Even during the debate, Kamala Harris had only one problem. Every argument in her narrative does not hold water because it is built on the denial of reality, attempting to present herself as ‘the new guy’ while for three and a half years she has been the incumbent deputy of Joe Biden, a president on whose inadequacy the Democrats themselves have spoken better than anyone else by hastily removing him from electoral contention.A true original sin, which renders completely unreliable any ‘we’ll do’ or ‘I have a plan’ to which Donald Trump has had an easy time responding ‘you’re the White House, why haven’t you done it these three and a half years? Economy, immigration, foreign policy: the refrain was repeated throughout the entire ninety minutes, on every topic discussed, putting the Democratic candidate in an objectively uncomfortable position, moreover amply demonstrated by her body language.
During his opponent’s speeches Trump remained silent and impassive, while Harris’s facial expressions were characterised by continuous grimaces that betrayed a certain insecurity and in some cases even resentment, offering the millions of Americans in front of their television screens an unbalanced self-image, while Trump managed to instil more confidence. This is not to say that it was a walk in the park for Donald Trump, far from it. It is certainly no coincidence that yesterday I titled the article introducing the debate ‘Trump defies the media, Kamala herself’, closing it with a figure: on the ABC, NBC and CBS networks, coverage of Kamala Harris is positive 84% of the time, while that of Donald Trump is negative 89% of the time.A pattern that was punctually verified last night in Philadelphia, with Kamala who, as explained above, had to come to terms with her own history and the relative inconsistency between words and deeds, and with Trump who also had to deal with the ABC moderators who repeatedly intervened on his positions, taking care not to use the same yardstick with Harris on the numerous fake news stories she repeated, such as the – sensational – one about the ‘bloodbath’ (which I will dismantle here, to read in order to understand the media’s attitude towards Trump, Editor’s note).A context that at some junctures has unnerved the Republican candidate, leading him to utter a sentence about some illegal immigrants eating ‘cats and dogs’ that is likely to go viral and be ridden by the Democrats: very little, however, compared to the real bombs that Trump has been able to drop against his opponent.
Like when, speaking of Ukraine, he first stated decisively that he intended to ‘stop the war and save lives’ and then, addressing Kamala, said that ‘they sent her to negotiate peace before the war started. Three days later, Putin came in and started the war because everything they said was weak and stupid. They said the wrong things. The war should never have started.”
Also objectively memorable was the response to Harris’s good intentions on the immigration emergency, urging her to leave aside proclamations and get on with it now: “call the President of the United States, get him out of bed, wake him up at 4pm and tell him to come to the office to sign a bill.” However tried and tested for weeks, even the attempts to provoke Trump have seemed rather blunt: from his opponent’s supporters who would leave his rallies early “because they are bored”, to the events on Capito Hill being called the “worst attack on our democracy” forgetting that we are just hours away from the 23rd anniversary of 9/11.A debate that in my opinion in electoral terms will not shift anything between the respective electorates, which are by now largely crystallised, and which for the above reasons could significantly benefit a Trump who has succeeded in highlighting the failures of the Biden-Harris administration by using them as the perfect product placement for the solutions he has already demonstrated he knows how to implement: from the introduction of tariffs on China, to zero wars, to the management of the economy.
If we wanted to, we could sum up the ninety minutes that just ended with Trump’s last speech “they had three and a half years to fix the border, three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why didn’t he do that?” and Kamala Harris’s response to the first question she was asked, “do you think Americans are better off than they were four years ago?” and her, “I was raised as a middle class child…”
