In the pre-election debate, Harris managed to throw Trump off and put him on the defensive. is reported by the world’s media, including Reuters and The New York Times (NYT). Trump has repeatedly responded to her outbursts with false statements or personal attacks, she reports. According to the AP, Harris’ performance seemed to be the opposite of outgoing President Joe Biden’s appearance in June.
The oldest president in the history of the United States is in a televised duel he led so badly that he came under unprecedented pressure from former allies and eventually withdrew from the campaign. The new candidate of the Democratic Party, Harris, has now presented herself with clear and focused answers, in which she emphasized the differences between herself and Trump, AP writes. “Harris was able to deliver a forceful and clear message most of the time. Trump appeared angry and defensive,” wrote the NYT newspaper.
“From the moment Vice President Kamala Harris took to the debate stage in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, it was clear she had one goal in mind: to get under former President Donald Trump’s skin,” The Washington Post commented on the debate.
Poll: Harris wins the debate
According to this newspaper and other media, the vice president did well on the ABC television broadcast. In a flash poll of television viewers conducted for CNN, 63 percent of respondents said that Harris was the winner of the duel. The website Politico recalled that after the debate in June, in a similar poll, two-thirds of the viewers identified Trump as the winner.
Harris in the almost two-hour clash of the ex-president she constantly teased with allusions to his loss in the last election, to his court cases, to former associates, of which became Trump’s critics, or on the attendance of his campaign rallies. “Trump, who relies on the kind of crowds he draws, was clearly fired up,” wrote Reuters.
According to the NYT, the ex-president on criticism from a rival he responded with a whirlwind of false claims, misinformation and personal attacks.
Unlike the June debate, this time the pair of moderators refuted some of Trump’s statements immediately after his answers. This happened, for example, at the moment when Trump again accused the Democrats of wanting to allow not only abortions, but also the killing of babies after birth. The President from 2017 to 2021 also made a number of other false or misleading statements, for example, when he again portrayed the result of the last presidential election as a fraud, or claimed that he had nothing to do with the invasion of the headquarters of Congress by his followers on January 6, 2021.
Harris also uttered falsehoods, saying, among other things, that Trump left the US with the worst unemployment since the interwar Great Depression after leaving office. At the beginning of 2021, however, the unemployment rate was 6.4 percent, which, according to the NYT, is far from meeting Harris’s condition.
The first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris (on the night of 9/10/2024 to 9/11/2024) | CTK / AP / Alex Brandon