On 29 September 29, 2020, viewers of the first of three televised US presidential debates were treated to ninety minutes of ill-tempered banter, during which two crusty old men behaved badly with one another, one of them more so than the other. With the American Declaration of Independence hovering in the background, Joe Biden, the contender, and Donald Trump, the incumbent, bickered, traded insults, and repeatedly spoke over one another, while a mostly ineffectual Chris Wallace, Fox News anchor, valiantly attempted to “moderate” the proceedings. Given the debaters’ obvious anger, their social distancing served more than one useful purpose. Despite the great importance of the event, the evening’s proceedings at the Case Western Reserve University health education campus in Cleveland, Ohio, were decidedly underwhelming and are certainly not worth viewing unless you have absolutely nothing better to do. For there were no spells of brilliant oratory, no memorable quotes, and not even any worthwhile take-home messages to mull over afterwards.
The programming was created by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which is described as a private, non-partisan organisation. The debate was broken up into 15-minute segments, which included two minutes for each candidate to speak without interruption on each selected topic. The topics under discussion included the Supreme Court nomination of Justice Barrett, the Covid-19 crisis, the American economy, race relations, law and order, an appraisal of both candidates’ records while in office, climate change and, finally, election integrity. Both candidates tended to drift away from the topic under discussion, sometimes to make personal attacks on matters of little interest to the wider American public, such as Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s history of drug abuse and financial dealings in China and Russia.
It is possible, however, to bring together the key messages each candidate was trying to put across, even thought not a particularly orderly manner. President Trump was his usual combative self, and there were no surprises in what he had to say. He claimed his right as President to nominate the “phenomenal” Amy Barrett, “endorsed by very liberal people”, to the Supreme Court. The topic soon shifted to “socialised medicine”, focusing on Obama’s “too expensive” Affordable Health Care Act, which Trump hoped to repeal and replace shortly, probably with Barrett’s help, although he had yet to produce an alternative comprehensive healthcare plan. He took this opportunity to congratulate himself over his dealings with “Big Pharma”, which had made insulin cheap “like water”,
When it came to Covid-19, Trump had done a “phenomenal job”. He had delivered gowns, masks, ventilators, and therapeutics, and America was only weeks away from a vaccine. Without him, as many as two million Americans could have died, but he had kept the death toll at the much lower number of 200, 000, which even he said was far too many, apart from being the highest death rate in the world. Despite the ravages of Covid-19, he had managed to rescue the economy from the “China plague”, and records were being set as the country experienced what, in his view, was a remarkable V-shaped recovery.. Trump then briefly glossed over his federal income tax returns, reassuring his listeners that he paid millions of dollars in taxes each year, and that he was actually underleveraged and rich in assets.
On the matter of race, Trump was equally upbeat. He had done more for African-Americans than any president other than Abraham Lincoln, and even accused Biden of unworthy racist sentiments from the past. This brought him neatly to the matter of law and order, where he lamented a broken America, in which the top forty American cities, nearly all led by Democrats, had fallen victim to the vicious hard left. He, for one, was all in favour of decisive action, for calling in the National Guard to bring things under control in no time at all.
Overall, Trump appeared extremely proud of his record. He had accomplished more in three and a half years than any other US President in history, and repeatedly contrasted Biden’s 47 unproductive years in politics with his own highly successful 47 weeks. Trump had replenished the military and reinvigorated the Veterans Administration. He was proud of his efforts in plugging the gaps that Obama had left behind in the judicial system, with 300 new federal court and court of appeal judges, and three Supreme Court nominees. He also felt elated that he had “brought back” 700,000 American manufacturing jobs. He ended his spiel by pointing to his clever balancing of environmental and economic issues when it came to matters of climate change.
Trump ended, however, on an angry note, venting his great displeasure on an impending fraudulent election, the result of predictable and widespread mail-in voter fraud. He repeated stories of ballots being sold in public, and others being dumped in waste baskets and rivers. But he vowed that he would fight to the end for a fair and just result, which might take months to be declared, and even called upon his supporters to flock to polling booths to act as “poll watchers”, especially in Democratic strongholds.
You might by now wonder what Biden managed to say during the times when he wasn’t being interrupted by Trump. Given the highly polarised nature of partisan politics in America, now truly “a country divided against itself”, he said just the opposite. Besides calling Trump ” a liar”, “a clown”, “Putin’s puppy”, and “the worst president America ever had”, he strongly opposed Trump’s Supreme Court nomination, sharply criticised his handling of the Covid-19 and economic crises, and claimed he was a racist, who pandered to white supremacists. Biden also came out on the side of law and order, confirming his opposition to defunding the police and calling for a more racially sensitive style of community policing. He was strong in his convictions when it came to climate change and talked about a new self-fulfilling green economy, and about taking America back into the Paris Climate Accord. In contrast, Biden ended without any anger, claiming that he trusted the election process, was not worried about possible fraud, and would accept the result either way.
Overall, you have on offer two very different candidates, appealing to two parallel Americas that coexist uneasily side-by-side, although Biden seemed more committed to the reunification of America than his opponent. Given what we have heard, you cannot but help feel a little bit worried about the happenings across the Atlantic. Even from a safe distance away, the possible outcomes of what might happen on November 3 are most alarming. As usual, we will just have to patiently wait and see.
Ashis Banerjee