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Kamala Harris set Donald Trump up by attacking the thing he holds most dear in the world: his rallies.

“He’ll talk about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He’ll talk about how windmills cause cancer. What you’ll also notice is that people leave his meetings early out of exhaustion and boredom. The one thing you won’t hear him talk about is you,” she said, in a moment that had likely been rehearsed for days.

Trump’s eyes widened and his face slumped. He could no longer hear the moderators over the ringing in his ears.

“Let me just comment on the rallies,” he said, ignoring a question about the border. “People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics,” he continued.

The man who put himself in the shoes of his opponents in every debate of his life ultimately became the victim.

From that moment on, his voice rarely dropped below a shout. His sentences were incoherent. His syntax was confused. His face was red. His brows were furrowed. He leaned forward into the empty space before him.

The worst was yet to come.

In perhaps the strangest moment of the debate, or any presidential debate in American history, Trump stumbled from a defense of his rallies to sharing a conspiracy theory online about Haitian migrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.

“In Springfield they eat the dogs — the people that came here — they eat the cats. They eat … they eat the pets of the people that live there,” he said.

When ABC’s David Muir said there were no credible reports of pets being abused, the former president responded with an answer that could have prompted a welfare check had it been delivered anywhere other than during the debate: “The people on television are saying my dog ​​was taken and used for food.”

The split-screen was not kind to Trump. As he conjured up images of dead cats from his imagination, Harris’s facial expressions told a story of their own. She laughed and grimaced during his answers.

This wasn’t the imposing Trump who stalked Hillary Clinton in 2016. Or the subdued Trump who spoke calmly when Joe Biden stumbled just two and a half months ago.

Trump’s debate style was once compared to a “defective piece of equipment.” On stage tonight he was like a whistling kettle rattling on a stove. He never found his balance.

Harris challenged him again and again, attacking his temperament, calling him weak and a “disgrace.” She stared Trump in the eye as she told him that world leaders were “laughing at Donald Trump” and called him “confused about facts.”

Trump’s gaze was straight ahead, his anger at an invisible sign in front of his desk only growing.

“Let me tell you about world leaders. Viktor Orban, one of the most respected men — they call him a strong man. He’s a tough man. Smart. Prime Minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it wasn’t blowing up. Why is it blowing up? He said because you need Trump as president again,” he said, before listing more dictators who thought he was a good guy.

Harris has been most critical of Trump on abortion and race.

In what will likely be her most viral moment, she was able to forcefully criticize Trump’s dismantling of Roe v. Wade.

“Trump bans abortion and makes no exceptions, not even for rape and incest. 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 is immoral,” she said.

“And you don’t have to give up your faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that the government, and Donald Trump in particular, should not tell a woman what to do with her body,” she added.

Trump, meanwhile, continued to expand on his position on a national abortion ban, making the absurd claim that Harris’ running mate, Tim Walz, supports “execution after birth.”

That prompted a surly moderator, Linsey Davis, to remind the former president: “There is not a single state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

Trump had hoped to use the debate to link Harris to all of Biden’s failures. By the end, Harris had more success in pursuing the case against Trump.

In her closing statement, Harris spoke of the candidates’ “two very different visions for our country.”

“One that’s focused on the future and the other that’s focused on the past. And an attempt to bring us back. But we’re not going back. And I believe the American people know that we all have so much more in common than what divides us and that we can chart a new path forward,” she said.

Trump concluded his remarks with a question for Harris.

“So, she just started saying she was going to do this, she was going to do that, she was going to do all these great things. Why didn’t she do it?” he asked.

“We are a failing nation. We are a nation that is seriously going backwards. We are being laughed at all over the world. They are laughing all over the world, I know the leaders very well. They come to me. They call me. We are being laughed at all over the world. They don’t understand what has happened to us as a nation. We are not leaders. We have no idea what is going on,” he added.

When Donald Trump walked off the stage, he probably wished he had been a little more gentle on Joe Biden.