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More unpopular than ever, the former and current presidents face each other this Thursday evening in front of the cameras of a particularly divided America. Four months before the election, they will try to push the other to make mistakes.
For four years, Joe Biden and Donald Trump have been cultivating their antagonisms from a safe distance, fiercely spitting on each other from one end of the United States to the other, each passing the buck for the calamities that threaten the country, and the world with it. An eternity swept away by the ravages of a pandemic, an aborted coup attempt, and the burning breath of distant conflicts. Four years punctuated by historic advances and a few regressions that are no less historic, where the last two presidents, both back on the campaign trail for a new term, had never again found themselves in the same room, in a position to sniff each other out again, to give substance to their differences and disagreements, and to personally assess the gulf that separates their respective visions of the American experience and the office charged with presiding over it.
Barring a last minute discard – which would be very expensive for the loser – the two have an appointment to spend the evening of this Thursday, June 27 together in Atlanta (3 a.m. in Paris), in front of the CNN cameras, the time to an hour and a half to debate live, without a net, without a phone call to a friend or a cheat sheet, finally reinjecting into their duel that most pure and primitive special effect that is presence, under the gaze of tens of millions of Americans. Everyone ventures into it full of the hope of standing out, or of pushing the other into error, so as to finally shake up this balance of power which has seemed, for
