By Stefano Vaccara
NEW YORK (UNITED STATES) (ITALPRESS) – If we wanted to recount Tuesday night’s debate for the U.S. presidency on ABC live from Philadelphia as a soccer match, we would write that after a first half with untouched nets, in the second half Kamala Harris ramped up against Donald Trump conceding, only at the end, to the former president a useless flag goal. The vice president showed from the first seconds of the live TV broadcast more confidence than her opponent. Stepping onto the stage, she went to find him and shaking his hand loudly she said his name (which the former president usually mispronounces). Then, after a slow start due in part to the first question about the economy in which Biden’s deputy is most vulnerable, the candidate who could become the first woman president of the most powerful country in the world unloaded deadly lunges on her opponent for more than an hour, dazing him. Harris punctured Trump’s defense by attacking him on his abortion decisions, his criminal convictions, his dangerous lies – still repeated yesterday – about voting in the 2020 election, his responsibilities for Jan. 6, 2021 – with Trump “naked” and thus elusive when asked if he had anything to recriminate -. Ridiculing Trump even on “made-up” reports about migrants who would “steal” Americans’ pets “to eat them.” Even on foreign policy, where Trump would have liked to dominate by claiming that “World War III” is avoided with him, he had to suffer Harris’s slyness instead. Such as when the vice president, after revealing that several military officers had confided in her that they considered Trump “a disgrace, a disgrace” to U.S. security, then described the then-president’s tendency to “bend” to the wills of dictators. Here Harris managed to hit back with a torpedo that could give him victory in one of the swing states: ‘Who knows what the more than 600,000 Americans of Polish descent in Pennsylvania’, she said, accusing Trump of wanting to give Putin’s Russia the green light in Ukraine and then Europe. The former president, who had not started badly in the first few minutes, keeping calm and following his own logical thread while jumping from pole to pole in the arguments, began to stagger when he took the bait thrown by the astute Harris. Referring to the audience that attends Trump’s rallies, Kamala provoked Donald’s narcissism by stating that “his rallies where he only talks about himself are so boring that more and more people leave before the end.’ He fumed at Trump’s anger at those insinuations, and throughout the rest of the debate he lost his bearings.
From that moment on, the Republican candidate continued to take the bait from his opponent’s provocations, responding to each criticism confusedly, attempting to retort with the weapon of misinformation but which was punctually picked up and cancelled by the hosts. Thus, as if he were back in kindergarten, we witness Trump suddenly exclaiming, “Now I’ll tell you a secret, even Biden hates her.” All this in an hour and a half in which Trump never turned his gaze toward Harris, while the vice president watched him making expressions with her face and clearly delivering the message to the audience at home: but how can anyone take him seriously? “It’s time to turn over a new leaf,” Harris repeated, with the prosecutor’s wrapped-up demeanor toward the defendant at the closing argument. Harris described Trump as a servant of his personal interests and of billionaires and big corporations, while she would be the champion of the middle class. Trump for his part described Harris as not only “liberal,” but even “a Marxist like her father, a Marxist professor of economics who taught her well.” Only in the end did Trump manage to link Harris to the administration of the unpopular Joe Biden, and in his closing remarks, he said that his opponent would never accomplish what she promises, “because she hasn’t done it in the last three and a half years she was in the White House.” While Trump did manage to lash out at Harris on the economy’s performance with Biden, repeatedly referring to the damage caused by inflation, the vice president retaliated by presenting her proposal to give $50,000 in tax breaks to small “start-up” companies and up to $6,000 a year per child to parents. But it was on abortion that Trump suffered the attack from Harris that went perfectly well: ‘You don’t have to abandon your faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that the government-and Donald Trump, certainly-should not tell a woman what to do with her body.” The room in Philadelphia was without an audience and with two ABC reporters conducting the questions and opening and closing the microphones, with David Muir and Linsey Davis, unlike what happened in the previous CNN-hosted debate between Trump and Biden, who intervened when one of the candidates (i.e., always the Republican candidate) told falsehoods with invented data so obvious that upon rebuttal, he didn’t have the courage to insist. ‘There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after birth,’ journalist Davis stymied called back to Trump at one point after the latter had gone on to claim that Democrats in certain states allowed the ‘execution’ of babies.
But the big blow of the evening for the Harris-Walz campaign came when the debate against Trump had already been over for a few minutes and the American television networks and newspaper sites were broadcasting the “breaking news”: pop star Taylor Swift had just announced in a social media post her endorsement for the Democratic ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. Addressing her nearly 300 million followers on Instagram, Swift signed her post ‘childless cat lady,’ in reference to derogatory comments about childless women made by JD Vance, the Ohio senator chosen by Trump on the Republican ticket. In the post he wrote why he supported Harris-Walz, putting the emphasis in a woman’s right to freedom of choice over her own body. We conclude by cautioning that Harris’s convincing performance in the debate may not serve to take votes away from that 50 percent of Republican and MAGA voters and who so far in polls have consistently indicated that they will vote for Trump on Nov. 5 in the seven key states to win the election (in addition to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Arizona). Instead, the debate could benefit Harris if he has convinced-we will have confirmation in the post-debate polls-a majority of voters still undecided in the 7 “swing” states, which are now very few but that in the race between “head-to-head” candidates, their vote will be decisive. Will Taylor Swift’s endorsement make a difference for Harris? The appeal of America’s and the world’s most popular singer could have certain predictable effects on the tens and tens of thousands of very young people who had yet to take an interest in politics. In that case we will see “swifties” running to the polling station for the first time to vote for Kamala. At the end of the Philadelphia debate (meanwhile, Harris’s campaign immediately challenges Trump’s to organize another one in October) the question that no one asked each of the candidates yesterday remains hanging like a sword of Damocles: but if Trump (considered by Harris to be a tyrant dangerous to democracy) wins, what would the vice president say to her electorate? Can one accept defeat by leaving U.S. democracy at the mercy of the future dictator? But if it was Harris (just called by Trump the Marxist ready to destroy America) who won instead, what could the former president say to his electorate? All the MAGAs in the grip of the White House?
– Photo Ipa Agency –
