Trump-Biden debate: two old fighters looking for a coup de grace

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Little more than a month to go and, finally, it begins to look like an electoral campaign.

Finally, we are on our way to Cleveland, Ohio. And in addition to the usual donuts and warm coffee in the car, we now have hand sanitizer, sterilizing wipes, and face masks. Welcome to the 2020 elections.

And finally, we are going to have some of the familiar furniture for all the American elections of the last 60 years: the first television debate.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden hand in hand. Unarmed combat. Two boxers with a combined age of 151, tying their gloves, each looking for a knockout, though they probably won’t be able to float like a butterfly or sting like a bee.

Television debates rarely change the course of an American election; more often they act as catalysts for trends that already exist. But only occasionally do they cause discomfort.

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In the first televised debate in 1960, John F Kennedy was the underdog against the more experienced and cunning Richard Nixon. JFK, also had to overcome many anti-Catholic prejudices. But on television, Kennedy looked smooth and unflappable; Nixon sweaty and irascible. He turned the tide in favor of JFK, and he won the tightest of the tight elections.

So what should we expect tomorrow night in Cleveland? A game changer or a confirmation of what we already know?

Joe Biden’s task has arguably been made a bit easier because the Trump campaign set the bar so low for him. They have said that the former vice president is not entirely, he is a bit senile, he can no longer form sentences: the lights are on, but no one is home.

It’s certainly true that Biden sometimes sounds very off-beat and a bit incoherent. He also had a stutter as a child that affects the way he speaks. But Donald Trump’s sentences can also get lost in puzzling subclauses and strangled syntax. The Trump campaign’s claim that Biden should undergo a blood test to make sure he’s not taking performance-enhancing drugs – you won’t be surprised to learn – has received little attention from Team Joe.

There will be an element of the debate that the French would call “a dialogue of sourds”: a conversation of the deaf. In other words, they won’t listen to each other.

So Donald Trump will want to focus on his economic achievements before the pandemic happened, he will want to attack the Biden family, and in particular their son, Hunter, and how he ended up on the board of a Ukrainian energy company when Joe Biden was vice. . -President (we know from previous debate performances that Donald Trump will go with all guns burning).

Biden will want to focus on the president’s handling of the pandemic and, no doubt, the gap between what Donald Trump said to journalist Bob Woodward and what he said to the American people.

Or to give another example, what about the unrest that has gripped America since the assassinations of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor? If the past form is something to go through, the president will focus on law and order, suburbs at risk, left-wing mobs on fire and looting. Biden will speak about racial injustice, the need for healing. Each will have its own reality. Each will be in a parallel universe.

The job of forcing the two candidates to address each other’s talking points will fall to the moderator of the debate, Chris Wallace of Fox News.

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It’s formidable: sharp, knowledgeable, and will cut through the candidates’ previously rehearsed sound bites. That should keep them on their toes.

A list of topics has been released. But as of the last 24 hours, there is a new topic, and perhaps it could become a central topic, and it is the taxes of Donald Trump, who only paid $ 750 in income taxes in his first year in office in the White House. that you have personal debts of more than $ 400 million (who do you owe the money to?); that $ 70,000 was written off to pay for the hair salon before the TV appearances. That is an expensive haircut.

Hillary Clinton tried to corner Trump on this issue four years ago, berating him for paying little or no federal tax, but “that makes me smart,” the billionaire mogul responded. Her followers applauded her. But then he was the outsider businessman; You are now the president and still pay only $ 750 in a year? That might resonate a bit more this time.

This may seem counterintuitive, but although Biden has been in politics for decades, to some extent he is the unknown in this debate. Earlier this year, in the pre-Covid primaries, he was a mediocre candidate, and that’s being charitable.

After the lockdown, he moved into his basement in Wilmington and hasn’t been out much since. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is omnipresent with daily rallies, speeches, press conferences – who can name the last 24-hour period that Donald Trump was not in front of the camera?

But that, in a sense, is the choice of the American people. Donald Trump, the aggressive and loud fighter; or Joe Biden, the calmest, calmest and most kind old man.