Former US President Donald Trump and candidate for the upcoming US elections may have restrained himself and not attacked his opponent and co-candidate Kamala Harris, however, in their first televised debate, the difficulty he fell into was evident.
Throughout the debate, for a full ninety minutes, the popular Donald Trump stared straight ahead, his teeth clenched, trying not to once again reveal his well-known temperament of inappropriately attacking his opponents. .
Kamala Harris repeatedly managed to put him on the defensive in an extremely tense atmosphere. The impact of this tough televised confrontation on the deeply divided America has already been seen in the first polls that followed the rematch, but it remains to be seen in the result of the American elections on November 5.
The Taylor Swift reaction
However, the first, immediate reaction to the debate of the two candidates for the Presidency of America came from the extremely popular Taylor Swift. The hugely popular pop star, who has a huge influence on the young men and women of America, has informed her 283 million Instagram followers that she will be voting for Kamala Harris in November.
On the other hand, Mr. Trump judged in his post on Truth Social, a social networking site that is his personal creation, that this “was my best debate (…) even more so because it was three against one!”, calling into question the impartiality of the two presenters, ABC journalists, who in some cases intervened and corrected him.
Ms. Harris, who was gathered with supporters, warned that “we still have a lot of work to do,” while her husband Doug Emhoff chimed in, stressing that while the vice president “won” the televised debate, “we haven’t won anything else yet.”
The Trump-Harris handshake
Arriving at the studio where the showdown took place, in Philadelphia -under draconian security measures-, the vice president approached the former president who had no choice but to shake the hand he extended to her.
Over the next 90 minutes, the 59-year-old vice-president continued to attack the 78-year-old former president – who had never met her before.
Trump is very bad
“Trump was very bad and Harris won by a margin” the telefight, opined political scientist Larry Sabato. But this is not mandatory as it will be reflected in the polls, according to him Julian Zelizerprofessor at Princeton.
The critical moment with race and abortion
A moment of particular importance for the debate was the one in which Kamala Harris attacked Donald Trump, saying that he lies, weaves a “web of lies” on the issue of abortion, and “insults” American women.
He also accused him of trying to “divide” Americans by stirring up issues of race relations. The issue concerns her personally: the tycoon has said that the former prosecutor “became” black for electoral reasons.
The former president, for his part, indulged in his usual doomsaying, sometimes repeating “alternative truths” that one hears in his campaign speeches.
I blame it on the democrats for trying to kill him
In addition, the former president said he has “no doubt” that the assassination attempt on him in mid-July was because of what his Democratic opponents had said: “I have no doubt that I was shot in the head because of what they said about me,” he said. former president, who suffered an ear injury when the attempt was made. “They talk about democracy”, they say that “I am a threat to democracy. But they are the threat,” Mr Trump insisted.
He also accused the vice president of “copying” President Biden’s program for the economy, that she has “no program” herself, that she plans to proceed with the “confiscation” of Americans’ weapons, that she “left behind millions” of prison and psychiatric inmates foreign clinics to enter the US.
“Identified with Biden”
“Remember, she’s (identified with) Biden. He’s trying to distance himself from Biden,” he insisted. Harris countered: “You’re running against me, not Joe Biden.”
Mrs. Harris “told us that he would do one thing, he would do another thing, and vice versa, various wonderful things. Why hasn’t he done them? He’s been there for three and a half years,” added the Republican.
Harris seemed determined to address issues that bother him, banking on his excessive sensitivity.
He said, for example, that many of those who go to his speeches leave long before he finishes them because of the “boredom” he causes them, something that must have bothered the former president deeply, or even that he was “thrown out” by voters in 2020 – in an election in which Mr. Trump refused, for the umpteenth time, to admit defeat.
He held on to Trump with clenched teeth
During the debate, Trump kept his facial features tight and his gaze fixed on the camera – never looking at his opponent.
Mrs. Harris, much more relaxed in body, often turned her head towards her opponent, in a manner which sometimes showed doubt of what she heard, and often was purely ironical.
The false claim about immigrants
During the debate, Mr. Trump repeated the false claim spread by other Republican “barons” according to which Haitian immigrants, in the city of Ohio (northeast), “eat dogs and cats.”
ABC anchors corrected him, as they have done in other instances of the Republican’s unsubstantiated claims — something their CNN colleagues had not done in June during Donald Trump’s televised debate with Joe Biden.
Harris: He’s being manipulated by terrorists
The conflicts between the two candidates extended to foreign policy issues. The vice-president described Mr. Trump as “a laughing stock” of foreign leaders, said that if he were president, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin would have arrived and sat round “in Kiev”, scolded him for being someone who can be “manipulated” by the ” dictators”.
Trump: “If he becomes president, Israel will be lost”
“He hates Israel. If she becomes president, I believe that Israel will no longer exist in two years,” said the former president, referring to Mrs. Harris. “Israel will be lost,” he insisted, after Kamala Harris pointed out that Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip “must end immediately” and that “we need a ceasefire” so that “the hostages can return”.
Leaving the stage, Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris did not shake hands.
Later Wednesday, both candidates will attend events to pay tribute to the victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Then they plan to continue their campaign in key states: North Carolina and Pennsylvania for Harris, Arizona and Nevada for Trump.
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