The axiom is true in the United States as well as elsewhere. During a presidential election, voters expect a programme from the candidates, but first they decide on a personality and a character. Voting is a question of trust. As she prepares to experience the ordeal of a televised debate against Donald Trump on Tuesday 10 September on the ABC channel, Kamala Harris will no longer be able to benefit from the dull comfort of a lightning-fast and euphoric campaign.
The vice president, who has avoided any missteps since Joe Biden’s withdrawal seven weeks ago, claims to embody change without implying any rupture or difference with the American president. On Tuesday evening, she will experience a contradiction that will undoubtedly be aggressive, perhaps controlled. Faced with the attacks of the billionaire, intent on returning her to the balance of the outgoing administration, Kamala Harris had to show self-control, in the face of the files.
Quite a track record for someone who has never excelled at the task. Kamala Harris spent several days in a hotel in Pittsburgh to prepare for the debate with her advisers. According to the American press, a fake stage was set up there to review the arguments and possible weapons transfers. The show will take place a few hundred kilometres away, in Philadelphia, in the same Pennsylvania so coveted by both sides, with its nineteen electors at stake.
Immersed in his third presidential campaign, Donald Trump is no stranger to televised debates. He has a sense of brilliance, of destabilizing malice. At the end of June, he managed to stay focused in the face of Joe Biden’s shipwreck. But Donald Trump is also a radicalized candidate, full of impudence, who has saturated the political air since 2015, affected by the same vulnerability as his former opponent: his advanced age, 78 years old. Today he is increasing the excesses. After describing him as ” crazy “Donald Trump kept the expression “Comrade Kamala” since mid-August, to caricature his rival as a dangerous communist.
Donald Trump’s threats
Kamala Harris managed to irritate the billionaire, choosing to degrade him, to send him back in time like a moth-eaten garment, rather than presenting him as an existential threat to the United States, as per Biden’s strategy. However, this threat exists. In a message on his Truth Social network on September 8, Donald Trump warned that in the event of victory, “people who cheated” in the 2020 elections it will be “sued in court”with possible “long prison sentences”. A promise of political vendetta, treated by the American media with a kind of weariness and insouciance.
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