamous June debate when asked about the fall of Deer: “I supported Roe vs. Wadewho had three trimesters,” he deferred. “The first time is between a woman and a doctor. The second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And the third time is between the doctor—I mean, it would be between the woman and the state.” On this point, he did have something right—abortion, as construed in Deer, is a matter of doctors’ rights. But it was not a satisfactory answer for the women who suffered the consequences of Dobbs in states across the country.

In Tuesday’s debate, on the third question of the night, Trump was given the chance to explain his previous rambling evasions about which abortions are considered legal and what types of abortion bans he would support. The moderator, ABC News anchor Linsey Davis, closed the probe with a simple question: “Why should women trust you?”

Trump responded as he now unfailingly responds to this question: with a pair of lies. The first is the now familiar lie that Democrats support aborting babies “in the ninth month” and also favor “executing babies” after they’re born. Before even giving Harris a chance to respond, Davis abruptly put a stop to that series of lies: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” she said, before giving Harris a chance to respond at greater length.

Harris was also tasked with responding to Trump’s second lie, which was more subtle but dumber. Abortion has nothing to do with women, as he puts it, but with the “legal people” who get to decide what women need. Trump famously said that “they’ve been trying for 52 years Roe vs. Wade in the states,” and that “every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted to see this issue brought back to the states where people could vote.” The word “woman” was nowhere in his answer, by the way, because in his imaginary construction of the problem, the imaginary “scientists” get to decide for the rest of us. (Well, the scientists and “the genius, the heart, and the strength of six Supreme Court justices.”) In other words, Trump’s answer to the question of why women should trust him was literally that “scientists” and the Supreme Court got to decide—and they sent it to the states to decide. So trust Trump!

Harris’ response emphasized who loses, because their bodily autonomy was “transferred to the states” after Dobbs:

In over 20 states, there are Trump abortion bans that make it a crime for a doctor or nurse to provide health care. In one state, it’s a life sentence. Trump abortion bans that make no exceptions, even for rape and incest. Which — understand what that means. A survivor of a crime, a violation of their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next. That’s immoral. And you don’t have to give up your faith or deeply held beliefs to agree: the government, and Donald Trump in particular, should not be telling a woman what to do with her body.

She then explained what Trump’s fictional legal scholars and hand-picked Supreme Court zealots never wanted to understand:

You want to talk about, this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, who have had a miscarriage, who are denied care in the emergency room because the providers are afraid they’re going to jail, and she’s bleeding to death in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or 13-year-old incest survivor who is forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.

Understand that in his Project 2025 there would be a national abortion clinic, a watchdog that would monitor your pregnancies and miscarriages.

Asked whether he would veto a national abortion ban, Trump declined to answer. Asked why his running mate, J.D. Vance, said he would, Trump said he and Vance had not discussed it. The mood was that the issue was not even worth discussing between running mates; best left to the “scholars” and the “courageous” Supreme Court.

Harris’ response was intended to create a still life in American women, afterDobbs—a snapshot of the people whose lives have been disrupted and decimated by the former president and his hand-picked Supreme Court justices who have never, ever cared about their dignity or autonomy:

There is no woman in America who carries a pregnancy to term and asks for an abortion. It doesn’t happen. It’s insulting to the women of America. And understand what has happened under Donald Trump’s abortion ban. Couples who pray and dream of a family are being denied IVF treatments. What’s happening in our country, working people, working women who work one or two jobs, who can barely afford childcare, have to travel to another state, get on a plane, and sit next to strangers, to get the health care that she needs. They can barely afford it. And what you’re doing to her is unconscionable.

And for millions of us it was finally, oh my God, Finally, the right answer, delivered convincingly and passionately, without excuses or triangulation. As Harris put it, “The majority of Americans believe in a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body. And that’s why in every state where this issue was on the ballot, in both red states and blue states, the people of America voted for freedom.”

There is a robust minority of American voters who are so obsessed with Donald Trump that his solipsism provides them with considerable comfort: When Donald Trump says that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are feasting on pets, that must be true; when Donald Trump says that there wouldn’t be a war in Ukraine if he were president, that must be true; when Donald Trump says that every American pundit, Republican or Democrat, believes that your most intimate health care decisions should be voted on by randos in state legislatures, that must be true. To them, Trump’s answers on abortion should feel like a comforting reminder that Big Daddy knows everything and that Viktor Orbán has his back, if there was any doubt.

But the fact that a great many Americans, and a majority of American women, are fobbed off with debunked lies about executing live babies, and then bombarded with claims that you shouldn’t have to make your own miscarriage care or fertility choices because “scholars” and “courageous” judges wanted your state legislatures to decide for you, is not comforting. It’s a tactic so flimsy it oozes contempt. It feels like Trump is saying, I had eight years to prepare for this debate question and all I could do was make you invisible to me.

The contrast was underscored by perhaps the debate’s most striking moment. In closing statements, Harris offered a leadership philosophy to Americans trying to understand who she is for the first time: “I started my career as a prosecutor. I was a prosecutor. I was an attorney general. A United States senator. And now vice president. I’ve had only one client. The people. And I’ll tell you, as a prosecutor, I’ve never asked a victim or a witness, ‘Are you a Republican or a Democrat?’ The only thing I’ve ever asked them is, ‘Are you OK?’”

Donald Trump doesn’t care whether You are okay because that’s all he cares about He is OK. He is incapable of imagining a world outside his own strange, smoky, pet-eating inner hell. He never has been able to. On Tuesday, Harris told the millions of American women who have been serially insulted by Samuel Alito and their state legislators, and then not even deemed worthy of being addressed with a “you” in Trump’s staged response, that they are seen and that their experiences matter. Harris looked into the camera and said, simply, that it’s not enough to be handed off to another Big Daddy when your needs and demands and basic human rights are demanding and life-changing. And that moment won the debate.