The United States is a power with exceptional resources, a diverse population, and numerous skills. However, the country is preparing for a depressive presidential election, a default choice whose impact will be global. On the right, Donald Trump, a candidate criminally convicted and responsible for an attempted coup d’état, after his defeat in 2020. On the left, an outgoing president, Joe Biden, whose voice sometimes becomes a thin trickle and the footsteps , an uncertain adventure. While the two camps are in turmoil, their first televised confrontation, Thursday June 27, in Atlanta, on the CNN channel, will mark the start of the campaign for many Americans. Backwards.
It is also backwards that we approach the very format of the debate, which takes the country back to 1960, when Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice-President Richard Nixon faced each other. Its particularity is an absence: that of an audience. The condition was set by the Biden team. It will therefore be “a sterile and dead room”, regretted Donald Trump in the Washington Examiner.
The exercise will last ninety minutes, interspersed by two commercial breaks. Candidates will not be entitled to cheat sheets. Only two journalists, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, will face them and will be able to mute their microphone in the event of untimely interruptions. They are already the subject of attacks for their supposed bias from the Trump camp, a way of cushioning a possible lackluster performance from their leader.
Three and a half years separate the two men
Joe Biden prepared in secret at Camp David with, in particular, his former chief of staff, Ron Klain, and his advisor Mike Donilon. Its preferred angles of attack should be the defense of reproductive rights, exactly two years after the end of the Roe vs. Wade decision decided by the Supreme Court, which guaranteed since 1973 the right to abortion throughout the country, and the threat existential for American democracy that Donald Trump represents – convicted criminally and still indicted in three other cases.
The latter intends to depict an America supposedly decadent and in free fall for four years, emphasizing inflation and the migration crisis. On June 22, at a meeting in Philadelphia, he pretended to question his supporters about Joe Biden. “Should I be harsh and mean and just say ‘you’re the worst president in history?’ Or should I be nice and calm and let him talk? »
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