How to Diminish a Former President

How do you undermine a strongman candidate? Emasculate him very, very carefully.

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She didn’t shout. She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t complain about less speaking time.

But “she” — she being Kamala Harris, to use Donald Trump’s preferred name for her — managed to undermine Trump during this week’s debate, provoking him into shouting, finger-pointing and sputtering, ranting about eating dogs and transgender operations on prisoners and nuclear weapons with sweat on his upper lip. She remained calm and collected, emasculating him one subtle jab at a time. 

“The incredible shrinking candidate,” by Barry Blitt for the New Yorker. See it here.

I had come into the debate preparing to watch for the way Trump would try to exert his physical influence. Maybe he would tower over Ms. Harris, whom he declared would be “cheating” if she used a stepstool to appear at his same height. (It didn’t matter; they were on separate screens.)

Or maybe he would stalking behind her or over her, like he did with Hillary Clinton eight years ago. I even convened a team of sociologists (and one political scientist) to watch it all play out with me, hopeful they could shed light on all of the hidden dimensions I might not see. 

And yet even as we began the debate tallying Trump’s subtle sexism — how he wouldn’t look at Harris or speak her name; the way he kept referring to “her boss” (Joe Biden), diminishing her own power — by the end, we were all tallying the ways that she dug into him: picking at his brittle ego, cracking the fragile facade of his blustering machismo.

She dismissed the size of his rallies. She mocked his “love letters to Kim Jong Un” — as if to say, “gay.” She called him “weak,” referred to him as “this fella” and said Vladimir Putin would “eat you for lunch” — each different ways of calling him small. She talked about his multiple bankruptcies (code for him failing as a man, and provider) and noted that he had been “fired by 81 million people” and was clearly “having a hard time processing that,” like a gentle mother, patting her tantruming child on the head.

And she managed to do it without being shrill, or angry, or coming off as petty.

Worst of all, she laughed at him. It wasn’t a forced or controlled or premeditated laugh. It was a real laugh. A big laugh. The sort of laugh she couldn’t hold in, and made those of us watching laugh along with her, too. “Talk about extreme,” she said, as he stared, dead-eyed into the distance. She immediately hammered home all of the former generals and advisers who had declared him unfit for office. He could only fidget uncomfortably in response. 

Eight years ago, this same man, perhaps less sleepy but no less angry, hulked over Hillary Clinton as she tried to ignore him and keep speaking. Today, the woman running for this country’s highest office was no longer turning the other cheek. Instead, she laid bare the smallness of Trump’s manhood and asserted her own power, competence and confidence in the face of it. In the end, only a woman could do that for us.

With special thanks to an A+ team of social scientists who agreed to live chat the debate with me: Tristan Bridges, C.J. Pascoe, Marianne Cooper, Jessica Calarco, Philip N. Cohen and Laurel Elder. Thanks for reading!