IN these days of the ubiquitous online “expert” and politicians’ platitudes, an old friend of mine frequently resorts to a familiar refrain in response. The jocular Latin version goes along the lines of “excrementum vincit cerebellum” or to put it more plainly, “bullshit baffles brains”.

I couldn’t help thinking about that phrase time and again in the early hours of yesterday morning as I sat up late to watch Kamala Harris and Donald Trump lock horns in the hotly anticipated debate that could have a major impact on who next inhabits the White House. 

It wasn’t that the content of Trump’s bullshit in any way baffled Harris, not at all. Instead, such was the depressingly familiar nonsense – immigrants eating dogs – uttered by Trump, that Harris seemed not so much lost for words as deemed them barely worth wasting a serious response on. 

But respond she had to, that, after all, was what she was there for and what both the American people, and those like me tuning in globally were eagerly anticipating. 

If bookies and the financial markets are often the best gauge of winners and losers then certainly Harris won out and Trump hit the buffers.

According to the Financial Times, traders predicting the winner of the presidential election on PredictIt, a political betting platform, are now pricing Harris at 56 cents, ahead of Trump on 47 cents, a jump in the vice-president’s favour compared to their neck and neck positions just ahead of the debate. 

Harris and her campaign team will be happy with that and the other polls and pundits that gave her the edge. There were after all quite a few faltering moments for the Democratic nominee, not last in those wobbly first 15 minutes when she looked more like a stage-struck performer than seasoned prosecutor.

Harris’s avoidance of questions and taking any responsibility for inflation or explaining how she can attack Trump for his tariffs policy when the Biden-Harris administration has left some of his tariffs in place, must have had the knees knocking among a few campaign aides watching from the sidelines. In fact, as sitting vice-president, she evaded almost every question about her administration’s record. 

It was left to the inimitable American comedian and Daily Show host, Jon Stewart (below), to articulate what I like many others no doubt felt while watching the tussle between the two presidential hopefuls. 

“I just want to say after surviving the PTSD of the last presidential debate how unbelievably refreshing it is to go back to the same old ‘Nobody’s gonna answer any fucking questions!’” quipped Stewart delightedly, noting how neither candidate actually answered the first question on the economy. 

Trump especially, spent way more time repeating the questions asked of him by the moderators and adding his own than answering any of them. This debate offered Trump perhaps his best chance to consolidate his position in the campaign, and, like his somewhat lacklustre convention speech, he missed a moment. 

It was almost at times as if he was casting around for the presence of his old adversary Joe Biden, willing him back into the presidential battle, rather than Harris, the more nimble and mischievous opponent he now had to confront.

But if Trump simply repeated the questions asked of him without answering, then Harris at times was little better.

With my Foreign Editor’s hat on I was especially struck by her rather equivocal response to what she said about the Israel-Hamas war.

As for Trump on foreign policy, it says all you need to know that he touted the support he has had from Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban (below), a perpetual burr under the European Union (EU) saddle and a political leader cut from the same authoritarian cloth. According to Trump’s reasoning, Orban is good because he’s tough and recognises that the US needs Trump “back as president.”

“I don’t like to use the word ‘afraid’, but I’m just quoting him. ‘China was afraid of him. North Korea was afraid of him’. Look at what’s going on with North Korea, by the way … ‘Russia was afraid of him’,” Trump ranted as confusingly as ever. 

All of which is patent nonsense of course, but evidence yet again that so much of what passes for Trump’s foreign policy approach is, as Harris said, determined by whoever flatters, praises or incentivises him. 

If Trump were president, the wars between Israel and Hamas and Russia’s war in Ukraine would be over in the blink of an eye he’d have us believe. Once again yet another attempt by Trump to baffle brains with a deluge of bullshit.

As for Harris, my problem yet again was her evasiveness on certain issues of foreign policy were she to become president. On Ukraine, yes, she was unequivocal, but on the Israel-Palestine conflict it was the same old, same old, American government’s unwillingness to call out Israel for what it is doing in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Yes, I know, it’s not tactically expedient for Harris to do this right now when she’s trying to win over as many voters as possible, but still, don’t hold your breath on any significant shift in US policy with regards to the Palestinian people’s right to their own state under her watch should she sit in the Oval Office post-November.

And there you see is the ultimate problem I have with what I took from Tuesdays night’s debate. That should she become president it will most likely be business as usual when it comes to US foreign policy – especially in the Middle East.

Yes, Harris might have come out on top and early polls indicate that. But there remains a lingering and troubling evasiveness about her performance that left me and I’ve no doubt many others just a tad uneasy. At times it was almost as if she was over-rehearsed, practised, artificial even. 

As for Trump, he is what he is, that ultimate purveyor of a bullshit baffle brains approach to politics and because of that will continue to invoke such an immediate and often visceral opinion of him. This debate then, or indeed any other in the remaining eight weeks or so before the election, is unlikely to change that. 

At the end of the day,  I seriously doubt that Harris managed to convert many dyed-in-the-wool MAGA supporters – who could? – even if she may have assured a few of the independent-minded American voters left that she is up to the job.

On reflection, I think Stewart got it bang on. Neither of them really answered the questions.