On September 10, U.S. presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump finally met for a debate.
Feedback from both political camps pointed to a clear conclusion: Kamala Harris won the debate. A CNN poll showed that 63% of voters rated the vice president’s performance as better. After the June debate, 67% in the same poll favoured Trump.
Of course, a lot can change in the two months before the US presidential election. But so far, Kamala Harris has been able to gradually build momentum in her campaign. The last debate only confirmed this.
In addition, they provided a little more insight into how both candidates view Russia’s war in Ukraine.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the debate between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump was one of the most anticipated political events not only in the United States but around the world.
Usually, debates do not have a decisive impact on voters’ preferences. But the current situation was different and unprecedented in its own way. Never before has a United States presidential candidate entered an election so late in the race.
For Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, this was both a challenge and an opportunity to catch Trump off guard and disorient him.
So for the Democrat, the debate was a key event, an opportunity to introduce herself to the general public and announce more specific measures that she plans to implement if she wins.
She took advantage of her past experience as a prosecutor, as well as her ability to “interrogate” her opponent rather than debate him.
Harris actively attacked Trump—even on extremely uncomfortable topics that the Republican campaign obviously wanted to emphasise during the debate. These skills came in handy when she caught Trump in outright lies.
However, Harris also had some gaps. She did not offer enough specifics on the economy, although she repeated several times that she “has a plan.”
As for Trump’s performance, “role reversal” is probably the best way to describe it.
Whereas in the June debate, the Republican candidate was at his best, constantly attacking Joe Biden and not letting him catch his breath, now he often got on the defensive and fought off Kamala Harris’s equally annoying attacks.
The former president’s attempts at personal attacks on his Democratic opponent were not very convincing.
The debate allowed Trump to show that Harris is no different from Biden and that he can lead the US out of the “dead end” the current administration has driven it into.
Trump used the topic of Ukraine’s war with Russia as an opportunity to reiterate his criticism of the current administration’s poor negotiation skills.
He refused to say that Ukraine’s victory is in the interests of the United States. Instead, he believes the US should “end the war.”
Kamala Harris’s message on the conflict actually repeated the position of the current US administration.
While Trump said that under his presidency, the war in Ukraine would simply not have happened, the vice president said that in such a scenario, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv and looking at the rest of Europe, starting with Poland.”
And in the end, she directly criticised the possibility of any “negotiations” with Putin, saying that Trump liked to flirt with dictators during his presidency and that Putin is a dictator who would “eat you for lunch”.
