In a presidential debate, you should look presidential. Instead, Donald Trump was spreading lies. Among his outlandish claims was the one that immigrants were eating pets. His running mate JD Vance had made that claim before him but backtracked after fact-checkers had called him out. In the debate in Philadelphia, a city in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania, Donald Trump did not understand that he was not in a television reality show were anything goes to boost the rating.
Luckily, the ABC team around the moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir offered useful real-time fact-checking. In addition to debunking the lies that immigrants were eating cats and dogs, regarding abortion, Linsey Davis pointed for instance out that Trump lied when he said that, in some states, Democrats would kill newborn babies. She said: “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
Donald Trump falsely claimed that the crime rate went up under the Biden-Harris administration. David Muir said: “As you know, the F.B.I. says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.” The former president did not back down and made another outlandish claim: “They didn’t include the cities with the worst crime! It was a fraud!” David Muir did not debunk this. He just moved on with the debate.
Nobody expected Donald Trump to offer accurate facts and figures in the first and maybe only 2024 presidential debate. On the contrary, Vice President Kamala Harris had everything to loose. But she did not crack under pressure. Only one candidate looked presidential — and it was not the notorious liar, mysogynist, xenophobe and insurrectionist Donald Trump who, after the 2020 election, wanted to overturn the result of a free and fair election.
In the 2024 debate in Philadelphia, Donald Trump was citing Hungary’s Viktor Orban as a witness for the validity of his foreign and security policy. Orban, the illiberal, notorius Putin cheerleader! Under Trump’s leadership, the Republican party has given up all its core values and become a freakshow. The debate showed once again that Donald Trump is unfit to lead the United States.
Donald Trump rightly attacked President Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, but Kamala Harris was intelligent enough to immediately counter-attack the self-declared master-dealmaker stating that Donald Trump had “negotiated one of the weakest deals you can imagine”, reminding viewers that the former president had invited the Taliban leaders to Camp David, negociating the U.S. retreat. Trump claimed that, subsequently, the Biden administration had not followed through on his plan. In reality, both Trump and Biden played a disastrous role in the Afghanistan retreat, handing over a (totally corrupt) democracy to the Taliban, notably abandoning the women and girls. Neither the Democrat nor the Republican candidate had much to gain in a debate over the Afghanistan disaster. But Kamala Harris came out as the winner thanks to her counter-attack. She obviously was well prepared.
David Muir asked Donald Trump whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war. The former president did not answer the question. He just said: “I want the war to stop.” He claimed that people were killed “by the millions”; a fantasy number. Trump said, if elected, (as president-elect) he would negotiate a deal even before officially becoming president. Trump warned of Russia’s nuclear weapons and of “playing with World War three.” Trump was repeating Putin’s playbook.
On Ukraine, Kamala Harris had a strong attack line on Donald Trump: “Why don’t you tell the 800,000 Polish Americans right here in Pennsylvania how quickly you would give up for the sake of favour and what you think is a friendship with what is known to be a dictator who would eat you for lunch.”
Will this presidential debate change the election? Time will tell. Debates can have an impact, as the previous one showed. It ended Joe Biden’s presidential run. The 2024 election will be decided in a few swing states. What do the voters there think of the performance of the two candidates?
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Article added on September 11, 2024 at 15:21 German time. Info about Ukraine added at 15:53.
