Harris corners Trump
Kamala Harris brought out her toughest and most aggressive side to corner and provoke Donald Trump in the televised debate between the candidates for the US presidency for the upcoming elections on 5 November.
After the first televised debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump practically cost the current US president his job due to his clear mental lapses attributable to his already advanced age, it was the turn of the current vice-president and candidate of the Democratic Party, who replaced Biden at the last minute in the middle of the election race against Trump.
Tough debate
Kamala Harris passed the tough test and was able to take Donald Trump out of his stride with an aggressive speech that put the Republican Party candidate on the defensive. In a debate without an audience and with the constant intervention of the moderators to highlight the two minutes that each speaker had to show their political discourse, Harris and Trump showed their arguments, to defend their positions and to reaffirm their vision of what the next president of the United States should be like.
‘Kamala's (Harris) performance was better than expected. They both sought to provoke each other and I don't know if I would call Trump's ‘outburst’, but clearly Harris managed to generate annoyance and quite a bit of agitation. But on the other hand, I think Kamala didn't talk a lot of substance. It was a pretty basic debate,’ Martin de Luca, a former New York prosecutor and strategic adviser, told France 24.
Donald Trump sought to lean on one of his star issues, the management of immigration, known for his protectionist stance and tougher requirements for immigrants to enter the United States. He also attacked Kamala Harris for the economic policy carried out by Joe Biden's government in recent years, with Kamala Harris herself as vice-president.
Although rather than going into certain issues in depth, both candidates sought the ‘melee’ and, surprisingly, Kamala Harris knew how to handle herself well in this area, giving a sharp and tough speech that sought to corner Trump and make him very nervous so that he would lose control a little.
In this sense, Kamala Harris emphasised the judicial problems that have beset Trump, for cases such as the detestable assault on the Capitol by ‘Trumpist’ radicals motivated by the rejection of the election results that gave victory to Joe Biden in the last US elections, the case with the porn actress Stormy Daniels, the issue of electoral interference in the state of Georgia or the case of the classified documents kept by Trump after leaving the White House.
For example, on the thorny issue of the assault on the Capitol in Washington, Kamala Harris said: ‘I was on Capitol Hill. I was the vice president-elect. I was also a senator, and on that day, the president of the United States (Trump) incited a violent mob to attack our nation's capital, to desecrate our nation's capital’. In this sense, the Democratic candidate wanted to show Donald Trump as an absolute threat to democracy.
The Democratic Party candidate also wanted to portray Donald Trump as a millionaire disconnected from reality, with an authoritarian or dictatorial profile, which has nothing to do with what the leader of the country considered to be the champion of democracy in the world should be.
The vice-president remarked on Donald Trump's character as a ‘convicted criminal’, delving into his problems with justice, highlighting his trials for alleged electoral meddling and rejecting his allegations of electoral ‘fraud’ in the 2020 elections; regarding which Donald Trump has always maintained that he did not lose the last elections to Joe Biden.
Kamala Harris went so far as to call Donald Trump ‘immoral’ and a ‘crook’ in what was a full-blown attack on the GOP nominee that put him on the ropes.
Economy and immigration
At the start of the debate, both candidates debated the economy. Kamala Harris talked about creating an ‘opportunity economy’ and a tax cut to favour the working class, while singling out Trump for wanting to cut taxes for the rich. For his part, the Republican candidate criticised the Democrats for inflation in the US.
‘I believe in the ambition, aspirations and dreams of the American people, and that's why I envision and actually have a plan to build what I call an economy of opportunity,’ said Harris, who also accused Trump of creating ‘the worst unemployment since the Great Depression’.
Donald Trump took aim at the weaknesses of the Biden administration, saying the nation's rising prices are the ‘worst in history’. The Republican candidate called the Vice President a ‘Marxist’ and accused the Democratic candidate of copying Biden's plan. He also stressed that his government had done a great job with regard to the economy, until the pandemic arrived.
As for another of the other issues to be highlighted, immigration, Trump tried to play his trump cards by criticising Kamala Harris for the large increase in migratory flows during this time of Democratic government. The Republican candidate added that Joe Biden's policies are ‘destroying the social fabric of the country’ and assured that those who enter the country irregularly are ‘criminals’ and ‘fugitives from mental institutions’, as well as taking the jobs that exist in the nation, as he said during the election campaign. Trump stuck to his hard line, accusing the Biden administration, and by extension Kamala Harris, of weakness on border security.
For her part, Kamala Harris criticised Trump for rejecting legislation that would have strengthened border security with Mexico and established certain avenues for legalising the status of refugees in the country.