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Republican US President Donald Trump and former Democratic Vice President Joe Biden appeared together on stage for the first time Tuesday for the first televised debate of the US presidential election. It wasn’t exactly a debate. Shouts, interruptions, and often incoherent crossover conversations filled the air as Trump purposefully and repeatedly interrupted and blurted out his rival and moderator alike in a 90-minute melee that showed the president’s sense of urgency to change one. race in which polls show him behind.
Biden struggled to make his points about Trump’s stream of interjections, turning directly to the camera for refuge from a scrum that hardly represented a contest of ideas. But Biden didn’t stumble, contradicting months of questions from the Trump campaign about his state of mind, and Trump appeared to do little to attract voters who were not yet part of his base.
The career impact of the messy issue, given that 90 percent of voters say it’s already decided, is an open question. Here are six takeaways from the first debate.
Trump trampled everything
From the opening bell, Trump came out as a bully, speaking about Biden in what appeared to be almost a rumble by design – he razed Biden and moderator Chris Wallace all night. But his objective, other than to have a tough competition, was less clear. Trump seemed primarily focused on undermining and misleading Biden, rather than presenting an agenda or vision for a second term in the White House.
“I’ve seen better organized food fights at summer camp,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist. “But Trump needed a clear ‘W’, and he didn’t get it.” Biden’s own performance was mostly adequate. He swallowed some of his own lines and Trump spoke on others. Before the debate, Wallace had said that, if successful, his job would be to be “as invisible as possible.” Sometimes he managed to back away, although other times he got caught up in the screaming party. He rarely exerted control over chaos. “If you want to change seats?” he offered himself bravely at one point to Trump.
The performance kept the focus squarely on Trump, often where he seems to like it, but also where Biden’s campaign wants all the attention in the 2020 election the Democrat has launched as a referendum on the current president.
Biden, at his strongest, turned towards the camera and walked away from Trump
Biden’s visceral dislike of Trump practically burst onto the screen. He told Trump to shut up. He called him a clown and a liar. He labeled him a racist. “You are the worst president the United States has ever had,” he said at one point. “Keep barking, man,” he told another.
But for the most part, Biden managed to avoid the friend Trump was throwing into the water of the debate. Instead, he kept turning, physically, to face the cameras and address the American people instead of his chatty rival. “This is not about my family or his family,” Biden said at one point, after Trump tried to provoke him with an attack on his son Hunter. “It’s about your family. The American people. He doesn’t want to talk about what you need. “The former vice president was stronger and more comfortable with the issues he has overwhelmingly focused on in the past six months: the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting economic recession.” How is he doing? ? “Biden asked the television audience about the economy, choosing Trump as the candidate of the rich, taking advantage of the recent report from The New York Times that Trump had paid only $ 750 in federal income taxes in both 2016 and 2017.
Addressing the cameras gave Biden refuge from the constant stream of words coming from across the stage, and helped him land some of his most effective and empathetic lines, an area his advisers see as crucial to his appeal. When Trump bragged about his large rallies being held against the guidance of many public health officials, Biden said, “He’s not worried about you.”
Trump still wants to wear the outsider mantle
Trump is the president. He gave his speech at the convention on the White House grounds. But he found some of his greatest successes four years ago when he took on Hillary Clinton as a failed Washington insider. And he’s not willing to give up on that angle in 2020.
In the 2016 debates, Trump criticized Clinton for his failure to fundamentally change the country. “She has been doing this for 30 years,” he said then. She repeated the same line almost word for word against Biden. “Why haven’t you done it for the last 25 years?” Trump challenged him for reforming the tax code. “In 47 months,” said Trump in one of his best, though clearly well-crafted lines, “I’ve done more than you’ve done in 47 years, Joe.” As it was for Clinton, it was at times a difficult attack for Biden to respond to. But unlike her, he had Trump’s track record for attacking. “He’s going to be the first president of the United States,” Biden responded at one point, “to leave office with fewer jobs in his administration when he becomes president.”
Trump would not condemn white supremacy or urge his supporters to remain calm
One of the main reasons Biden has said he is running for president at age 77 is because of the white nationalists who gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and Trump’s unwillingness to condemn them. The president refused to condemn the white supremacists again on Tuesday, despite being asked directly by Wallace if he would. “I’m willing to do that,” Trump began, before saying instead that “almost everything I see is from the left wing. Not by the right. “Finally, after Biden suggested that he condemn the Proud Boys, a far-right organization widely condemned as a hate group, Trump declared,” Proud Boys: back off and follow up. “It was a moment that it would probably last longer than the night. California Democrat Ro Khanna said: “The problem is not that Trump has refused to condemn white supremacy. It is much worse. It is that he acknowledged that he was their leader by telling them to ‘wait.'” More Later, Trump also refused to say he would abide by the election results and refused to tell his supporters to stay calm and avoid civil unrest. “If I see tens of thousands of ballots, I cannot accept that,” Trump said. , urging his supporters to go to the polls and “watch very carefully.” Biden said he would abide by the results and called for calm.
Trump did little to address the gender gap
Biden has been betting on a consistent career lead in large part because of a historic gender gap: Women support him far more than Trump, and by a much larger margin than Trump’s lead among men. While Trump at times tried to explicitly tailor his points to suburban women, who have been at the center of his demographic erosion, it seemed unlikely that his intimidation would win them back.
Trump has long viewed politics in terms of strength and weakness, winning and losing, but his disruptions and self-aggrandizement did not seem adequate to expand his political coalition. “Unless his strategy was to alienate more women to see if that helps him get more men, no,” said Sarah Isgur, who was a spokesperson for Jeff Sessions when he served as attorney general in the Trump administration and is now a writer. from The Dispatch, a conservative news site.
Or as Anne Caprara, a Democratic strategist and chief of staff to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, put it, “I don’t know any woman who is watching that and who is not disgusted by everything Trump did.” Trump’s struggles in the suburbs are, in part, the result of his declining support among college-educated voters. Her mockery of Biden’s decision to regularly wear a mask, which health officials have recommended, underscored her rejection of science when it suits her political purposes.
“I don’t wear a mask like him,” Trump said. “Every time you see him, he has a mask. He could be talking 200 feet away and he’s showing up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen. “
Biden rejected the left label
Beyond his attacks on Biden’s mental aptitude, which redounded to Biden’s benefit by lowering expectations of his performance, one of Trump’s most consistent lines of attack has been that Biden is actually a leftist or even a socialist in disguise. of centrist.
Trump, whose narrow victory in 2016 was aided by disgruntled liberal supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders who stayed home or voted for a third party, has worked hard to foster ideological divisions among Democrats. Biden repeatedly seized opportunities Tuesday to distance himself from his party’s left wing, without reporting them. And it left little doubt who was in charge. “The party is me, right now,” Biden said. “I am the Democratic Party.” He said his eventual stance to add Supreme Court seats, in which he has avoided taking a position, would become the party line, and he rejected the Green New Deal without disparaging expansive environmentalism. “I support the Biden plan,” he said. Biden’s delivery wasn’t always forceful. He occasionally lost his cool and succumbed to Trump’s barrage of taunts. But for the most part he was unscathed, and for most Democrats, anything but a loss was welcomed as a clear victory. – New York Times
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