Donald Trump attacks Kamala Harris over policy U-turns in debate

Former US president takes aim at opponent, claiming ‘everybody’s laughing at her’ during crucial presidential election debate

Donald Trump attacked Kamala Harris for U-turning on key policies as they faced each other for the first time in a presidential debate.
The former Republican president ridiculed Ms Harris for changing her stance on everything from fracking to supporting calls to defund the police, saying: “Everybody’s laughing [at her]”.
“She gave up at least 12 and probably 14 or 15 different policies,” he said.
The 90-minute debate came at a critical juncture in the 2024 election, with polls showing the two candidates in a dead heat.
Speaking afterwards, Trump claimed the moderators were “very unfair” towards him, making the event a “three-on-one”.
At several points, he appeared to respond angrily to provocation by Ms Harris over the size of crowds at his rallies and the result of the 2020 election, which Trump still claims that he won.
Ms Harris received praised for her delivery – managing to stay calm in contrast to Trump – after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance drove him from the race.
However, Trump attacked Ms Harris as “a radical Left-liberal” on stage, accusing her of supporting progressive efforts to defund police departments in Minnesota following the death of George Floyd in the state in 2020.
“Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” he said.
Trump, 78, highlighted his Democratic opponent’s previous opposition to fracking, despite Ms Harris now ruling out a ban.
The issue is of keen interest to voters in Pennsylvania, the site of the debate and the most important swing state in 2024, where the energy industry remains critical to the state’s economy.
Trump said: “If she won the election, fracking in Pennsylvania will end on day one”.
The policies discussed during the debate were as follows:
The two candidates repeatedly traded barbs, particularly over the issue of immigration.
Trump claimed his Democratic opponent would turn the US into “Venezuela on steroids” by allowing illegal immigrants unfettered entry across the border if she wins in November.
Trump claimed America’s southern border was in crisis, claiming the record surge of illegal crossings into the US had reached “21 million people” a month.
Policy experts have stated that the figure is far lower. Official data shows that the total number of “encounters” from both the northern and southern borders in the last three and a half years, including at legal ports of entry, was roughly 10 million.
Trump said a wave of illegal immigration had left the US suffering from “migrant crime”. Ms Harris retorted by highlighting Trump’s own criminal convictions.
Immigration is seen as a weak issue for Ms Harris because she was tasked by President Biden with solving the border crisis and appears to have made little progress.
Last month, Ms Harris abandoned her previous support for decriminalising illegal border crossings to instead vow a tougher approach to border control.
She said she would renew a push for comprehensive border legislation that would tighten migration into the US and vowed to “enforce our laws” against border crossings.
Speaking in the debate with Trump, she said: “Let me say, the United States Congress, including some of the most Conservative members … came up with a border security bill, which I supported.
“That bill would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border to help those folks who are working there right now, doing overtime trying to do their job. It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.”
She continued: “That bill would have allowed us to prosecute more transnational organisations for trafficking guns, drugs, and human beings. But do you know what happened to that bill? Trump got on the phone and killed the bill.”
However, the vice-president has previously pushed for a more humanitarian approach in dealing with the US migration crisis.
In her 2020 campaign for president, she lobbied for the closure of immigration detention centres and the decriminalisation of illegal crossings.
In 2021, she said: “This issue cannot be reduced to a political issue. We’re talking about children, we’re talking about families, we are talking about suffering.”
Ms Harris reversed her stance on fracking, confirming that if elected as president, she would not back a ban on the energy extraction process that is key to the economy of swing-state Pennsylvania.
“My values have not changed,” she said in the debate. “We’re here in Pennsylvania, and I made that very clear in 2020 I will not ban fracking.”
She continued: “I have not banned fracking as vice-president of the United States, and in fact, I was the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act which opened new leases for fracking.
“My position is that we have got to invest in diverse sources of energy so we reduce our reliance on foreign oil.”
But in 2019, when Ms Harris was asked if she would implement a federal ban on fracking on her first day in office, she said: “There’s no question I’m in favour of banning fracking and starting with what we can do on day one around public lands.”
