Barely had the presidential debate ended Tuesday night in Philadelphia when Donald Trump’s allies quickly sought to excuse the former president’s performance by blaming the evening’s hosts, David Muir and Linsey Davis, of ABC, “who displayed deplorable behavior,” said businessman and close friend of the former president, Vivek Ramaswamy. According to him, the evening delivered an unfair debate, “three against one.”
Started with a handshake from Kamala Harris offered to her opponent with a determined step, which seemed to surprise the populist, the first televised debate between the two candidates for the presidency of the United States ultimately avoided cacophony. It will also have allowed Donald Trump to once again bring before the voters his many insults about his opponents, his dark messages on immigration, on crime and to present a romanticized assessment of his first term.
The vice-president, for her part, has succeeded on several occasions in shaking him up by recalling his new status as a criminal convicted by the courts, his attacks on democracy, his dubious friendships with dictators or by questioning the rationality of several of his recent statements, including one on wind turbines which, according to him, cause cancer.
“She accomplished the mission,” Democratic strategist Antjuan Seawright said on the other end of the line, reached by The Duty from South Carolina. “It made clear who was presidential and who was not. It was a debate between an attorney general and a defendant that highlighted the threats Donald Trump could pose to the country if he were to return to the White House.”
For more than 90 minutes at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the two candidates delivered diametrically opposed views on inflation, abortion rights, immigration, the United States’ place in the world and the weakening of democracy. Donald Trump made claims that conveyed exaggerations or erroneous facts, while Kamala Harris called for “turning the page” on the former president’s years of chaos.
“We cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts, as he has in the past, to overturn the will of the voters in free and fair elections,” she said, reminding her opponent that in 2020 81 million voters voted to remove him and denouncing his persistence, including in Tuesday night’s debate, in not acknowledging his defeat. “It leads us to think that we may have, in the candidate to my right, a temperament or a capacity to be confused with the facts. It is deeply troubling. And the American people deserve better.”
Gaffe v. normalization
In 1976, Republican Gerald Ford lost his first debate with Jimmy Carter, and probably the election that year, by making a notable gaffe about the influence of the Soviet Union in several Eastern European countries, an influence he seemed not to understand very well.
Less than 50 years later, Donald Trump should not suffer too much from his assertion that immigrants, who arrived in the country because of the policies of the Democrats, are “eating the pets” of the inhabitants of a town in Ohio. “The people who have come are eating the dogs, eating the cats… They are eating the pets of the locals. This is what is happening in our country, and it is a shame,” said the Republican, thus repeating, in prime time, a self-serving sensationalism promoted by several American conservative media outlets in recent days.
Debate moderator David Muir, however, reminded the populist that ABC’s verification of the rumour with the city’s chief executive had established that there had been no credible reports or complaints there “of domestic animals being injured or mistreated by individuals within the immigrant community.”
“There’s no doubt that Donald Trump won the debate on immigration and Kamala Harris won the debate on abortion,” Republican strategist Bryan Iverson notes in a live interview from Oregon, where he hosts a podcast on local politics. “But I don’t think the Democrat has presented a strong enough impeachment to change voters’ minds,” he adds, while acknowledging that by the end of this meeting it’s also becoming clear that “Donald Trump, too, needs to move on from his past” and present a vision of his policies that looks to the future.
“It ended up being a pretty boring game, and I think we’re going to need another one in October,” Iverson said.
This was also mentioned in the minutes following the end of the debate by Kamala Harris’ campaign team, which, in a statement, indicated Tuesday evening that “Americans were able to see the choice they will face this fall at the polls: move forward with Kamala Harris or move backward with Trump,” summarized the vice-president’s campaign manager, Jen O’Malley Dillon. “That’s what they saw tonight and what they should see at a second debate in October. Vice President Harris is ready for this second debate. Is Donald Trump?” she added.
In front of journalists, the former president gave a mixed and vague response, as is his habit, saying he was not sure he wanted to participate in another debate, after having delivered Tuesday evening, the “best debate of all time, I think.”
“It showed how weak they are, how pathetic they are, what they are doing to destroy our country, the border, foreign trade…” he added of the Democrats.
After this first debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, it will be the turn of their running mates and aspiring vice-presidents, Democrat Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance, to cross swords on March 1.er next October, in New York.