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Read the key takeaways from the first — and possibly only — debate between Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump here.

This live page will soon be closing. Here’s what happened during Trump and Harris’s first presidential debate:

• The proceedings began with an awkward handshake but otherwise went ahead relatively smoothly, in part thanks to the candidates’ muted microphones, which reduced interruptions.
• Harris entered the debate with more to gain, and she arguably capitalised on the moment.
• Her composed performance saw her land several blows, particularly when it came to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, abortion rights and race.
• Trump repeatedly sought to turn the conversation to the economy and immigration, repeating false stories about migrants stealing and eating people’s pets.
• The former president also said he would not sign a federal abortion ban and refused to admit he lost the 2020 vote.
• The Harris campaign swiftly called for a second debate. It also collected an official endorsement from pop star Taylor Swift, who commands a whopping 283 million followers on Instagram.

Harris has restated her position on Israel and Palestine at the debate, saying she and Biden are working tirelessly towards a ceasefire.

But at least one pro-Palestine advocacy group, the Institute for Middle Eastern Understanding Policy Project, dismissed her comment as lip service.

“Vice President Harris, you can’t talk about achieving a ceasefire — much less Palestinian freedom — while the US is providing billions of dollars in weapons to support Israel’s genocide,” the group wrote.

The group also suggested Harris applied a different standard to Ukraine than to Palestine.

“VP Harris is right to condemn Russia for taking Ukrainian territory by force — a violation of international law. Where is her condemnation of Israel taking Palestinian territory by force?”

Another political action group, representing the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, also called out Harris’s comments as hollow.

“Harris cannot turn the page and be a new generation of leadership if she continues to hold onto the policies that deny Palestinian rights and arms Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people,” they wrote.

Some commentators on Fox News, a conservative TV network, said in post-debate comments that Kamala Harris won her debate against Donald Trump.

She was “well prepared, had answers and knew where she was going,” said Fox political analyst Brit Hume. He compared Harris’s debate performance with an interview she and vice presidential nominee Tim Walz gave on CNN last month, calling her “a different person” tonight.

Hume also indicated that Harris managed to derail Trump at various points throughout the debate.

“She baited him – successfully,” Hume said. “She came out ahead in this, in my opinion. No doubt.”

Hume added that Trump had a “bad night”.

“Tonight, she won,” echoed Harold Ford Jr, another commentator.

Other network talent, however, criticised the debate’s moderators, accusing them of only fact-checking Trump and calling the debate “frustrating”.

Trump is a frequent guest on Fox News shows, but he has had an uneasy relationship with the broadcaster, faulting the broadcaster for calling states like Arizona for the Democrats during the 2020 presidential race.

The results of the 2020 election – which Trump lost – caused internal strife at Fox News, with some journalists pushing for accurate reporting and others repeating Trump’s false claims that he won.

The presidential candidates are ready to hit the campaign trail again.

As their first – and possibly last – in-person face-off comes to a close, Trump and Harris are both scheduled to attend memorial events on Wednesday for the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

Vice President Harris will be in New York City with President Biden on Tuesday, where they are scheduled to attend a ceremony at the site of the World Trade Center.

Afterwards, they will head to similar events in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia — the other two sites targeted in 2001. Trump is also expected to be in New York City at a fire station and in Shanksville.

After that, it’s back on the road for rallies and campaign stops, with Harris travelling to North Carolina and Trump to Arizona on Thursday.

The Harris campaign branded her upcoming travels through battleground states as the “New Way Forward” tour. Vice presidential nominee Tim Walz and Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff are also hitting the road as part of the tour — to Michigan, Nevada and Arizona, respectively.

The Trump campaign has referred to his ongoing campaign stops as the “Agenda 47 Policy Tour”.

Harris’s campaign has almost immediately called for a second debate against Trump.

“Under the bright lights, the American people got to see the choice they will face this fall at the ballot box: between moving forward with Kamala Harris, or going backwards with Trump,” Jen O’Malley Dillon, the head of Harris’s campaign, said in a statement.

“That’s what they saw tonight and what they should see at a second debate in October. Vice President Harris is ready for a second debate. Is Donald Trump?”

Speaking to reporters after the debate, Trump said Harris only wanted a rematch because she “lost” the first debate.

By contrast, some political analysts argued that Harris’s strong showing tonight may make her want to rethink giving Trump a chance to strike back.

In a post on Instagram, Swift said she was motivated to officially endorse Harris after AI-generated images falsely showed her and her fans endorsing Trump last month.

Trump later posted those images to his Truth Social account.

“It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth,” Swift wrote.

“I’m voting for [Harris] because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.”

The pop star signed the message, “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady” – an apparent rebuke to Republican vice presidential pick JD Vance who has made fun of “childless cat ladies” in the past.

She accompanied the post with a photo of herself and one of her cats, Benjamin Button.

John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said Harris appeared to “get under Trump’s skin” throughout the debate.

“I think that, at the end of the day, what Trump was trying to was project strength, project the idea that he had a winning economy back when he was president,” he told Al Jazeera.

“I think that [on] style points, I would give the edge to Harris because I think that it was her first time being introduced to the public. She had a kind of a tough start, but she seemed to get her stride,” he continued.

“And after that, it was just kind of a both sides kind of wailing and wailing on each other.”

