Former President Donald Trump battled to control his temper as Vice President Kamala Harris took him up on some critical issues during the first encounter between the duo.
With a stream of attacks on abortion limits, his fitness for office and his myriad legal woes, as both candidates sought a campaign-altering moment in their closely fought election.
A former prosecutor, Harris, 59, appeared to get under the former president’s skin repeatedly, prompting a visibly angry Trump, 78, to deliver a series of falsehood-filled retorts.
At one point, she brought up Trump’s campaign rallies, goading him by saying that people often leave early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”
She also accused Donald Trump of telling lies and “insulting the women of America” with his policies and statements on abortion in a fiery exchange with her Republican rival during their televised presidential debate on Tuesday.
“You’re going to hear a bunch of lies,” Harris said, before dismissing Trump’s claim that Americans on both sides of the political divide wanted the 1973 ruling enshrining the constitutional right to abortion to be overturned by the Supreme Court.
Accusing the Republican former president of facilitating “Trump abortion bans that make no exception, even for rape and incest” in states across the country, Harris called for Americans to “understand what that means.”
“A survivor of a crime of violation to their body does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next,” she said.
“You want to talk about this is what people wanted, pregnant women who want to carry pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the healthcare providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot,” she continued, turning to face Trump and pointing at him, while he stared ahead, stone-faced.
“They didn’t want that,” Harris continued. “Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest, being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? You don’t want that.”
Earlier, she stated, “Donald Trump hand-selected three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe v Wade, and they did exactly as he intended.”
She repeated promises to reinstate Roe if she won the White House.
Trump, for his part, continued to insist that “every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal-conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states.”
He insisted that it took “courage” to do it, and said again that Democrats are allowing babies to be executed after birth, even as ABC News debate moderators stated that was not true. Harris said the comment was “insulting to the women of America.”
When the moderator asked him about a statement by his running mate JD Vance, who said that Trump would not sign a national abortion ban if it reached his desk as president, he obfuscated, pivoting to attack Harris over student loans.
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