First televised duel between Joe Biden and Donald Trump

Joe Biden at the celebrations of the 80th anniversary of the Landings in Colleville-sur-Mer (Calvados), June 6, 2024. GUILLAUME HERBAUT/AGENCY VU’ FOR “LE MONDE”

The United States is a power with exceptional resources, a diverse population, and many skills. However, the country is preparing for a depressing presidential election, a choice by default whose impact will be global. On the right, Donald Trump, a candidate convicted of criminal charges 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 his steps, an uncertain adventure. While both camps are in turmoil, their first televised confrontation, Thursday, June 27, in Atlanta, on CNN, will mark for many Americans an entry into the campaign. In reverse.

It is also backwards that we understand 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 ruling. vs Wade decided by the Supreme Court, which since 1973 had guaranteed the right to abortion throughout the country, and the existential threat to American democracy represented by Donald Trump – criminally convicted 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. Saturday 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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