U.S. President Donald Trump speaks next to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 10, 2025. REUTERS/Nathan Howard
A year ago, Vice President Kamala Harris confidently walked up to Donald Trump, looked him in his bloodshot eyes, offered her hand, and then proceeded to spend the next 90 minutes dragging him all over the stage of Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center in their one-and-only 2024 presidential debate.
Harris was prepared, disciplined, and clearly demonstrated her keen understanding of both domestic and foreign policy issues. She wasted no time stating her key plans for her administration, and effortlessly illustrated a command of the Constitution. She made it clear that she, not her opponent, who was a convicted felon, had spent an entire professional career upholding our nation’s laws, not violating them.
She even predicted how the debate would go down telling the world that Trump would haul out “the same old, tired playbook,” and warning he would resort to “a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling.”
While Harris strongly defended a woman’s right to choose, Trump stammered and lied saying, “As far as the abortion ban, no, I’m not in favor of an abortion ban. But it doesn’t matter because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”
Then he weirdly said, “I have been a leader on fertilization.”
With an incredulous look, Harris stared at him and then the camera, and said without speaking, “I have no idea what the hell he is talking about, either.”
This was repeated several more times, as Trump used the shovel Harris casually tossed him to bury himself.
When she wasn’t relentlessly fact-checking and battering the haggard Trump with the facts, she was nonchalantly casting a line and patiently waiting for the two-ton sucker fish to hit it, before setting the hook, and reeling him in.
By the time she was done, the orange, flapping fish was bleeding out all over the stage, and screaming, “They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!”
Harris also effortlessly dog-walked Trump into the very racist trap that he set weeks earlier when he questioned Harris’s “Blackness.”
“All I can say is, I read where she was not Black, that she put out. And I’ll say that, and then I read that she was Black. And that’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her. That’s up to her.”
That’s up to her … How kind.
Harris again looked at the camera, with a “you decide” look.
When the a----kicking was finally over, Harris had masterfully humiliated Trump. She had proven she had the capacity to be one damn fine president, and knew how to stand up to fascist bullies, not roll out the red carpet for them.
So badly was Trump beaten, he actually flat turned down an offer from Republican state media at Fox TV to host a second debate, saying “there will be no rematch.”
It’s fitting then, that on the one-year anniversary of Harris’s knockout of Trump on that Philadelphia stage, we are getting news of Russia President Vladimir Putin’s incursion into Polish airspace today. High-ranking Polish military officials are decrying an “unprecedented violation” as a “huge number” of Russian drones were shot down by Polish and NATO forces over that country.
This is the first time in the history of NATO that alliance fighters have engaged enemy targets in allied airspace.
Read that again.
As I type this, Poland’s government has invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty, that states alliance members “will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the parties is threatened.”
Without invoking Article 4, there cannot be Article 5, which could entail military action.
From reporting in The New York Times this afternoon:
Since NATO’s founding in 1949, Article 4 has been invoked eight times. Before Wednesday, the last was on Feb. 24, 2022, the day Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
What we know for sure right now is that the world is less safe today than it was yesterday, and certainly one year ago. We still don’t have a clue what Trump has to say about any of it, except what he posted on his social media account:
"What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!"
Here we go? Good God.
This is the terrifying stuff of world wars, but of course, Harris was on top of this issue, too, during that debate, because unlike Trump, she read her national security briefings, and could tell our friends from our enemies.
At one point, Harris turned to Trump and said this:
“Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favor, and what you think is a friendship with a known dictator (Putin) who would eat you for lunch?”
She wasn’t done:
“If Ukraine loses, Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.”
Holy hell …
And let me remind you that Trump promised to end Russia’s war with Ukraine on Day One of his presidency. Of course, anybody who was paying attention, and/or really loves this country, knew that like so much of the heated bilge that pours out of his lying mouth, it was all complete bulls–––.
Instead, just last month he surrendered to Putin on American soil by giving the murdering dictator the red-carpet treatment Harris had predicted.
But if we are really being accurate here, all of this was forecasted on another debate stage in 2016, when Trump was dragged around by another smart, tough, unflappable woman.
When Hillary Clinton went after Trump’s bromance with Putin, the man who would violently attack America only four years later said this:
“He (Putin) said nice things about me. He has no respect for her (Clinton), he has no respect for our president (Obama). I’ll tell you what, we’re in very serious trouble.”
Clinton responded this way:
“Well that's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States.”
Truer words have never been spoken.
Both of these patriotic women were right about everything, and we should all be reminded of that every single day.
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.