Kamala Harris’s Debate Performance Was Cathartic For Women

Call it laziness or privilege or being derelict in my journalistic duties, but I didn’t watch June’s presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump. I knew it would be more blood bath than spirited conversation, and I could’t stomach the gore. Like many young progressives, though, I’ve had a marginally easier time tuning into the presidential race since Vice President Kamala Harris took the party reins — so last night I rallied my roommates together, uncorked multiple bottles of red, and turned on ABC.

The four of us, all women in our 20s and 30s, gathered in front of the TV. We groaned with unease as David Muir and Linsey Davis welcomed the American public to the historic event. The cameras panned out, the lights went up, and my heart raced. The candidates took the stage. Harris made a beeline for Donald Trump, and extended her arm. As the politicians shook up and down, it felt like they held my guts in their interlocked hands.

The stilted gesture was a little awkward to behold, sure, but my queasiness was borne less of cringe than of fear. Many of us who lived through Trump’s presidency are tired of hearing his voice and seeing his face. But for women especially, Trump is more than just an annoyance or a bully with a bad tan. He’s a known predator, convicted in court as liable for sexual abuse, and his presence can trigger a form of what social scientists call our collective trauma.

That Harris dodged the triggers inherent to facing a known sexual abuser . . . makes her debate performance all the more impressive.

Whether or not we’ve individually experienced sexual violence, sought abortion care, or had to contend with our own real-life versions of Donald Trump at some point in our lives, research shows that women experience “collective trauma,” a concept first coined in Black and postcolonial literature to describe “both shared experiences of violence and their long after-effects or continuation among a population or group,” according to a study done by feminist geographer Rachel Pain. It’s not hard to understand how, without having to endure violence firsthand, women are wounded by a culture of misogyny and systematic dehumanization. Watching this debate, the weight of the tension American women hold in our bodies was especially heavy; I could practically hear the cracking of countless nervous knuckles from Tallahassee to Seattle.

Hard as we try to scrub the painful memories, we remember the 2016 debates well — their excessive interruptions, name-calling, and overt sexism. Back then, many of us didn’t take Trump or the threat he posed to our democracy seriously. But debates in a post-Trump (and post-Roe) climate hit different. We know the level of destruction this man and his team are capable of. Among other issues, the first Trump presidency unleashed a landslide of anti-women and anti-queer legislation that continues to bury us today, and a second Trump presidency promises to heap mud onto the pile.

With last night’s debate in full swing, I kept coming back to the fact that these two politicians had never actually met. This was Harris’s first time looking into Trump’s eyes and shaking his hands — hands that have allegedly violated dozens of women. Just hearing his voice through a television makes my pulse surge. Harris is a skilled prosecutor and politician, but she is also a woman, subject to the same collective trauma as the rest of us. That Harris dodged the triggers inherent to facing a known sexual abuser during arguably the biggest moment of her career makes her debate performance all the more impressive.

Over the course of the night, Harris’s opponent denied her the dignity of calling her by her name, or even looking in her direction. But there were glimmers during the broadcast when Trump’s absurd asides briefly broke the tension, moments when Harris could hardly keep a straight face. As political influencer Matt Bernstein later pointed out, claims of undocumented migrants eating pet cats and dogs, or that Harris is doing “transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison,” read more like “AI-generated woke MadLibs” than legitimate talking points.

And of course there was the minutes-long stretch in which Harris had to explain to Trump how abortions work, a powerful exchange in a political landscape where white men have for so long reigned over reproductive rights. Her comments were bolstered by Davis, who punctuated a Trump rant with a reminder that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”

In the months left until the election, we can (and should) continue to debate policy, which many have argued was sorely missing from the discussion last night. Was it depressing to watch the candidates flounder over who loves fracking more? Yes. Was I satisfied with anyone’s responses on the topics of Gaza or Ukraine? No. There were gaping holes that the American public deserves filled in. We know things are bleak when “I have the concept of a plan” is the most honest statement to come from one side of a debate all night.

Still, I kept thinking about what my own trauma response would have looked like if it were me on stage with a sexual abuser and convicted felon, someone with no regard for my bodily autonomy and who’s leading the movement to undo a century of work on my civil liberties. If it were me on that stage, callously told to be quiet, I would likely have been stunned into silence from a mix of rage and fear. Fear for the future of the country. Fear for the future of the planet. And a fear that was deeper and more primal.

It takes courage to not only get up on stage, but to proceed to wipe the floor with the ego of a man like Trump. Harris had moments of shakiness, and fell short on laying out clear action plans. But she kept her cool. She was not cowed. She, to paraphrase her own words, ate that aggressor for lunch.

Emma Glassman-Hughes is the associate editor at PS Balance. Before joining PS, her freelance and staff reporting roles spanned the lifestyle spectrum; she covered arts and culture for The Boston Globe, sex and relationships for Cosmopolitan, travel for Here Magazine, and food, climate, and agriculture for Ambrook Research.