About four and a half months before the American presidential election, Donald Trump and Joe Biden took part in their first televised debate this Thursday, June 27, on CNN.
While polls suggest that the US presidential race remains close in key states, Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off in a first debate this Thursday, June 27. Apart from personal attacks and other fake news, the candidates addressed several central themes.
The war in Ukraine
“The war in Ukraine would never have happened with me” in power, assured Donald Trump, before accusing Joe Biden of having “encouraged” Vladimir Putin to launch his offensive. The Democratic president passed the buck, ensuring that Donald Trump’s proximity to Vladimir Putin during his mandate had emboldened the Russian president.
Joe Biden took the opportunity to defend the support provided by the United States to kyiv under his presidency, arguing that Vladimir Putin will not stop, according to him, at the western border of Ukraine.
The Israel-Hamas conflict
Here again, Donald Trump said he was convinced that the Hamas attack in Israel would “never have happened” if he had been in the White House at that time. He also criticized Joe Biden for restricting the Israeli government and its military bombings on Gaza, accusing him of behaving “like a Palestinian” by pleading for the release of hostages and an end to the war.
Joe Biden did not respond to his opponent’s provocations and simply recalled that the United States “provides Israel with all the weapons it needs and when it needs them.” He also mentioned the latest ceasefire agreement, presented a few weeks ago but which, for the time being, seems unlikely to materialize.
The American economy
The two candidates accused each other of having “caused inflation” and “decimated the American economy”. When defending their respective economic records, both cited the difficulties encountered due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“We got hit by COVID and when we got hit by COVID we spent the money to keep from getting hit by the Great Depression,” Trump said. The former president, who has racked up twice as much federal debt as Joe Biden according to a new nonpartisan report cited by one of CNN’s reporters, said he was about to start paying down the nation’s debt when the coronavirus hit.
The current President of the United States, for his part, deplored having inherited an economy “in free fall”, caused according to him by the catastrophic management of Covid-19 by his predecessor. He notably recalled that Donald Trump had considered that the coronavirus was “not so serious” at the beginning of the pandemic and mocked the remedy that the Republican had once suggested to Americans, namely injecting disinfectant into the body.
L’immigration
During the debate, Joe Biden tried to praise the progress made in immigration management, highlighting a 40% drop in illegal border crossings since the entry into force of a new decree signed at the beginning of June. This involves the temporary closure of the border with Mexico as soon as a daily limit is reached.
Seeking to deconstruct his argument, Donald Trump, without providing any evidence, claimed that the border between the United States and Mexico is “the most dangerous place in the world” under his opponent’s presidency, assuring that illegal immigrants leaving “insane asylums” commit violent crimes in the United States.
This rhetoric, often put forward by the Republican candidate, was described as fake news by many American media following the debate. A report from the Cato Institute published this week notably showed that migrants were proportionally less likely than American citizens to have been convicted of murders in 2022.
Abortion
President Joe Biden took advantage of the debate to attack Donald Trump over his “terrible” action against abortion rights in the United States. As a reminder, the American Supreme Court, profoundly overhauled by the former president, overturned the Roe v. case law in June 2022. Wade, who guaranteed the federal right of American women to have an abortion, giving each state the freedom to legislate on the issue. Since then, around twenty American states have adopted bans or restrictions on abortion.
Joe Biden said he was convinced that his opponent would be ready to enact a law to ban abortion nationally or restrict it to “six, seven, eight or ten weeks” of pregnancy, “something very conservative”, if such a project was voted on by a future Republican Congress.
In response, Donald Trump continued to defend the freedom of each state to legislate on this issue. “I believe in exceptions in cases of rape, incest,” and danger to “the life of the mother,” he added. The former president, questioned on the question of the abortion pill, also indicated that he would not “block” it if he was elected.
