From Mary L. #Trump

Not only did Vice President #Kamala Harris expose my uncle’s #weakness on the #debate stage last night, which left him seething with rage and reduced to sputtering #incoherence, she also gave millions of us something we have needed for almost a decade — catharsis.

And Harris did it in a way that was not just masterful, it was almost surgical. She #dominated Donald from the outset, crossing the stage to his lectern and forcing him to do something he did not want to do—shake her hand. (I confess, I did not want her to shake his hand—not because I thought it was a tactical mistake, but because I didn’t want her to have to touch him.) And then, while addressing policy issues and giving us substantive answers to the moderator’s questions in a way that underscored how incapable Donald was of doing the same, she slid the knife in again and again. She told him to his face in front of the world that he is a #disgrace. She looked at him with bemused condescension, pity, and outright #contempt. She called out his lies and, worst of all for him, she #mocked his rallies:

“I'm going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump's rallies because it's a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

Donald never recovered from that accurate and damning assessment of one of the most important metrics by which he measures his worth This bit of rhetorical evisceration, which happened at about the 25-minute mark, undid him and he spent the next hour defensive, desperate, and flailing.

We needed someone to call out Donald’s lies in a context he did not control. We needed someone to set the record straight while he had to stand there and listen. Harris did that while laying out his decades’-long patterns of #racist, #corrupt, and #disturbing behaviors that are utterly disqualifying.

For over nine years, this country has been in thrall to a cruel and deranged man who cares only about himself. His constant war on truth and basic human decency has worn us down, #demoralizing those of us who care about other people, who want a better world, and who crave a leader who exhibits empathy and understanding.

We’ve been waiting for somebody in a position of authority to stand up to Donald in a way that would matter, that would loosen Donald’s grip on power and perhaps even undo him. Instead, we’ve watched helplessly as the entire Republican Party bent its knee to him; as corrupt judges give him a pass; and as the #illegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court ripped up the Constitution in order to give him, this man who has earned nothing and deserves nothing, more power.

#auspol #USPol