In a presidential election, voters expect candidates to present a platform, but they vote on personality and character first and foremost. Voting is a matter of trust. The axiom is as true in the United States as anywhere else. And as Kamala Harris prepares to face Donald Trump in a televised debate on ABC on Tuesday, September 10, she can no longer hide behind the quiet comfort of a euphoric blitz campaign.
The vice president, who has avoided making any missteps since Joe Biden's withdrawal seven weeks ago, claims to embody change, yet without proposing any break or difference with the president. On Tuesday evening, she will be subjected to an undoubtedly aggressive, but perhaps controlled, contradiction. Faced with the assaults of a billionaire, who will be counting on pinning the incumbent administration's record on her, Harris will have to demonstrate self-mastery, ahead of her mastery of the issues at hand.
Quite a task for someone who has never shone at this particular exercise. Harris has spent several days in a Pittsburgh hotel preparing for the debate with her advisers. According to the American press, a mock stage was set up there, on which to review the likely arguments and clashes. The show will take place a few hundred miles away, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in a state greatly coveted by both camps, with its 19 electoral college votes at stake.
Now running in his third presidential campaign, Trump is no stranger to televised debates. He has a flair for stunts, for destabilizing nastiness. At the end of June, he managed to stay focused in the face of Biden's disastrous performance. However, Trump is also a radicalized candidate, full of bile, who has saturated the political space since 2015, and who is affected by the same vulnerability as his former opponent: His advanced age, at 78. He is currently stepping up his excessive statements. After having described her as "crazy," Trump used the expression "comrade Kamala" from mid-August onwards, to caricature his rival as a dangerous communist.
Harris has managed to arouse the billionaire's irritation, by choosing to belittle him, to consign him to the past like a moth-eaten garment, instead of presenting him as an existential threat to America, in keeping with Biden's strategy. Yet this threat does exist. In a message on his Truth Social network, on September 8, Trump warned that if he won, "people that CHEATED" in the 2020 election would be "prosecuted," with possible "long-term prison sentences." A promised political vendetta, which was treated with a form of weariness and casualness by the American media.
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