Kamala Harris had a plan for her televised duel with Donald Trump on ABC News Tuesday night: to drive her rival in the November presidential election into a tizzy in order to distract from her own weaknesses. The plan was executed perfectly, and the populist leader fell for all the traps she had set for him. It will probably only marginally change the electoral balance in a highly polarized campaign, but by Wednesday morning, the American media were converging on the winner, Kamala Harris.
Even Fox News acknowledges between the lines that the highly anticipated debate went badly for its champion. Under a sober headline on its website about a “fight night,” the network interviewed Robert Kennedy Jr., the left-wing defector who rallied to Donald Trump. The latter said he was “disappointed” by the “bias” of the moderators, “who constantly checked trivial details.” As for the Republican candidate, he accused journalists David Muir and Linsey Davis of going “three to one” with the Democratic candidate.
Two-speed “fact-checking”
In fact, both interviewers contradicted Donald Trump more often. They coldly dismantled his most fanciful assertions, live on air: no, Haitian migrants do not eat the dogs of the residents of Springfield, Ohio; no, it is not legal to kill children at birth in some states.
On the other hand, regrets the “Wall Street Journal” in an editorial, there was no “fact-checking” when Kamala Harris welcomed the fact that there is not a single American soldier on active duty in a combat zone abroad. The United States is nevertheless under fire from pro-Iranian militias in the Middle East.
Similarly, journalists did not flinch when the candidate wrongly accused the Republican of supporting the radical “2025 project” concocted by a think tank, and of opposing in vitro fertilization. But Kamala Harris also had to defend herself alone when her opponent repeated that she would ban the exploitation of shale gas by hydraulic fracturing.
After the debate, Donald Trump rushed to the press room to defend his performance, as if he had not been able to explain himself in an hour and a half of face-to-face. According to a CNN poll, 63% of viewers on Tuesday night believe that Kamala Harris won the duel. “I won the debate,” Donald Trump interrupted on Fox News, therefore “not inclined” to ask for a second round. However, it is possible that he will end up accepting the opportunity offered by Fox News, because the Republicans want a rematch.
The hare Trump and the tortoise Harris
Replaying the televised duel would not be a bad option for the Democratic camp either. Kamala Harris has shown that with good preparation, she is able to overcome her weaknesses, not to freeze up, not to go into long, meaningless sentences when caught off guard. She also needs to be exposed more than Donald Trump because she is less well-known – even if it means taking risks.
On Tuesday night, we saw two political athletes who were very unequally prepared. The tortoise Harris had locked herself away for five days to revise. The hare Trump held rallies until the weekend, considering that he had “prepared his whole life”. However, the debate was not a rally but a contradictory exchange, where the candidate, who has been criminally prosecuted four times, had to face a former prosecutor experienced in accusatory techniques. This time, unlike what happened at the end of June during the duel with an out-of-touch Joe Biden, it was not the speaker who set the pace. It was a woman 19 years younger than him.
With a determined step, Kamala Harris went to shake her opponent’s hand at her lectern. One could read the tension on her face during the first exchanges, devoted to the economy and the high cost of living, a weak point of the Harris-Biden administration. “I have a plan,” she repeated, a bit academically, explaining how she would defend SMEs and the middle class. She attacked head on the “Trump trade tax”, “a 20% tax on everyday goods”, which she said would be the inflationary consequence of the new customs duties proposed by the Republican.
Meetings where people “leave before the end”
Very quickly, her barbs had the desired effect on the hot-headed Donald Trump, whose microphone was, fortunately for him, muted outside of his speeches. She accused him of having let high-tech chips be sold to the Chinese, of having let the trade deficit spiral. On reproductive rights, he found himself cornered, not wanting to say whether he would veto a federal anti-abortion law. Donald Trump did not even manage to gain the upper hand when it came to immigration, another black mark of the Biden administration, because Kamala Harris diverted attention to the size of the crowds at her opponent’s rallies, and to those spectators who “leave before the end.”
From then on, Donald Trump, grimacing, remained on the defensive, unable to ward off his rival’s carefully planned blows. He fell into the trap instead of pressing where it could have hurt Kamala Harris: the record of three and a half years in power, the silence on the president’s state of health, the vagueness of the program, the sincerity of the turnaround towards the center. It would seem that the Democrat has once again been underestimated.