There was also some confusion around her stance towards the Green New Deal, a series of aggressive policies to combat climate change proposed in 2019.
She mentioned the deal during an interview with CNN last month, saying she had “always believed” in it and “worked on it”. However, her campaign later clarified that Ms Harris does not continue to support it.
Ms Harris stood firm on the Biden administration’s commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself.
Rejecting calls from progressives in the party to rethink sending weapons to Israel owing to the heavy Palestinian death toll, Ms Harris has said she would not withhold weapons to the US ally.
She continued to strike a firmer tone in her support of Israel in the debate against Trump after he accused her of “hating” the country, which she denied.
Ms Harris said: “Israel has a right to defend itself, we would, and how it does so matters because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed … children, mothers.
“What we know is this war must end … the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal and we need the hostages out.”
Ms Harris had previously struck a more critical tone of Israel, saying she “will not be silent” in the face of Palestinian suffering after a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, in July.
In previous speeches, she had shifted slightly from Mr Biden’s rhetoric. Last December, she told Israel that it “must do more to protect civilian life” and warned that “international humanitarian law must be respected”.
In February, she more outwardly criticised Israel, saying “too many innocent Palestinians have been killed”.
With action on the economy, a key priority for most voters, Trump and Ms Harris both argued they would do more to improve the cost of living pressures on struggling Americans.
Trump focused on his proposal to impose steep tariffs on foreign imports to protect American businesses from unfair competition.
Ms Harris flipped the policy on its head, branding it a “Trump sales tax” which she claimed would cost middle-class families $4,000 a year.
Trump’s ideas would result in “the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires,” she added.
Economists disagree on the potential costs of tariffs, but the non-partisan Tax Policy Center has disputed the figure cited by Ms Harris.
Trump hit back, arguing that Ms Harris “doesn’t have a plan”. “It’s like Run, Spot, Run,” he said.
Ms Harris claimed at one point that Trump left the US with the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression. However, this is incorrect. While the unemployment rate did reach a record high during the pandemic it had fallen back down by the time Trump left office.
Ms Harris said: “I have a plan to build what I call an opportunity economy. We know that we have shortage of homes and housing and the cost of housing is too expensive for far too many people.
“We know young families need support to raise their children and I intend on extending a tax cut for those families of $6,000, which is the largest child tax credit that we have given in a long time.”
She added that her passion was “small businesses” and that she would give a $50,000 tax cut to start-ups.
Donald Trump signalled that he would once again attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the last major legislative expansion to US healthcare protections often known as “Obamacare”.
However, he conceded he did not have a firm idea of what he would offer in place of the legislation, which remains widely popular with Americans. “I have concepts of a plan,” he said, sparking mockery online.
Ms Harris leant on her foreign policy credentials after four years at the top of the US government to claim world leaders “are laughing at Donald Trump”.
“I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you, and they say you’re a disgrace,” Ms Harris told her opponent, leaning over her podium.
Trump invoked his support among authoritarian leaders in response. “Viktor Orban loves me,” he said of Hungary’s prime minister.
Ms Harris went on to turn one of Trump’s biggest points of attack – his hardline stance on China – on its head, accusing the Republican of being soft on Beijing while in office.
“He ended up selling American chips to help [China] improve and modernise their military,” she said, adding he “basically sold us out”.
Ms Harris also questioned why Trump had thanked China’s president Xi for Bejing’s response to the Covid pandemic, pointing to a lack of transparency from the Asian nation over the origins of the virus. It is believed that Covid-19 may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan.
Ms Harris also claimed Trump would “give up” Ukraine to Russia after he twice refused to say he wanted Ukraine to win the war.
Asked how he would approach Moscow’s invasion, Trump said: “I want to get the war settled,” suggesting he would engage directly with both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky.
Pressed again on whether Ukraine should win the war, Trump replied it was in the country’s “best interest to get this war finished and get it done, negotiate a deal … [and] stop these human lives from being destroyed”.
Ms Harris replied: “If Donald Trump were president, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv right now.”
The 59-year-old vice-president baited her Republican rival into tirades at points during the debate, most notably when she goaded him over the size of his rallies.
