Donald Trump may have been a transformative force within the GOP, but he followed in the footsteps of many Republicans before him by saying his Democratic opponent wants to take away guns.

“She has a plan to confiscate everybody’s guns,” Trump claimed at one point in the debate.

A few minutes later, Harris revealed that she is a gun owner, something she doesn’t often talk about.

“This stuff about taking away everybody’s guns — Tim Walz and I are both gun owners. We’re not taking away anybody’s guns. So stop lying about this stuff all the time,” the vice president said.

As the debate enters its final phase, both candidates have remained true to form.

Donald Trump has rehashed his tried-and-true arguments, including a barrage of misinformation about immigration and immigrants, abortion and election security.

But Kamala Harris seems to have thrown him off at several points, including when she mocked his tendency to refer to fictional characters such as Hannibal Lecteror to go over windmills on difficult to follow side paths.

Although the candidates stood on silent while the other spoke, Harris also made good use of her side of the screen, using various facial expressions to show skepticism, concern and rejection.

Days after Harris launched her campaign, Trump claimed something shocking even by his standards: that the vice president, who is of South Asian and black Jamaican descent, is not actually African-American.

“Why do you think it is appropriate to speak out about your opponent’s racial identity?” moderator David Muir requested.

“I don’t, and I don’t care. I don’t care what she is. I don’t care. If you make a big deal out of something, I don’t care, whatever she wants to be is fine with me,” Trump responded.

Muir then asked Harris for her thoughts. She replied:

Frankly, I think it’s a tragedy that we have someone running for president who has consistently tried to use race to divide the American people over the course of his career. You know, I believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what divides us, and we don’t want this kind of approach that constantly tries to divide us, and particularly on the basis of race.

She made a point of bringing up Trump’s involvement in pushing for the prosecution of the Central Park Five. Here’s more on that:

The debate resumed after a brief break and the first question, to Trump, was about Ukraine.

“You said you would solve this war within 24 hours. You said that just before the break tonight. How exactly would you do that? And I want to ask you a very simple question tonight: Do you want Ukraine to win this war?” moderator David Muir requested.

The former president’s answer wasn’t exactly yes:

I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are useless. People who are being killed by the millions. It’s the millions. It’s so much worse than the numbers that you get, which are fake.

Muir pressed: “To clarify the question: Do you believe it is in the best interests of the United States for Ukraine to win this war?”

“I think it is in the interest of the United States to end this war and make a deal because we have to prevent all of these human lives from being destroyed,” Trump said.

Donald Trump claimed that crime in the US has skyrocketed – and he’s wrong.

Crime has actually gone down. FBI data showed violent crime fell during the Trump administration, spiked in 2020 during the pandemic, and then continued to fall.

Preliminary figures from the FBI show violent crime fell 6% in 2023 and 15% in the first quarter of 2024.

Violent crime declined for most of Trump’s presidency, according to FBI data that uses information from law enforcement agencies. But it spiked in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been falling in the U.S. since 2020 and is approaching pre-pandemic levels in 2022. Preliminary FBI data for 2023 shows violent crime fell another 6% overall that year.

While the data is preliminary, it includes figures from 80% of the country’s law enforcement agencies.

The debate has now shifted to the realm of foreign policy and the first question for Harris was how she would convince Israel and Hamas to agree to a ceasefire.

The vice president did not fully answer the question, but promised to defend Israel. At the same time, he acknowledged the toll that the Israeli invasion of Gaza is taking on civilians:

Now Israel has the right to defend itself … and how it does that matters. Because it’s true, far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed, children, mothers. What we know is that this war has to end … And the way it’s going to end is we need a ceasefire deal, and we need the hostages free, and so we’re going to continue to work day and night to achieve that. Working day and night, also realizing that we have to chart a course for a two-state solution, and in that solution there has to be security for the Israeli people and Israel, and equally for the Palestinians.

She added: “I will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, especially with regard to Iran and any threat that Iran and its allies pose to Israel.”

Donald Trump continued to insist he won the 2020 election despite the moderator’s statements David Muir He pointed out that judges across the country had rejected his claims of fraud.

That gave Kamala Harris an opportunity to attack him in terms the former presenter of The Apprentice would well understand:

Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, so let’s be clear about that. And he’s clearly having a very hard time processing that. But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who, as he has in the past, tries to thwart the will of the voters in a free and fair election.

And I’m going to tell you, I’ve traveled the world as vice president of the United States, and world leaders laugh at Donald Trump. I’ve talked to military leaders, some of whom work with you, and they say, you’re a disgrace. And when you talk like that in a presidential debate and deny … you lost because you did lose that election, it leads to the belief that maybe we don’t have, in the candidate to my right, the temperament or the ability to not get confused about facts. That’s deeply troubling, and the American people deserve better.