ANDREW NEIL: A senior Republican told me Trump’s performance was the ‘worst debate’ he’d ever seen. But there IS a silver lining for the GOP…

In the most crucial test of last night’s U.S. presidential debate in Philadelphia — which candidate could best connect with a broader audience beyond his base — Kamala Harris won handily. Donald Trump was too busy simply taking her well-crafted bait to do the same.

There wasn’t a rabbit hole she showed him that he wouldn’t rush down. Harris is a lukewarm candidate, but in Trump she has a formidable ally.

He had been warned in advance by his campaign team not to take up the bait. But he just couldn’t resist. Every time she provoked him, he would start ranting and raving incoherently, as if he were at one of his rallies.

Even his hardcore supporters are starting to get tired of this schtick. It went off like a bombshell in front of a huge audience on primetime TV.

Especially, it seems, with Taylor Swift, who threw her support behind Harris within minutes of the debate ending — though that was undoubtedly prearranged with Team Harris.

There wasn’t a rabbit hole Harris showed him that he didn’t quickly run down. She’s a lukewarm candidate, but in Trump she has a formidable ally.

I’m not sure celebrity endorsements are as important as politicians think. But in the case of the greatest entertainer of our time, it’s better to have than not, I guess.

Harris is clearly convinced that she emerged as the clear winner last night. Her campaign has already called for a second debate next month. It’s hard to see how Trump could refuse. But if he doesn’t learn the lessons of Philadelphia, he’s likely to get another beating.

It’s true that Harris was helped by the ABC News moderators, who were much more eager to grill Trump than she was. But a competent debater would have played a three-on-one conspiracy to their advantage. Trump just sounded cranky.

ABC didn’t wrap itself in glory last night. But a serious postmortem by the Trump camp will have to do more than just blame the network, whose biases were already known.

Harris was exonerated time and again by the moderators — and, more importantly, by Trump. She was never really held to account for her fracking flip-flops (we know she dropped her opposition to it, just because she had to win Pennsylvania). Her total failure to stem the tide of illegal immigration at the southern border was never really exposed.

She was allowed to sidestep the most important economic question for voters: Do you feel better than you did four years ago?

It’s true that Harris was helped by the ABC News anchors, who were much more intent on attacking Trump than she was.

In all of the above, the moderators clearly failed in their jobs. But so did Trump. He was too busy bragging about the size of his rallies (furious about Harris’s valid claims that people are already quickly drifting away from them). Too determined to wash his hands of responsibility for the shameful events of January 6, 2021, and recycling lies about how he offered to provide 10,000 National Guard. Too obsessed with still claiming he won in 2020, when all available evidence shows he lost.

These Trump talking points may still resonate with the core. But they only serve to remind disengaged voters watching TV why they didn’t vote for him four years ago.

Harris was shallow, inconsistent, vague, disingenuous, full of meaningless movie nonsense, and at times a stranger to the truth. But next to Trump, she came across as a woman of substance. She set the rules all the time. Trump never took the initiative, even on the economy, immigration, and crime, where voters see her as weak.

That is the true measure of how bad Trump’s performance was. One senior Republican, who had no hostility toward Trump, confided to me that it was the “worst debate performance” he had seen in a long time.

Harris repeatedly tore into her expensive policies on housing, child support and small business aid. A mainstream conservative would have rightly noted that all of this meant more government spending, while the federal deficit for this year is nearly $2 trillion. But Trump is a big spender, too. So he instead threw himself into baseless social media nonsense about illegal immigrants eating the family pets.

It sounded like he was deranged and unworthy to occupy the White House.

He was all over the place on abortion, even though it was entirely expected that Harris (and ABC) would make it one of the evening’s topics.

Trump came out with his usual litany of lies about everything from Ukraine to the military to NATO to the economy. But Harris had her own familiar lies to tell, from lies about what Trump said about Charlottesville to Project 2025 (the Trump “manifesto” that never happened) to IVF treatments (he’s not against them) to his alleged calls for bloodshed. She now poses (despite once considering mandatory confiscation) as a proud gun owner!

Not surprisingly, ABC was less enthusiastic about these claims than it was about Trump’s.

Trump clearly yearns for Joe Biden to return as his opponent. At one point, Harris had to remind him that he was running against her. Biden’s only relevance in this debate should have been to tarnish Harris with all the failures of his administration — and to emphasize how Harris vouched for Biden’s mental acuity when he was clearly in serious cognitive decline. She misled the American people.

He was warned in advance by his campaign team not to respond to the lure, but he just couldn’t resist.

But Trump got to neither. He was too busy harping on about pet-eating Haitians, harping on about how the prime minister of Hungary (a rather unsavory “strongman” that 99 percent of Americans have never heard of) thought he was great, and predicting that we were on the brink of World War III. Not quite Ronald Reagan’s “it’s morning again in America.”

The debate wasn’t the transformative event of the Biden-Trump clash in late June. But it was nonetheless highly significant. In a tight race, the momentum is once again with Harris, and after last night, Trump’s campaign could easily descend into factional fighting and bitterness.

In a rollercoaster campaign in which both parties have their periods in the sun, Harris must once again be considered the frontrunner. For now. November 5 is still a long way off and much can change, not least if there is a second debate.

I’m not happy with a Harris presidency, but it would have two advantages over a Trump presidency.

A second Trump defeat would undoubtedly mark the end of his malign tutelage over the Republican Party, allowing the party to rediscover the traditional roots and values ​​that have served it so well in the past.

And at a time when a revanchist Russia is on the rise (backed by the world’s leading autocrats) and Europe is in danger, it is clear that NATO would be safe in its hands. At the same time, it is equally clear — especially from the debate — that Trump’s idea of ​​peace in Ukraine is for the country to surrender to President Putin, which would be a disaster for NATO.

The catastrophic consequences of this for America and its allies are plain for all to see. Bar – in last night’s broadcast – to Donald Trump.