Armchair quarterbacks typically weigh in the morning after a game’s been lost. Regarding the debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president and current felon Donald Trump, the advice deluge happened beforehand.

Headlines promising the secret sauce on how Harris could win or should comport herself were plentiful. “Time for Kamala Harris to face some real scrutiny,” intoned The Telegraph. Hillary Clinton, Julian Castro and Chris Christie shared their advice, based on experience.

Based on her performance in Tuesday’s ABC-sponsored debate, Harris didn’t need anybody’s two cents. She had to cogently make a case for her presidency while baiting traps his ego couldn’t resist. But I doubt even her team could have predicted how fun it would be to watch.

Harris and Trump’s first and possibly only debate at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia was billed as the vice president’s biggest – and, again, possibly only — shot to give undecided voters a clearer sense of who she is.

The most effective and, dare I say, presidential strengths she put on display were her confidence, her comic timing, her relative sanity and her media savvy. She took what could have been a terrifying, pointless exercise and pulled out 90-plus minutes of delicious TV.

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ABC's David Muir and Linsey Davis served as moderators. Aside from the two journalists, the candidates and the production crew, the hall was empty — a sanity-preserving decision. The spectators that mattered most were watching from the (dis)comfort of their homes, where the dissimilarity between the two could not be plainer to see. Through the magic of the split screen, Harris smiled brightly, laughed or visibly held back her giggles when she wasn’t shaking her head at the extremeness of her opponent’s lies.

Trump glowered, rolled his eyes, and clenched his mug into a clownish grin whenever Harris succeeded in getting under his skin, the thrust of her debate strategy.

“In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats! They're eating — they're eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump madly spewed in a wild impersonation of Grandpa Simpson, boosting a racist lie about Haitian immigrants in the process. “This is what's happening in our country.”

Narrator’s voiceover: This is not what’s happening in our country. In reality, what we’ve been subjected to are Trump's increasingly unhinged bigoted, sexist posts on his social media platform Truth Social.

That’s one of the reasons I was dreading this debate. Past square-offs between him and President Joe Biden achieved little........

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