With over a month ago it feels like the buildup to November elections has started in United States. The first Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden has just been folded. The unarmed contestants with a combined age of 151 have just finished their first dual – a television debate that is been happening for the past 60 years. Not just raising fingers at each other, the two pugilists entered the ring with laced up gloves and exchanged heavy punching in a bid to knockout one of them.
TV debates don’t really have a significant impact on US elections and don’t necessary change its course but can occasionally result in upsets acting as a catalyst for the existing trends.
The first presidential debate can easily be summed up as the worst and most acrimonious 90 minutes in the history of Presidential debates in the country since the first one won by John F Kennedy in 1960. Biden and Trump mano a mano was not a pleasant sight to watch and left the audience with its starkest election choice in over decades. The national will have to chose if they want four more years of division, racial injustices, civil unrest, chaos and international isolation or may pick the other man septuagenarian that does not believe in White supremacy, sees a dream for African-Americans and is a proponent of liberal Democracy.
The Republican President – clearing any doubt about his authoritarian reflexes and imposing will – has already said he many not accept the outcome of the Elections if he loses the vote casted through postal ballots. Trump charged his Democratic challenger and wanted to blow away his adversary firing on all cylinders. Truly off-the-rails 90-min ride came up with a total disregard for debate rules as the Republican sought to bully his rival.
Trump refused to condemn White supremacists and didn’t name-checked the neo-fascist group Proud Boys telling them to “stand back and stand by to the chock of the audience present in and outside the venue. Through its hardly surprising with what happened in the last four years of the Republican’s presidency. Trump was trailing before the debate and would not achieve much from it except the trolling.
“The commander in chief refused to condemn white supremacy on the global stage in front of my children, in front of everybody’s families and he was given the opportunity multiple times to condemn White supremacy,” said Van Jones, a CNN commentator and former Obama adviser who has also worked with Trump administration on criminal justice reform.
The recklessness was on an equal display by Trump who ravaged the country with a failed response to COVID-19 that is still raging in U. The economic decline experienced by the Americans is the worst in 90 years while the racial reckoning is facing a record slump in the last 5 decades.
The clash between the two was nothing short of a conflagration and Dana Bash rightly described the debate as a “shit-show”, courtesy President Trump.
Trump bulldozed the rules agreed by his team for equal time. All Biden attempts to speak on his turn culminated in a confusing noise. If the helpless Democrat waited the President out, the President with all his savagery just would on a tear while overwhelming the Fox News moderator Chis Wallace in the process.
“Will you shut up, man?”, said a fed-up Democratic candidate at one moment who mostly showed restraint to Trump’s goading.
“He doesn’t have a plan. The fact is, this man doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Biden said, condemning his rival’s efforts to eliminate Obamacare without providing a viable replacement.
“How many of you got up this morning and had an empty chair at the table because someone died of Covid-19?” Biden asked, blaming the Republican for his poor handling of the COVID-19 for thousands of US deaths.
“It is what it is, because you are who you are,” he told Trump.
