Who Won the Debate?

One always reads the newspaper in a fit of irritability. So imagine, dear reader, how painful it is to return to newspaper articles and try to extract the pith (or ‘take the piss’ as we now more medically and less lispingly say). The subject today is the recent ABC televised debate between Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. I usually tend to check three sources of news, which is perhaps a bit negligent of me, but it gives me a loose sense of what is going on: I read the Guardian for the standard absurd lines which are probably the-stating-of-the-obvious for everyone I used to know at university in the 1990s; I read the Spectator to try to hold falteringly onto the hope that there is sense and civilisation of a sort carrying on within the Overton frame; and I read the Sceptic just to keep up with whatever it is I really should know about and would have missed otherwise – not being on Twitter.

And so we find that the Guardian yesterday had a profusion of pieces: a clot of articles so great it threatened to give any reader of the newspaper a stroke. Let me simply quote some headlines:

‘How the Trump-Harris debate played out on social media: “Maga mad libs’”‘
‘Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris for president in post signed “childless cat lady”‘
‘Harris targets Trump for falsehoods on abortion and immigration in fiery debate’
‘Harris’s powerful abortion stance and Trump’s fact-checks: key takeaways from the debate’
‘Prosecutor Kamala Harris put Trump on trial, but the court of public opinion can be fickle’
‘Harris delivered a “masterclass” debate. Will it change the race?’
‘Who won Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s first debate? Our panel reacts’
‘Kamala Harris, unlike Donald Trump, was well prepared for this debate – and won’
‘Trump’s dour negativity contrasted with Harris’s optimism about America’
‘Fact-checking Trump’s debate claims: from abortion to Project 2025’
‘Trump Media drops to fresh stock market low after presidential debate’
‘Harris clearly beat Trump – not that you’d know it from the Right-wing media. Shame on them’
‘Trump campaign publicly claims debate win but privately express skepticism [sic, or perhaps I should say sik]’
‘Republicans dismayed by Trump’s “bad” and “unprepared” debate performance’
‘The Guardian view on the U.S. Presidential debate: Kamala Harris’s triumph isn’t transformative, but it was essential’

Good God. At least 15 articles. I think I innocently read four or five of them. I read the rest out of duty. So let’s examine some of them.

Canon wrote that Trump “spewed misinformation”, was “fact-checked”, and “spouted salacious and sometimes racist claims about immigrants”. Gambino quoted Gavin Newsome: “She kept looking in the camera, talking about you, talking about me, talking about the American people, talking about the issues they care about, and he was talking about dogs, and he was talking about crowd sizes and his grievances and his little pity party and his victim mindset. It was a terrible night for him, but it was, most importantly, a great night for the American people.” Her report was otherwise fairly balanced. It ended by observing that Taylor Swift had endorsed Harris on Instagram. Sullivan, who devoted an article to Swift’s endorsement, quoted Swift as saying that “the simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth”. Robert Tait quoted some Republicans, including Trump’s former rival Chris Christie, as saying that Trump was not prepared. This line was echoed in another piece by Rebecca Solnit, who offered the balanced analysis that Harris “spoke in lucid paragraphs that were clearly the result of careful preparation”, but shared the stage with “the adjudicated rapist who spoke in loose phrases that flapped and looped and circled around and usually reverted to some version of” anti-immigration politics.

The Guardian panel was asked who won. This is amusing but you must be patient. First member of the panel: “Harris prevailed. Harris won the debate.” Second member of the panel: “Harris commanded the stage. While Harris sought to uplight and empower, Trump resorted to divisive language.” Third member of the panel: “Harris won easily. Trump… confused… angry… narcissistic… authoritarian.” Fourth member of the panel: “Harris won the evening and the debate.” Fifth member of the panel: “Harris dominated the debate. Trump… clutched at bigoted straws.” Sixth member of the panel: “All Harris had to do on Tuesday night to be celebrated by the media was to occupy it and string together sentences generally recognised as English. She managed to do that.”

I hope you persisted to the sixth. The Guardian sensibly placed this bit of free thinking at the bottom of the page, hoping that everyone would have been vaccinated into sweet sleep by the five kamala-lullabies before they reached this spiky protein hit. I should record the sixth panellist’s name so we can pay homage: Bhaskar Sunkara.