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Ashley Bryant Bailey, a Democratic strategist, said Kamala “came to do the job she has been prepared to do her entire career”.

“She litigated tonight with precision and it’s exactly what we expected to do,” she said.

“I think Trump was absolutely outmatched. He took the bait flawlessly. I think she effortlessly, really, went in on all of the points.”

Before the debate was even over, Trump’s campaign sent an email declaring “victory”.

“President Trump delivered a masterful debate performance tonight, prosecuting Kamala Harris’s abysmal record of failure that has hurt Americans for the last 4 years,” the campaign said in a statement.

But Democrats were similarly ebullient about their candidate’s performance. In the aftermath of the debate, Harris’s running mate Tim Walz described Harris as “tough”.

“She’s experienced. And she’s ready,” he said. “Could not be prouder to be on this ticket with her.”

Kamala Harris is tough. She’s experienced. And she’s ready.

Could not be prouder to be on this ticket with her. pic.twitter.com/msQ1ZyKbGj

— Tim Walz (@Tim_Walz) September 11, 2024

The former president questions why Harris has not put her campaign plans into action while in power at the White House.

“She’s going to do all these wonderful things,” Trump said. “Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and a half years. They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about.”

He concluded the debate by calling Biden and Harris the worst president and vice president in the history of the country.

Harris ended the debate by framing the November 5 election as a choice between two visions: “one that is focused on the future, and the other that is focused on the past, in an attempt to take us backwards”.

She also said:

• “The American people know we all have so much more in common than what separates us.”
• She said she would create an “opportunity economy” to give “hard-working folks a break” and bring down the cost of living.
• She would keep “sustaining America’s standing in the world and ensuring that we have the respect that we so rightly deserve”.
• “I will be a president that will protect fundamental rights and freedoms, including the right of a woman to make decisions about her own body and not have her government tell her what to do.”
• She framed herself as an advocate for all Americans, regardless of party: “As a prosecutor, I never asked a victim or a witness, ‘Are you a Republican or a Democrat?’ The only thing I ever asked them is, ‘Are you okay?'”
• “That’s the kind of president we need right now: someone who cares about you and is not putting themselves first.”

Trump has, on multiple occasions, called climate change and global warming a hoax in speeches, social media posts and interviews.

The original source of Harris’s claim that he called climate change “a hoax” was a tweet Trump sent on November 6, 2012.

Trump’s tweet said, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”

More than 97 percent of the world’s climate scientists and a majority of domestic and international scientific organisations agree that human activity is causing the Earth to warm. The related long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns are known as climate change.

Trump said Harris “has a plan to defund the police”.

That’s mostly false.

The Trump campaign has pointed to statements by Harris in 2020 – not in 2024. Shortly after George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Harris was asked about the “defund the police” movement. She called for “reimagining” public safety. She didn’t explicitly call for getting rid of police departments, but she offered support for reexamining police budgets and lauded a proposal by the Los Angeles mayor to shift part of the police budget to community initiatives.

Harris did not call for dissolving police departments, she said police were necessary. She told The New York Times in June 2020, “We’re not going to get rid of the police.”

In another sidestep, Harris does not articulate a clear healthcare plan but said she would continue to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, a signature piece of legislation from former Democratic President Barack Obama.

Trump has sought to repeal the act, which provides subsidised health insurance to US citizens. He has since been less clear on how he would approach the issue.

“You have no plan,” Harris said.

The former president has slammed the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a piece of healthcare legislation passed under former President Barack Obama which runs largely on private insurance along with some subsidies and regulations.

But Trump said he would only repeal the ACA if he has a plan to make healthcare cheaper and better.

“We still do not have a plan. I have concepts of a plan. I’m not president right now,” he said.

It may be the purpose statement of the night for Harris, who has been criticised for not articulating a distinct political identity this election season.

“I am not Joe Biden, and I am certainly not Donald Trump,” Harris said.

“What I do offer is a new generation of leadership for our country, one who believes in what is possible, one who brings a sense of optimism about what we can do, instead of always disparaging the American people.”

The former president is pushing to erase any policy distinction between Harris and Biden.

“She is Biden. She’s trying to get away from Biden. ‘I don’t know the gentleman,’ she says,” Trump alleged.

He credited the Biden-Harris administration of creating “the worst inflation we’ve ever had – a horrible economy”.

Harris has largely avoided responding directly to Trump’s claim that she has emphasised different parts of her racial heritage for political gain. Harris is of Black and South Asian descent.

It is a “tragedy that we have someone who wants to be president, who has consistently – over the course of his career – attempted to use race to divide the American people,” Harris said.

She pointed to a 1973 federal lawsuit against Trump and his real estate company for alleged racial discrimination. The case, brought by the Justice Department, was later settled out of court.

She also pointed to Trump’s public pressure campaign in 1989 against the Central Park Five, a group of young men accused of a New York City rape who were later acquitted. Trump had, at the time, taken out full-page newspaper advertisements that read in part: “Bring back the death penalty.”

The former president defended the deal his administration struck with the Taliban to pull US troops out of Afghanistan.

Instead, he argued that the Biden administration allowed the Taliban to violate the agreement.

“These people did the worst withdrawal and, in my opinion, the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country,” Trump said.

Referring to Harris, Trump added: “And by the way, that’s why Russia attacked Ukraine because they saw how incompetent she and her boss are.”