She urged viewers to attend a Trump rally, joking that many attendees leave out of exhaustion and boredom.
Trump shot back: “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics,” he said.
Before the debate had even begun, the Harris campaign had baited Trump on the issue with billboards greeting visitors to Philadelphia.
“Crowd size matters,” the adverts read, with a full pretzel representing Ms Harris’ crowds compared to a half-one for Trump’s.
Trump also refused, once again, to concede he had lost the 2020 election.
Ms Harris retorted he had been “fired by 81 million people”.
Questions over abortion, an issue where polling suggests Ms Harris has the upper hand with voters, triggered some of the most contentious exchanges of the night.
A defensive Trump falsely claimed Democrats supported “execution after birth” while insisting he had done the country “a favour” by paving the way for individual states to determine abortion restrictions after the Supreme Court struck down constitutional protections for the procedure.
Trump added that he favoured Ronald Reagan’s exceptions for cases involving rape, incest and where the life of the mother was at risk.
He appeared to distance himself from his own running mate, JD Vance. Trump was questioned over whether he would veto a national abortion ban and declined to answer. When one of the moderators noted that Mr Vance had said he would veto it, Trump said: “I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness.” 
He added “I don’t mind if he has a certain view,” but said his running mate was not “speaking for me”. However, at a different point, Trump said he would not sign a ban.
Ms Harris angrily hit back: “This is what people wanted?
“People being denied care in an emergency room because healthcare providers are afraid of being hauled off to jail?”
Last month, Ms Harris’ campaign quietly confirmed that after championing Medicare for All – a universal single-payer national health insurance system, it is no longer part of her agenda.
In 2017, Ms Harris said she would eliminate private insurers as part of implementing Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All bill, which would have replaced private health care in the US with an NHS-styled system.
But since 2020, she has promoted accomplishments shared with Mr Biden about expanding access to private insurer plans that serve Obamacare patients and using Medicare to negotiate drug prices.
Ms Harris reiterated in the debate that she “absolutely supports” private healthcare options. “What we need to do is grow and maintain the Affordable Care Act,” the vice-president continued.
Trump repeatedly attacked his one-time opponent Joe Biden. “He spends all his time on the beach,” Trump said of the US president.
He repeatedly attempted to link Ms Harris to her boss for the last four years. “Remember this: she is Biden,” he said.
Ms Harris hit back: “Clearly, I’m not Joe Biden and I’m certainly not Donald Trump.”
She positioned herself as the only candidate who would offer a “new generation of leadership for our country”.
However, in the final moments of the debate, Trump appeared to regain his footing.
He used his closing statement to remind voters Ms Harris had been in power for the last four years. “All the things she’s talking about … Why hasn’t she done it?” he asked.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Ms Harris voiced support for “defunding the police” in a radio interview after nationwide protests.
Ms Harris said that the movement “rightly” called out the amount of money spent on police departments instead of community services, including education, healthcare and housing, before saying that more police officers did not increase the public’s safety.
“This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” she said.
This has prompted the Trump campaign to attack Ms Harris, with the former US president saying: “She was big on defunding the police in Minnesota.”
Ms Harris was quick to deny Trump’s claims, shaking her head and saying: “That’s not true.”
Ms Harris has previously said she would support offering taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries to prisoners.
Speaking in 2019 as a California senator, Ms Harris was asked if she would ensure transgender and nonbinary people who rely on state medical care “including those in prison and immigration detention” would have access to gender transition surgery.
Mr Harris said “yes”, before adding: “It is important that transgender individuals who rely on the state for care receive the treatment they need, which includes access to treatment associated with gender transition.”
This was seized on by Trump in the debate as he attacked Ms Harris over her series of U-turns.
“She did things nobody would ever think of. Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison. This is a radical, left, liberal that would do this,” Trump said.
A Harris campaign adviser told CNN: “The vice-president’s positions have been shaped by three years of effective governance as part of the Biden-Harris administration.”
“As president, [Ms Harris] will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on common sense solutions for the sake of progress,” added a Harris campaign spokesman.