By Peter Baker

NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s America is a grim place, a nation awash in marauding immigrants stealing American jobs and eating American cats and dogs, a country devastated economically, humiliated internationally and perched on the cliff’s edge of an apocalyptic World War III.

Kamala Harris’ America is a weary but hopeful place, a nation fed up with the chaos of the Trump years and sick of all the drama and divisiveness, a country embarrassed by a crooked stuck-in-the-past former president facing prison time and eager for a new generation of leadership.

These two visions of America on display during the first and possibly only presidential debate between Harris and Trump Tuesday (10) night encapsulated the gambles that each candidate is taking in this hotly contested campaign. Trump is betting on anger and Harris on exhaustion. Trump is trying to repackage and resell his ‘American carnage’ theme eight years later, while Harris is appealing to those ready to leave that in the past.

The question is who has a better read on the American psyche eight weeks before the final ballots are cast. For the past two decades, most Americans have told pollsters that they believe the country is on the wrong track, a prolonged period of national disenchantment that Trump has successfully channelled throughout his tumultuous political career. But Harris argues that Trump is the one who wants to take the nation back down a path to nowhere.

“She’s destroying this country,” Trump declared at one point during the debate. It was a line he recycled in one form or another 13 times in all — she or the Democrats destroying the country, the economy, the energy industry.

“Let’s turn the page and move forward,” Harris said for her part. She turned pages or moved forward at least five other times. “Frankly,” she added, “the American people are exhausted with this same old tired playbook”.

Elections are, of course, about contrasts and the contrast between the candidates now on offer this campaign season is as stark as any in modern history — not just along ideological, cultural, temperamental, demographic or generational lines but in fundamental outlook.

Trump has always been about extremes, articulating an all-or-nothing Manichaean worldview in which the country is a virtual paradise on Earth when he is in charge and going to hell when he is not. “We had no problems when Trump was president,” he said, attributing the claim to a European autocrat. Now that he is out of office, Trump added, “the whole world” is “blowing up,” and “we’re a failing nation”.

Harris offers subtlety and nuance in a political environment that does not always value either. She boasts of progress, not perfection, and promises seriousness, not self-absorption. “What I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country,” she said, “one who believes in what is possible and one who brings a sense of optimism about what we can do instead of always disparaging the American people”.

The former president’s vision is built partly on a foundation of fiction. So much of what he said over the course of an hour and a half onstage in Philadelphia was false, misleading or seemingly made up out of whole cloth that it could take a team of fact-checkers all night just to catch up. Crime is “up and through the roof,” he said, except that authorities report that it is actually near its lowest level in decades. Harris and President Joe Biden “got rid of” the petroleum industry, except that U.S. oil production has risen to record highs.

Most head-snapping was Trump’s decision to latch onto a bizarre tale of Haitian immigrants supposedly snatching and devouring pets in Springfield, Ohio, an internet rumour debunked by incredulous local authorities. “They’re eating the dogs,” he asserted. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” When David Muir, one of the ABC News moderators, pointed out there was zero evidence of that, Trump simply shrugged and said he heard it on television so it must be true.

It is not a new shtick, although it seems more pronounced than ever. Trump debuted his first presidential campaign in June 2015 with dark talk of Mexican rapists flooding over the border and took office a year and a half later with his famous promise to halt ‘American carnage’.  The risk is that it may feel stale to voters after nearly a decade, as Harris maintained.

Harris, who ducked some questions, gave vague answers to others and at times stretched the truth herself, though not as brazenly as her opponent, kept the focus on Trump. Americans, she said, have grown tired of all the “belittling and name calling” even as she threw some of his own favourite belittling insults back at him, calling him a “disgrace” and “weak”.

Appropriating another of his regular lines, she said “World leaders are laughing at Donald Trump” and added that dictators “can manipulate you with flattery and favours” and foes like President Vladimir Putin of Russia “would eat you for lunch.”

Perhaps most cutting, she took aim at his obsession with crowd sizes at his campaign events, declaring that his act had grown so tiresome that “people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom”.

“Donald Trump actually has no plan for you,” she told the television audience, “because he is more interested in defending himself than he is in looking out for you”.

Nothing seemed to rattle Trump as much as the jab about his beloved rallies, and he let it distract him from a discussion of illegal immigration, an issue that is one of Harris’ prime political vulnerabilities. “People don’t leave my rallies,” he insisted. “We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics, that’s because people want to take their country back.”

Harris got under his skin repeatedly, needling him and putting him on the defensive. Indeed, while judges have scolded him and prosecutors have accused him, no one in years has trolled Trump to his face on a public stage quite like she did. His Republican primary opponents went easy on him, and Biden was spectacularly ineffective at taking him on during their debate on June 27 before the president dropped out of the race.

By contrast, Harris, the former prosecutor, calmly and confidently poked at Trump’s sensitive spots time and again, litigating the political case against a candidate who was convicted of 34 felonies, indicted three other times, found liable of sexual abuse in one civil trial and of business fraud in another and tried to overturn an election that he lost. He scowled much of the evening, refusing even to look at her.

Whether many voters change their minds one way or the other as a result of the back-and-forth remains to be seen. Trump’s strong support from his Republican base has been locked in for months, largely unaffected by events, favourable or otherwise. He has not been losing many voters nor gaining them, although he remains unable to crack the magic 50% threshold.

Harris, on the other hand, had more to gain or lose Tuesday night as the new candidate in the race, reintroducing herself to tens of millions of viewers evaluating her as a potential commander-in-chief for the first time.

A CNN flash poll found that she won by a nearly 2-to-1 margin and the professional commentariat seemed to agree, including some conservatives. By any measure, she did better than Biden, whose shaky performance in June was so bad that it forced him from the race. But as Hillary Clinton can attest, debates do not always translate to victory in November.

If there are no more debates, then the two candidates will now separately crisscross their two Americas for the next 55 days in a high-stakes, this-is-for-all-the-marbles test of which one has a better sense of the country. And then it will be left to voters who are angry and voters who are exhausted — and those who are both — to decide which America they see and what kind of America they want to live in.

-New York Times