Back to the usual line was Brockes, who could not believe that other newspapers cared to differ with Guardian editorial standards. She quoted the Telegraph expressing some reluctance to admit that Harris won. And she also quoted the Daily Mail saying that both were “pathetic”. Brockes however, was unimpressed with this impressive display of scepticism, calling it “cognitive dissonance”, and calling Trump a “lunatic”. Best of all was Robert Reich who came in late with the sort of diatribe that makes me wish I was on the Guardian shilling (or on the Guardian, shilling): “blubbering idiot… lies… shambolic… failure… belligerence… ageing, cantankerous white man… mess of a human being… raging fount of grievance…personal malignancy… bottomless negativism.”

I should say that I listened to the debate and thought that everyone did as well as could be reasonably expected: which is not very well. How well would you do? How well would I do? I can speak quite well when lecturing; but I doubt it would transfer very well to a debate. Trump is the master of the homily and digression: no one on God’s earth should ever have supposed that Trump is ever going to be the master of a brief or exhibit forensic accuracy. He is a trumpet-blower and a powder-monkey and a town-crier: he is not a barrister.

The Spectator also mostly told us, in articles by Kate Andrews, Amber Duke and Charles Lipson, that Trump lost the debate. Not great. Less amusing to read than the Guardian pieces, which at least showed spirit.

Who won the debate? I have four answers.

First answer. Trump won the debate.

Against the media consensus that Harris won the debate, I recognise that politics is entirely subjective, and if I am forced to take sides I take the side of the man who thinks for himself, is more amusing, and is more or less aware that there is a glitch in the Matrix: also that Kamala Harris may be one such glitch. I admit that this is not a very sceptical answer. Fear not. The next three answers are more sceptical.

Second answer. No one won the debate.

How can one ‘win’ a debate? There are no points. There was no audience, who expressed a preference before the debate and then another preference afterwards. There was no phone-in. Hitting was not allowed. There was no possible metric except the one the Guardian and Taylor Swift mentioned, ‘truth’. To which we have to say, as Pilate said, speaking as a man-of-the-world, “What is truth?” Jesus did not answer, but we suppose he at least could have done. Whereas one would not like to trust Rebecca Solnit or the ABC fact-checking moderators with an answer. The whole thing is a circus of motes and beams.

Third answer. Trump won the debate, Harris won the debate, both Trump and Harris won the Debate, neither Trump nor Harris won the debate.

The third answer should always be the cleverest one. Have you heard of the catuskoti of Nagarjuna? Nagarjuna was a Buddhist philosopher, an adept of the Mahayana sect. He was an extremely clever casuist. His version of scepticism was not simply the epoche of the Greek sceptics. The Greek sceptics like balancing two propositions, or the supposed truth and falsity of one proposition, and declaring that they were equal in status. But the ancestor of the sceptics, one Pyrrho, arranged the original sceptical insight into a fourfold chant: he said that of any proposition, “it no more is than it is not or it both is and is not or it neither is nor is not”. Pyrrho went to India with Alexander and may have picked this argument up there: or taught it to the Indians – no one knows – or perhaps they were both taught it by a Scythian sage. But it is the same argument that Nagarjuna used a few hundred years later when he wrote arguments of the form “all things exist, all things do not exist, all things both do and do not exist, all things neither do nor do not exist”.

This sort of casuistry appears, at first sight, to be a cause of logical exhaustion. But the purpose was, at least for Nagarjuna, to intensity the Buddhist’s awareness that, even in following the Buddha, he might be attached to something, namely, the Buddha, and that this might be a cause of suffering. Buddhists were (and are) famous for the distinction between nirvana, the world of indifference, and samsara, the world of attachment, frustration and suffering, that is, the ordinary world. Nagarjuna was the philosopher who paradoxically took this distinction and argued that nirvana was samsara and samsara was nirvana. What he meant was that anyone who attempted to hold onto or define or enter nirvana had fixed it and therefore lost it, and that samsara was in fact the same world as the world of nirvana but experienced in suffering and attachment rather than experienced in the right way.

Anyhow, all that aside, it is a pretty good argument. Your friend says, “Harris won the debate.” You suck on your briar, and after a pause, say, “Yes. Harris won the debate, Trump won the debate…”

“Pardon…”

“Both Trump and Harris won the debate…”

“Er…”

“And neither Trump nor Harris won the debate.”

That’ll be the best pipe you ever smoked.

Fourth answer. Nick Clegg

No one in the entire history of the world — with the singular exception of the Right Hon. Sir Nicholas Clegg — has ever ‘won’ such a debate. And Clegg only won because he was a third candidate, with both David Cameron and Gordon Brown taking it in turns to appeal to him: “I agree with Nick.” If only RFK had been there, alongside Trump and Harris, he would have won the debate. But since he wasn’t, the correct answer is “Nick Clegg”.

Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.