U.S. President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, will face each other for the first time in the campaign on Tuesday, during a debate they both reach under pressure and is expected to be “belligerent,” full of harsh attacks that could hit the personal ground.
The first of three presidential debates scheduled before the November 3 election will be held tuesday in Cleveland, Ohio’s key state, and will last 90 minutes without ad breaks.
There will be six topics on the table: the political history of both candidates; the Supreme Court and Trump’s nomination of a new judge for that court; coVID-19 pandemic; the economy; racism and citizen violence; and the integrity of the election, as revealed by the moderator, journalist Chris Wallace.
On the edge of the mud
Each issue will be discussed for fifteen minutes, and the moderator will have the challenge of preventing the discussion from getting out of the planned issues and having the attacks become too ugly or personal, as both Trump and Biden are prone to throw themselves into the mud when someone challenges them.
“I hope I don’t take the bait and get into a fight with this guy. It’s going to be hard, because I think he’s going to be screaming,” Biden said during a virtual event this month.
All observers consulted by Efe expect a “belligerent” debate, in the words of Alan Schroeder, emeritus professor at Northeastern University and expert on televised debates.
“The two candidates find it hard to contain their emotions, and I think things will get ugly, especially in the case of Trump, whose style is based on insults and schoolyard taunts. The challenge for Biden will be to stop those abuses without losing his temper,” Schroeder summed up.
The weeks leading up to the debate have set the tone for the appointment: Trump has accused Biden of getting high to improve his performance and has unsuccessfully called for both to be tested anti-narcotics before the meeting; while the Democratic nominee has mocked the president for his slowness coming down a ramp in June.
The enversion between the two is such that Biden has come to refer to a possible debate in literally pugilistic terms: “They asked me if I would argue with this gentleman, and I replied, ‘If we were in high school, I would take him behind the gym and beat him up his life,'” he said jokingly in 2018.
Jennifer Mercieca, a political rhetoric expert at Texas A&M University, believes cleveland’s debate will be “even more combative” than Trump had with Hillary Clinton in 2016.
“I’m worried that Trump will mock Biden’s stutter. I wouldn’t be surprised if things got that bad,” efe said.
Trump, “attack” Biden’s family
According to The Washington Post, Trump plans to launch personal attacks on Biden and his family, namely his son Hunter, to which the president has accused, without providing evidence, of having committed “corruption” when he worked for a gas company in Ukraine while his father was vice president of the United States.
Biden’s campaign knows Trump is going to the jugular and wants the former vice president to focus on the issues that really matter to voters, such as the economy and the management of the pandemic by the current government, according to the rotary.
Trump spent part of this weekend preparing for the debate, but in mid-September he boasted that he would not need too much time, because he believes that “doing what he does” prepares him for the exchange.
The representative has also lowered expectations about his rival’s possible performance by accusing Biden of low energy, few campaign activities and an alleged decline in his mental acuity; but that strategy can go wrong for Trump.
“Lowering both the bar for Biden means the Democratic nominee has less to prove” and that a decent performance could be considered a victory, a professor of political communication at Boston University, Tammy Vigil, told Efe.
But if Biden “screws up, or does something that can call into question his cognitive ability, that will reinforce the narrative donald Trump has created,” a missouri university presidential debate expert Mitchell McKinney said to Efe.
Lots of expectation, few votes to define
The debate is unlikely to move votes, because the proportion of undecided is even lower this year than in 2016 and many Americans have already started voting; but the expectacit is maximum, partly “because conventions were virtual” and campaign opportunities have been limited, in the words of Aaron Kall.
“The first debate of the 2016 presidential election was watched by 84 million people, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the audience is higher this time,” He told Efe Kall, director of debate at the University of Michigan and editor of a new book called “Debating Donald.”
In that volume, Kall recalls that presidents seeking re-election in the U.S. often overestimate their ability and end up “doing it wrong in debates, especially in the first,” as happened to Barack Obama in 2012 or Ronald Reagan in 1984.
If it happened to Trump too, he would still have two other chances to correct himself, with the October 15 debates in Miami and 22 in Nashville, Tennessee.
In Biden’s case, his allies are clear about what to avoid: “When you get into the mud with a pig, the pig has a good time and you end up covered in mud,” Democratic Sen. Chris Coons said Friday.
