‘Everything Democrats could’ve hoped for.’ Public Notice’s Aaron Rupar says that, in her first face-to-face with Donald Trump, Kamala Harris “put on a debate masterclass.”
■ Harris led the evening with a power move, walking across the stage to shake Trump’s hand and pointedly introducing herself by (her correctly pronounced) name.
■ Popular Information’s Judd Legum: “The key moment … was Trump’s refusal to commit to vetoing a national abortion ban, explicitly contradicting his running mate.”
■ Jon Stewart: “Holy s***! She crushed that.”
■ USA Today’s Rex Huppke: She “shattered any veneer of sanity around Donald Trump, sending him spiraling into his true, babbling, unhinged form. … She said, accurately, that people often leave his rallies ‘out of exhaustion and boredom.’”
■ MSNBC commentator Brian Tyler Cohen: “In that moment, he and his inordinately fragile ego were entirely destabilized.”
■ The Sun-Times’ Lynn Sweet: “Trump kept shooting himself in the foot.”
■ The Washington Post recounts the night’s most memorable lines.
■ Politico: “The ultimate alpha male withered in the presence of an alpha female.”
■ The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser: Harris “proved beyond a reasonable doubt … that her opponent will always take the bait.”
■ Political analyst Nate Silver: “Harris got the debate she wanted.”
■ Harris wants another go-round, but Trump’s resisting.
■ Trump says it was his best debate, he won and everyone knew it …
■ … but The Daily Beast perceives a right-wing freakout.
■ Even Fox News’ Brit Hume says, “Make no mistake about it, Trump had a bad night.”
‘Staggeringly dishonest.’ CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale perceived a firehose of falsehoods from Trump.
■ PolitiFact counted at least four Pants-on-Fire moments for Trump.
■ Jimmy Kimmel: “I had to believe that during the debate prep, the one thing Donald Trump’s handlers begged him not to mention was this thing about Haitians eating pets. … ‘Stick to the economy and the border, anything other than Ohio Haitians eating pets.’ So what does he do?”
■ Tim Alberta of The Atlantic: “ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times and Harris zero times. Another way to look at it: ABC moderators fact-checked Trump 2-3 times instead of 500 times.”
■ Historian Heather Cox Richardson: “As he continued to interrupt and yell at Harris, they increasingly gave him leeway to do so.”
■ Stop the Presses columnist Mark Jacob: “ABC fact-checked Trump more often than Harris for the same reason that the police arrested Al Capone more often than Amelia Earhart.”
■ LateNighter’s monologues overview: “Hello, debate police? We just witnessed a murder.”
■ Her endorsement came as news to Harris’ running mate Tim Walz, who was appearing with Rachel Maddow at the moment.
■ A registration drive at a Chicago high school yesterday signed up dozens of new voters.
■ Want to be an election judge? The city needs volunteers.
■ Ipsos data analysis: Who are America’s childless cat ladies?
Politics aside. Harris, Trump, President Biden and vice-presidential candidate JD Vance came together this morning in the plaza where the twin centers towers of the World Trade Center came down 23 years ago.
■ Columnist Neil Steinberg was there Sunday: “The power of the place hits you instantly.”
■ In 2009, award-winning TV reporter Carol Marin looked back on her experience in New York that day: “You spend the rest of the time trying to reconstruct the moment that you didn’t die.”
■ A surge of traffic that morning rendered many news websites mute—leaving relatively new email newsletters as a key communications channel.
‘If I had a job, I would rent an apartment.’ The Tribune profiles migrants sleeping in a truck to stay close to Chicago Public School classes for a 14-year-old son.
■ Chicago’s closing three shelters next month, displacing 1,200 migrants.
‘A mayor’s first and most important job is to keep Chicagoans safe.’ A Trib editorial calls on Mayor Johnson to exempt cops and firefighters from his hiring freeze.
■ Chicago’s on the hook for the biggest U.S. jury award ever to a single person in a wrongful conviction case: $50 million to a man wrongfully convicted in a 2008 murder case—part of a pattern, he complained, of Chicago cops using coercive interrogation on young Black men.
A ‘meat and giardiniera’ reward. That’s what Block Club Chicago says Food Network star Jeff Mauro is offering for the return of sports jerseys missing since his Pork & Mindy’s restaurant chain went bankrupt in 2019 …
■ … which takes us back to 2018, when Mauro told Chicago Public Square about that time a guy in the audience died.
■ Bonus: It’s also reason to revisit the late Lin Brehmer’s moving tribute to Jones on WXRT in 2020. (1997 Jones photo: Richard Blanshard.)
Square loses a reader. A four-year subscriber bailed yesterday, with this reason: “Alittle too fat left leaning for me.”
■ Every cancellation hurts a bit, and “fat” kinda stings (typo or not), but support from continuing readers—even just $1, once—eases the pain.
■ Mike Braden made this edition better.