Donald Trump’s campaign was in damage control mode on Wednesday amid widespread dismay among supporters over a presidential debate performance that saw Kamala Harris, his Democratic opponent, repeatedly goad him into going wildly off-message and missing apparent opportunities to tackle her on policy.
Even with Trump insisting to have won the debate “by a lot”, Republicans were virtually unanimous that Trump had come off second best in a series of exchanges that saw the vice-president deliberately bait him on his weak points while he responded with visible anger.
The Republican nominee – who took the unusual step afterwards of visiting the media spin room, a venue normally frequented only by candidates’ surrogates – was non-committal on Wednesday to the Harris campaign’s proposal for a second debate. Despite widespread opinion to the contrary, Trump suggested she needed it because she had lost. “I’d be less inclined to because we had a great night. We won the debate,” he told Fox & Friends.
Related: Trump campaign publicly claims debate win but privately express skepticism
Harris had not commented herself on her debate performance by Wednesday afternoon, accompanying Joe Biden on official appearances as the US president and vice-president attended a series of events commemorating the 23rd anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the US, traditionally a non-partisan occasion.
Some of the Fox network’s high-profile presenters took a different view from Trump, too. “Let’s make no mistake. Trump had a bad night,” the Fox News analyst Brit Hume said immediately after the debate. “We just heard so many of the old grievances that we all know aren’t winners politically.”
Many commentators said the tone of the debate was set at the beginning when Harris walked on to the stage and – after a slight hesitation – approached Trump’s lectern to introduce herself and shake his hand. It was the first handshake at a presidential debate since 2016.
The gesture enabled Harris to turn the tables on Trump – who has a track record of condescension towards women – by establishing dominance, wrote Politico.
Another defining moment of the 105-minute encounter came when Trump’s eyes flashed as Harris depicted people leaving his rallies “early out of exhaustion and boredom”. Rather than let the jibe go or respond to a follow-up question by the ABC moderator David Muir on an immigration bill, Trump went off on a tangent to compare the two candidates’ rallies. Harris smiled and stared at him, resting her chin on her hand.
That exchange – along with several others – crystallised what many Republicans described as a clear defeat for Trump. There was also grudging praise from Republicans for Harris, who won respect for being well-prepared.
“She was exquisitely well prepared, she laid traps and he chased every rabbit down every hole instead of talking about the things that he should have been talking about,” Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who helped Trump prepare for his 2016 debates with Hillary Clinton, told ABC.
“This is the difference between someone who is well prepared and someone who is unprepared. Whoever prepared Donald Trump should be fired.”
“Trump was unfocused and poorly prepared,” agreed Guy Benson, editor of the conservative website Townhall on X . “[Harris] basically accomplished exactly what she wanted to here. I suspect the polls about the debate will show that she won it.”
Congressional Republicans voiced disappointment over Trump’s inability to discipline himself and press home key policy issues. He even seemed preoccupied with the absence of Joe Biden, whose calamitous performance at the previous debate in Atlanta in June prompted his withdrawal from the race, to be replaced by Harris. “Where is he?” Trump asked. “They threw him out of the campaign like a dog.”
“I’m just sad,” one House Republican told the Hill. “She knew exactly where to cut to get under his skin. Just overall disappointing that he isn’t being more composed like the first debate. The road just got very narrow. This is not good.”
Even as pro-Trump commentators criticised Muir and his fellow moderator, Linsey Davis, for fact-checking Trump but not Harris, there was acknowledgment that the Republican nominee was the architect of his own failings.
“Trump lost the debate, and whining about the moderators doesn’t change it,” the conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on social media. “He didn’t lose because of their behaviour. He lost because of his own performance while his lips were moving, not theirs.”
Related: Harris delivered a ‘masterclass’ debate. Will it change the race?
Harris also provoked Trump by saying he was deemed “weak” by US allies, who saw him as toadying up to Vladimir Putin, “who would eat [him] for lunch”.
Insisting that he was widely respected, Trump invoked the support of Viktor Orbán, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, who has dissented from Nato’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and shares much of the former president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
“Viktor Orbán is known for destroying Hungarian democracy using techniques Trump has tried to copy,” said David Driesen, a constitutional law professor at Syracuse University, who has written on the capture of democratic institutions by autocratic leaders. “It was surreal to hear Trump cite Orbán’s praise as validation of his own leadership.”
“The headline for the next few days will be how he lost this thing,” one GOP representative told Politico. “I expect him to do something drastic, whether it’s a campaign shake-up or some other wild antic, by the end of the week to change the upcoming news cycle.”
