The rules imposed by CNN to regulate and civilize the presidential debate on Thursday evening in Atlanta will not prevent Donald Trump from being unreasonable, since he is both a blatant liar and a very poorly informed citizen. We may in fact be surprised that he agreed to participate in a debate organized by a network that he despises. This perhaps means that he is convinced of being able, in any circumstance, to make Joe Biden look bad, whose physical and cognitive poise has become a campaign issue. Or perhaps he aspires, by extension, to make the effort to look “presidential”, for a moment and by comparison, in the hope that this will tip the scales within a baffled and confusing fringe of the electorate – just enough to allow him, leaning against the dysfunctional electoral system that is that of the Americans, to take back the presidency on November 5. If things go badly for him, he can claim, victimizing himself, that these rules and CNN’s pro-Democratic bias have handcuffed his freedom of expression.
Thursday’s debate will be decisive — or it will not be. Marking if a key moment, highlighted, leaves its mark in favor of one or the other. Expected from Mr. Biden that he will have to be alert as he was during his last Union speech in March. Quite likely, in this case, that at the end of this face-to-face the two candidates will still be neck and neck in the polls, their respective electorates having been frozen in place for months. However, four and a half months before the presidential election, a lot of water remains to flow under the bridge: fallout from the criminal conviction of Mr. Trump in the Stormy Daniels affair, the Democratic Party convention in July, and that of the Party Republican, in August, to highlight only the most obvious news.
The fact remains that in itself, this is a debate of exceptional singularity, in that it will be based on an aberration that the last three years have practically trivialized: here is a duly elected president, with 7 million of votes in advance, goes to debate with an ex-president, candidate again, who called for a coup d’état and whose political business consists of repeating that the 2020 election was stolen from him . How did we get there ? Many Americans will surely wonder, embarrassed, as they witness this duel – a duel which will ultimately reveal the distressing reality of a democratic life in urgent need of regeneration and rejuvenation.
Having suffered from Donald Trump’s ineptitude and verbal violence during the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton prayed to the American electorate on Tuesday, in a column published in The New York Times, to go beyond the theater to which presidential debates are too often reduced. “We choose a president, not the best actor,” she wrote. Mme Clinton obviously does not want to dwell in his text on the fact that, with regard to the deterioration of American democracy, the Democratic Party is far from being without historical responsibility. To understand this, you have to read John R. MacArthur, whose chronicles are published in The duty.
As a fragile bulwark against the terrifying possibility that Mr. Trump will be re-elected, Mr. Biden will necessarily insist Thursday evening on the authoritarian drift that the Republican embodies and on the sinister role that the latter played in the repeal by the Supreme Court, two years ago, from the stop Roe v. Wade which has guaranteed the right to abortion throughout the country since 1973. In absolute terms, these two arguments alone should help mobilize a decisive share of so-called independent voters and moderate Republicans against Mr. Trump. And yet no, at least not for the moment.
When it comes to abortion, Trump is seen by some as a moderate by considering it reasonable to leave it to the States to legislate, while the end of Roe v. Wade gives rise to a catastrophic deconstruction of women’s freedoms. By promising to carry out mass expulsions of migrants if he is elected, which certainly does not constitute a lasting solution to the complex issue of irregular immigration, he scores points with the electorate, while the “crisis migration” was not much less acute towards the end of his first mandate, in 2019. On the economic level, he continues to benefit from the collective exasperation against the high cost of living, even though the inflation rate is falling ( slowly) and that the national economy has rebounded significantly since the end of the pandemic… All this against a backdrop of a frightening political prospect according to which, if he is re-elected, this good-natured populist who has normalized the far right will launch without delay, out of a thirst for revenge, in a full-blown attack against the rule of law. Nothing is more disconcerting than the fact that this prospect seems to flow off the backs of a significant segment of centrist voters like water off a duck’s back.
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