Vice President Kamala Harris trounced Donald Trump during their presidential debate last week. For more than 90 minutes Trump had almost no substantive responses to her interventions and rebuttals as he lied, prevaricated, and acted like a broken computer spouting out conspiracy theories and obvious lies from some of the deepest sewers of the right-wing echo chamber. Harris’ victory was so complete, and Trump’s defeat so thorough, that the corrupt ex-president’s mouthpieces and other surrogates were basically forced to admit this reality. Of course, Trump who has shown himself to be an egomaniac and a narcissist, declared that he won. However, his actions suggest otherwise: Trump quickly declared that he would not participate in a second debate against Harris.

In total, Harris’ crushing defeat of Donald Trump is best explained by what political scientist M. Steven Fish describes as a “high-dominance leadership style.” Fish is a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley and te author of “Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge.”

"During the debate, Harris scrapped the time-worn, fruitless Democratic practice of treating Trump mainly as a dangerous, imperious liar. Instead, she cast him as insecure, tiresome, and small."

In this conversation, Fish details exactly how Harris used high-dominance leadership to defeat Donald Trump and why she and the Democrats must continue with that approach going forward to win the election. Fish also reflects on how the debate revealed, again, that Trump and today’s MAGAfied Republicans and “conservatives” are really bullies and cowards who will fold when confronted directly and forcefully. Fish also predicts that if current trends continue Kamala Harris and the Democrats will defeat Trump and the Republicans on Election Day.

Given these tumultuous last few weeks with two apparent assassination attempts against Trump, two conventions, Biden stepping aside and Harris now being the Democrats' presidential nominee and reversing the party's political fortunes (for now), how are you feeling?

I’m feeling better than I have in quite a while since it now seems possible that we’ll be able to relegate Trump to the status of a historical oddity. That said, Trumpism will survive this election even if Donald Trump is defeated. The Democrats will have to win a string of national elections — at least two or three in a row — to force the Republicans to return to real conservatism. We’ve got to be in this for the long haul. And the current race, of course, is a dead heat.

Kamala Harris utterly crushed Donald Trump during their debate. It was the inverse of Biden’s failure. And the debate seems like it was just part of the arc of the Democrats’ new approach.

“Crushed” is the right term, and it’s exactly what needed to happen for Harris to launch her fast start in July and then build on her momentum since then, including during the debate. The Democrats have long been seen as more caring, more knowledgeable, more likable, and so on. Trump’s main advantage has been that he’s regarded as a “stronger” leader. You don’t overcome that edge by throwing another rhetorical pity party for voters who are supposedly drowning in tears at the cost of a tankful for their Ford F-150s, nor by busting out another display of wounded indignation at your opponents’ insensitivity. You do it by showing you’re tougher, more resolute, more confident, and more committed to your own ends than your opponents are. You also ostentatiously delight in driving your foes to distraction. That’s precisely what Harris and the Democrats started doing, and it is what has resurrected their prospects.

There were many moments during the debate where I was literally yelling at the screen or commenting and doing play-by-play, as I was grinning and nodding. It was as if she were following the playbook I would have given her and that you spelled out in your new book “Comeback.” I have to ask: Do you know if Vice President Harris and her team read your book on high-dominance leadership?

I have no way of knowing, but I can say that I’m thrilled to see them doing just about everything I recommended in the book to overcome their dominance disadvantage, including many of the things you and I have discussed. At a minimum, what we have seen over the past two months is what scientists call a natural experiment, and the proof-of-concept is there: As soon as the Democrats shifted from almost a decade of abysmally low-dominance messaging to a higher-dominance mode, their fortunes improved overnight. And it was not just about Biden’s withdrawal or Harris’ relative youth. When Biden stepped aside, she was running further behind Trump than Biden in the polls and many Democrats considered easing her aside in favor of a stronger candidate as key to the party’s fate in November. In 2020 she ran an uneven campaign at best, and her tenure as vice president has been uneventful.

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Right out of the gate in late July, Harris brought an entirely new high-dominance, patriotic message, and she further upped her dominance and patriotism game at the DNC and the debate. Even her exuberance, which many people just see as a feel-good part of her style, is something I consider to be a crucial aspect of high-dominance messaging. The bottom line is........

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