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12-09-2024
WASHINGTON: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump meet in a fiery debate their first of the 2024 US presidential election.
They debated policy but personal attacks also dominated the 90 minute event.
Harris said people leave Trump rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom” he said people don’t go to hers in the first place.
Trump criticized Harris’s record on immigration and the border, and also her shifting policy positions Harris blamed him for “Trump abortion bans” and the 6 January attacks on the US Capitol.
Snap polls suggest Harris won the debate, but Trump says afterwards that she “lost very badly”.
With the election taking place on 5 November, Harris is slightly ahead in national opinion polls but key battleground states are very tight.
Last night Donald Trump once again repeated his unsubstantiated claim that he would have won the 2020 election, were it not for “cheating” from the other side.
After moderator David Muir suggested that Trump may have recently accepted his defeat when he said on a podcast that he lost by “a whisker”, the former president insisted his comments were made in jest.
He then launched into his standard attack on the US electoral system.
“Our elections are bad, and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” he said.
“They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in, practically. And these people (Democrats) are trying to get them to vote.”
Immigrants who haven’t obtained US citizenship aren’t allowed to vote in presidential elections breaking the law is punishable by up to a year in prison and deportation and while there are definitely scattered cases of vote fraud, there’s no evidence that immigrants to the US vote in any noticeable numbers but the idea of “rigged” elections has become a core part of Trump’s appeal to his fervent base. No doubt he’ll keep repeating these falsehoods as the election approaches.
Kamala Harris was an unknown quantity to leaders in Beijing. She still is even after the debate.
She represents something China does not like uncertainty. That is why President Xi used a recent visit by US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to call for “stability” between the superpowers perhaps a message to the current vice-president rather than President Joe Biden.
The prevailing view among Chinese academics is that she will not stray too far from Biden’s slow and steady diplomatic approach.
Instead of clarifying if this will indeed be the case, she went on the attack and accused Donald Trump of “selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military,” during his time as president.
She also said he “invited trade wars”. China would agree with this, but it will also be asking itself, does this line of attack suggest she will not do the same?
Donald Trump has made it clear he plans has to impose 60% tariffs on Chinese goods. China retaliated and numerous studies suggest this caused economic pain for both sides.
Beijing believes Washington’s trade tariffs are a way of containing China and ministers bristle with contempt at any attempt to curb the country’s rise as a global economic power.
For Chinese leaders, this debate will have done little to assuage beliefs that Trump represents something else they don’t like unpredictability but in truth, there is little hope here that US policy on China will change significantly no matter who sits in the White House. (Int’l News Desk)
