Listen up, Kamala Harris — let Donald Trump beat Trump

Jackie Calmes, Tribune News Service

Whatever else Kamala Harris is doing to prep for her debate with Donald Trump on Tuesday, she's already shown that she knows how to handle his provocations: Swat them away like the small, familiar gnats they mostly are. "Same old, tired playbook. Next question, please," was all Harris had to say when CNN's Dana Bash asked her on Aug. 29 about Trump's asininity that Harris had chosen to "turn Black," and it was all his diss deserved. Trump's whole schtick, including the race-baiting, has gotten tiresome, even for some voters who twice supported him. And that's how Harris should react: She's tired of his tripe; aren't we? All the better for her, the incumbent vice president, to pull off the trick of seeming like a fresh change agent next to America's crazy uncle, its barstool bigot.

One thing's for certain: The tableau of the two nominees onstage will be a far cry from the fogeys face-off between Trump and President Joe Biden in June. Trump was terrible in that encounter but Biden was worse, addled and looking older than his 81 years. Trump didn't beat Biden, for all his shameless hawking of remnants of the "knockout suit" he wore that night. Biden beat Biden. Now Harris needs to bring her prosecutorial best to Philadelphia, let the few undecided voters get more familiar with her, show some policy chops and not take his bait. Let Trump beat Trump.

Merely ignoring his performative bullying has limits, however. Harris, we can hope, will score points with a well-executed clapback or three, putting Trump on his heels or provoking him into an unhinged tirade, or both. Among the great what-ifs of past presidential debates was Hillary Clinton's failure to challenge Trump as he stalked her during their town hall-style showdown in 2016. As Clinton later wrote in a memoir, "No matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. … My skin crawled. It was one of those moments where you wish you could hit pause and ask everyone watching, 'Well, what would you do?' Do you stay calm, keep smiling and carry on as if he weren't repeatedly invading your space? Or do you turn, look him in the eye and say loudly and clearly, 'Back up, you creep.'"

I can't forget watching that scene, wishing like so many women for the latter response — for Clinton to spin on her heels and verbally put the creep in his place. For the second time in three presidential bids, Trump, the misogynist in chief, confronts a woman as his rival, and now a woman of color to boot. Any other male candidate would have to take care not to be offensive or patronizing. But not Trump. In-your-face affronts are his MO, and his voters love it. That and aggrievement. He's whined for weeks that he's not facing Biden again, muttering nonsense about how Democrats staged a coup. Now he confronts this smart, vibrant woman he's never even met. I smell fear.

When Bash expressed surprise in the CNN interview that the two had never met, Harris merely nodded. That was a missed opportunity. In the debate, she should take any such opening — or create one — to point out that she and Trump have never crossed paths for good reason: Trump is the first president since the 19th century to skip his successor's swearing-in. The sore loser took his marbles to Mar-a-Lago rather than witness the Biden-Harris inauguration at the Capitol, two weeks after his supporters' failed insurrection there.

In the weeks after Biden dropped out of the race, Trump fulminated and threatened to skip debating the president's replacement. Harris taunted him at her raucous rallies, with that laugh that so gets under his thin skin: "As the saying goes, if you got something to say, say it to my face." A little taunting is good. On Tuesday, she could school Trump on how to pronounce her name. If he trots out his new nickname for her, "Comrade Kamala," she could come back with a bemused put-down of the dated Cold Warrior rhetoric, and note the irony of Vladimir Putin's pal calling her "comrade."

Trump will surely repeat his stump-speech attacks on Harris for flip-flopping on long-past liberal positions, such as her 2019 opposition to fracking, which is important in battleground Pennsylvania. After a quick counter — say, about how her current stances represent appropriate compromise now that she's been in the government for nearly four years — how about slamming Trump for his still pinballing positions on abortion?

The policy-phobic Trump is sure to serve up unresponsive word salads to questions on substantive issues, like his two-minute gibberish at the New York Economic Club Thursday to a query about how to make child care affordable. It's worth watching the whole thing to see him inanely conflate the nation's tariff revenues (using false claims) with families' child care costs. ("We're going to be taking in trillions of dollars and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it's relatively speaking not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we'll be taking in.") In short, he has no clue.

Trump's falsehoods about his record are so familiar that Harris should be well-prepared with concise fact-checks , as Biden wasn't, especially on issues such as the economy and immigration, where he has an edge. Puncture his pompousness. Get out the fly swatter for the gnats. Cue the laugh. But most of all, show the persuadable voters what a serious presidential candidate looks and sounds like.