How you can Humiliate a Narcissist

Now that Kamala Harris has handily dismantled Donald Trump in a presidential debate, one query leaps to the fore: What took so lengthy?

For all of the credulous pundit lore that’s gathered round him, Trump has by no means been an achieved debater. In his prior performances, he’s leaned into inventory apocalyptic MAGA rants, taunting nicknames, and errant conspiracy-mongering. Whilst President Joe Biden imploded earlier than a gleeful Trump within the first 2024 debate, Trump served up lots of the identical hoary, bogus claims that marred his efficiency in opposition to Harris. Then, as now, he claimed that the January 6 riot was a principally peaceable gathering of involved patriots and that no matter mayhem occurred was Nancy Pelosi’s fault. In each debates, he baselessly asserted that Democrats supported the best to terminate pregnancies into the ninth month and to homicide delivered infants. In June, he additionally depicted immigrants as a murderous and mentally unwell menace to the material of the nation—although he hadn’t but amplified the fascist-authored libel about Haitian migrants consuming kidnapped pets, as he did Tuesday evening.

None of this was new. Previous Trump debate lowlights embrace his dog-whistle callout to the white nationalist Proud Boys to “stand again and stand by” in response to the query of whether or not he would distance himself from the group—a message they took to coronary heart come January 6; his announcement that he may need to jail Hillary Clinton for vibe-inflected abuses of a non-public e-mail server; his ludicrous effort responsible Clinton for his personal yearslong racist campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama’s citizenship. That is all to say nothing, in fact, of the broader lies that operate because the taken-for-granted background in Trump’s campaigns, reminiscent of his nonexistent opposition to the second Iraq struggle, his never-serious pledges to revive American manufacturing, and naturally the huge litany of asides touting his bogus genius as a deal-maker and a businessman. The breathtaking quantity and vary of lies Trump has aired out on debate phases over the previous 9 years bear testimony to the damaged state of, nicely, every part—our public discourse, our media, our political events, and our fundamental sense of what the reality is perhaps.

Which can also be why Harris’s environment friendly, focused publicity of Trump’s determined falsehoods was greater than a testimonial to her preparation for the Philadelphia debate and greater than a vindication of her much-touted stature as a prosecutor dealing with off in opposition to a low-grade prison grifter. In repeatedly goading and baiting Trump into greater ranges of self-humiliation, Harris served up a reminder of how completely Trump’s gaseous lying depends on elite-media and political-class complicity.

By invoking early on the played-out spectacle of the Trump rally—the foundational article within the media’s fantasy of Trump’s standing as a tribune of a forgotten America—Harris set Trump as much as reprise the rants about his personal rally-crowd measurement and the supposed pretend and leased composition of Harris’s rallies. In Trump’s addled internal monologue, that is all clear testimony to his unanswerable energy in charisma, however channeled right into a defensive debate reply, it got here off as delusional—and pathetic. The identical dynamic held all through the night. Harris uncovered the phony heroic narrative Trump trots out in regards to the Dobbs resolution by mocking his personal rhetoric, exhibiting how no girl may remotely be understood as “wanting” situations that jeopardize her well being, her future reproductive choices, and her fundamental entry to reasonably priced and life-saving medical care. Amazingly, Harris was even capable of greatest Trump on the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan—a stab-in-the-back fable that was entrance and middle on the Republican Nationwide Conference this summer season and fueled the Trump marketing campaign’s obscene photo-op at Arlington Nationwide Cemetery.

Behind the baiting tactic, although, is a psychological perception that’s eluded previous Trump rivals: The easiest way to fluster and derange narcissists is to strike at their most cherished asset—their bottomless vainness. That was the reasoning behind considered one of Harris’s most direct assaults—her depiction of Trump as a vainglorious and “weak” chief on the worldwide stage, somebody whose personal senior army thought to be “a shame” and who may very well be readily manipulated by different strongman leaders with “flattery and favors.” Similar to the specter of bored and exhausted MAGA followers decamping from his rallies early, this picture of Trump as a feeble and simply deceived laughingstock of a statesman was calculated to get him to sputter in rage and incomprehension—and it labored. Trump’s reply started by citing the admiration of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán, a grasp of election-rigging and dissent-quashing in his personal intolerant democracy. He then proceeded to rant some extra in regards to the absent Joe Biden, and supplied up this “little secret” about Biden’s relationship with Harris: “He hates her. He can’t stand her.” OK, then—nothing disgraceful to see right here!

This one bizarre trick sealed Harris’s victory in Tuesday’s debate, although in fact there have been different contributing components. Trump is exhibiting indicators of continued cognitive decline, with outbursts and delusional riffs which are excessive even by his standard requirements. And ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis did really handle to push again in opposition to at the very least a few of Trump’s most outlandish claims in actual time. (This led, predictably, to outraged cries from the MAGA trustworthy, and the candidate himself, that the proceedings had been rigged in Harris’s favor—a plaint that overlooks the essential fact that when you resent fact-checking interruptions, it’s most likely a good suggestion to not lie a lot.)

Harris’s successes on this entrance stand out in opposition to the ripostes that Biden and Clinton tried in opposition to Trump in their very own marquee debates. True to their very own political worldviews, Trump’s previous Democratic rivals professed horror on the Republican candidate’s transgressions in opposition to sacrosanct (small-d) democratic norms. However it does little good to name out trespasses in opposition to the principles if you’re dealing with a candidate and a political motion that thrives on choreographing outrage and exalting demagogic energy over the niceties of fine governance.

Shaming isn’t a well-liked political reflex—it serves principally to guarantee the shamers of their very own enlightened advantage, whereas opening up frontiers of ridicule for the norms transgressors to cavort in. (See for only one instructive living proof, Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” gaffe; for a extra prolonged crash course, see her complete neoliberal ideology.) However humiliation is one thing else altogether; it reduces your rival’s pet obsessions and outbursts to unhappy and involuted opera-bouffe arias. It additionally drives dwelling the pathological depth of an opponent’s self-involvement. How else can a dialogue of rally crowds segue into the shouted chorus “THEY’RE EATING THE DOGS”? The opposite proof of Harris’s profitable technique is that one conventional metric of debate efficiency—the time every candidate will get to talk—didn’t matter. Trump spoke for greater than 5 minutes longer than Harris did, and solely managed to dig deeper and deeper holes for himself.

There are nonetheless two months for the stability of the election to play out, and bitter expertise has taught us that every one types of calamities and unforced errors may nonetheless tip the enjoying discipline again in Trump’s favor. However for now, Kamala Harris has given us all a useful lesson: To defeat a narcissist, name him weak and let him speak.