Experts advise Trump to discuss politics with Harris without getting into personal matters
Photo: REUTERS.
On September 11, 2024, the first televised debate between US presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will take place. The show will start at 4 a.m. Moscow time and will take place in Philadelphia (9 p.m. there) on the ABC television network. The fight is expected to be watched live by tens of millions of viewers in the United States.
The event is given great importance: the two “duelists” managed to reach an agreement on the time and place with difficulty, and the elections will take place on November 5, so the current debate may be the first and last.
The rules of the fight are very strict. There will be no audience in the TV studio, only employees of the channel and candidates. The microphone will only be activated for the candidate speaking. This means that the opponent will not be able to interrupt him or make sarcastic comments. He is given two minutes to speak and the same amount to respond. The entire TV show will last for one and a half hours, and viewers will be asked twice not to “change” during commercial breaks.
The question of who benefits from an opponent’s “silent microphone” caused a lot of controversy, but journalists recorded the following fact: It was Harris’s team that opposed the ban on interrupting a speaker’s speech. Why did she do this? The Wall Street Journal speculated that Harris hoped to take advantage of Trump’s fiery temper. In a debate with Joe Biden before the 2020 election, then-President Trump frequently interrupted the Democratic candidate, angering many viewers. But in the disastrous televised debate in favor of Biden on June 27 this year, Trump’s “silent microphone” allowed Biden to “get confused in his testimony.” Biden, who did not always remember the right words (he, for example, promised to “end” the Medicare health insurance system, although he clearly meant something else), looked like a senile old man. And here the muted microphone helped Trump rather than hindered him: Being only four years behind his opponent in age, Trump remained quiet, allowing “Sleepy” Joe to send his ratings into the background.
Kamala has no obvious health problems, and her Indian-African heritage makes Trump’s personal attacks dangerous: he could be branded a racist and a misogynist. But during the four years of his vice presidency, Kamala Harris said very little “on the case” and achieved even fewer real results. Observers therefore advise Trump to put aside Kamala’s origins and personal qualities and focus on her incompetence and lack of political will.
Here, one can expect from Trump a standard set of complaints that conservative representatives of the Republican Party present to the Biden administration: high inflation, an influx of illegal immigrants at the southern border, an increase in drug addiction in the country and the country being dragged into many wars outside the borders of the United States.
In turn, it is beneficial for Kamala Harris to contrast herself with Trump, to emphasize the difference between her and him as individuals. If Trump wins, he will celebrate his 80th birthday as president. Meanwhile, Harris will only turn 60 before the election.
Trump has yet to address the numerous criminal cases filed against him; he is accused of supporting “hooligan elements” who tried to break into Congress on January 6, 2021; he is rude to women and paid a porn actress who had an affair with him to keep quiet, etc. I mean, there is enough dirt on Donald. But can Harris captivate voters with all these stories from yesteryear?
Observers note that the power in the United States has become so closed to criticism that Harris had her last serious debate in 2020, with then-Vice President Michael Pence. Since then, no one has argued with uncontrollable laughter. She rarely allows reporters to wonder about anything, and if they do ask questions, they are somehow gentle, almost “girlish,” as The American Conservative wryly puts it. She advises Trump to ask Harris some really tough questions. For example, what was she doing as vice president when Biden initiated the disastrous withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan three years ago? Why did we not hear any comments from her about the current president’s health problems, but then she so readily agreed to replace Biden, who suffered from memory lapses, at a fairly late stage in the pre-election race? And most importantly: why did a gallon of gasoline cost $2.17 cents under Trump and now costs $3.30 cents?
