Politics
The debate made the contrast between Trump and Harris crystal clear. Will it matter to voters?
The choice has now been laid out, and it is stark. Tuesday’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump likely won’t be among history’s most remembered, but it delivered what we needed in 2024, showcasing the very real differences between the two candidates.
And yet, I’m left to wonder whether it was enough to dramatically change the race. After nearly a decade of this same Trump in our politics, it’s difficult to have real confidence that an objectively poor performance will cost him the White House. As disorienting as his comments can be, it feels exactly like what we’ve seen from him for years.
After nearly a decade of this same Trump in our politics, it’s difficult to have real confidence that an objectively poor performance will cost him the White House.
The question remains: How many voters are willing to overlook his obvious flaws and bizarre rhetoric out of gauzy nostalgia for pre-pandemic days or a frustration with the current administration’s handling of the economy?
In style and substance, Harris looked the part of a president, the awkwardness of her early stumbles on the national stage gone. She spoke to her plans but more so to the values, principles and priorities that motivate her. She was firm and forward-looking. Harris was speaking directly to the American people.
Trump, by contrast, reprised his familiar role as America’s dark and self-obsessed loudmouth. He did little to appeal to swing voters, diving immediately into conservative culture issues and conspiracy theories. The Trump campaign had hoped to present Harris as a lightweight and a radical. But once again it was undermined by its candidate. The former president leveled many attacks, to be sure, but he got so lost in his own rambles that Harris was rarely put on the defensive.
At times she was able to toy with him, tossing out bait on topics like crowd sizes, Trump’s criminal conviction and his role on Jan. 6. He eagerly took it each time, wasting precious time on self-indulgent rants that serve only to highlight his narcissism. Perhaps the worst moment for the former president was an extended argument that he, in fact, did not lose the 2020 election. None of this does him any good with the undecided voters who will determine this election.
Harris, meanwhile, understood the assignment. She pressed her advantage on issues like abortion while presenting herself as a mainstream Democrat, saying she would be tough on illegal border crossers, promoting the need for a mighty military force and even announcing herself as a gun owner. She had no knockout blows, but in contrast to the brooding, unfocused performance of her opponent she was the clear better candidate onstage.
Tuesday’s debate was much bigger than the differences in their policy proposals. It was a contrast in the character, ideals and seriousness that we should expect from a president.
It’s confounding that the race is so close, making this debate supposedly so crucial, because the choice should not be hard. There is a serious candidate working to earn your vote, running in the traditions of American democracy and offering a vision for moving America forward. And there is another who remains deeply unstable and wants to scare people into going backward.
Brendan Buck is an NBC News and BLN political analyst. He was previously counselor to former House Speaker Paul Ryan and press secretary to former House Speaker John Boehner.
The U.S. delegation in Seattle includes HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, according to a FIFA official, along with White House FIFA World Cup Task Force czar Andrew Giuliani. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy were among those who attended the U.S.’ first match, against Paraguay.
Britain wouldn’t have its latest likely next prime minister if not for soccer.
Andy Burnham, the former Greater Manchester mayor elected to the U.K. Parliament in a closely-watched by-election on Thursday, is expected to oust Prime Minister Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader in a matter of weeks. The sport propelled his political rise.
The pivotal moment of Burnham’s long political career came in 2009, when he was the Cabinet minister for culture, media and sport under then-PM Gordon Brown. Burnham was asked to return to his native Liverpool for a memorial commemorating the Hillsborough Disaster.
The 1989 event remains Britain’s worst-ever sporting catastrophe. Almost 100 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at a cup game in South Yorkshire, following a series of disastrous crowd control errors by police chiefs and stadium staff.
The horror of the day was compounded in the immediate aftermath, when police sought to cover up their mistakes by falsely blaming drunken Liverpool fans for the crush. The lies were amplified by a willing national media and allowed to linger for years; the city grieved and demanded justice. Bereaved families campaigned for years. But no one listened, and no one was held accountable.
Born in Liverpool and steeped in soccer culture, Burnham knew all this as he headed to the memorial at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium 20 years later. He was well aware how a young government envoy would be greeted by the crowd, still raging at the injustice two decades on. But to his credit, he went anyway — and was met with a wall of heckles, chants and protest songs from the part of Anfield, known as the Kop, where the team’s loudest supporters congregate. (The video of his halting, shattered-looking appearance is well worth watching.)
Burnham — until then a typical career politician in Westminster — has described the day as a seminal moment. He returned to Cabinet and demanded a new inquiry into Hillsborough. Three years later its report revealed every claim made by the justice campaigners — of police failures and a scandalous cover-up — had been true. The government was forced to apologize.
Burnham was widely praised for his role in exposing the truth about Hillsborough. But more significant in his ultimate rise to power would be the shift in his own psyche. “I always say that I took my first steps out of Westminster on 15 April 2009 when I walked out to face the Kop,” he wrote in his memoir, “Head North,” penned with close friend (and Hillsborough survivor) Steve Rotheram. “Things were never the same after that day.”
Burnham says his experiences dealing with the Hillsborough justice campaign shaped his view of the Westminster political machine, as an arrogant and failing institution which ignores English regions outside of London. Eight years later he would quit Westminster altogether to become a mayor in his native northwest.
Fast-forward to 2026, and Burnham finds himself in an enviable position — an experienced politician able to cast himself as a political outsider ready to take on the Westminster elites. (While Starmer supports the North London-based champions Arsenal, Burnham is a season ticket holder at his beloved Everton F.C., and is regularly photographed jogging in a vintage Everton jersey.) It’s a familiar narrative which chimes with disgruntled voters everywhere.
Read Jack’s Blue Light News Magazine profile of Andy Burnham here and Blue Light News’s full coverage of the Makerfield by-election and its unfolding fallout here.
Who’s not here at Seattle’s Lumen Field for the Pacific Rim face-off between the United States and Australia?
If they’re following the match, the two countries’ elected heads — President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — are doing so from afar.
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