Trump and Harris clash in fiery presidential debate, but Taylor Swift steals the night | Opinion
From the League of Women Voters’ colorful bingo cards, to social media watch parties, Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was a highly anticipated event.
Did it match expectations?
It wasn’t quite a shouting match at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but the two hours were filled with name-calling and accusations. Trump called Harris everything but a “nasty woman,” and Harris said Trump lies constantly, is weak and can’t command a crowd at his own rallies.
Ouch. If we learned anything about Harris, she knows how to get under Trump’s skin.
It was the debate between the Angry Man and Give’ Em What-For Dreamer.
Trump scowled, full of hostility. Harris smiled, laughed and called for a return to democracy.
Did either answer the questions that most Americans want to know? Not really, and there are a few reasons for that: the choice of questions from the moderators, the so-called closed mics and having to deal with Trump’s bald-faced, false statements.
Let’s deal with Trump’s falsehoods. While Harris did try to come back to issues again and again, it was impossible not to respond to false statements by Trump about her position on guns, government-run health care and police funding.
Trump stuck to his script of fibs and we’ve heard it before. He incorrectly said that Venezuela and other countries are emptying their prisons of mental institutions and sending people to illegally migrate to the U.S. He also incorrectly said that under Biden and Harris, the U.S. had “the worst inflation we’ve ever had.”
And, in perhaps the weirdest segment of the debate, Trump said Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing and eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats. Leave it to Trump for a dynamite sound bite (no pun intended.)
Moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir asked questions on abortion, immigration, climate change, national security, war, tariffs and health care, but didn’t drill down on the topic most voters care about: affordability of food, goods and housing. Both candidates spent some time on this, but didn’t offer specific plans on how to ease the burden.
Missouri voters probably found the abortion discussion important, especially after the state Supreme Court re-certified the amendment to recall Missouri’s abortion ban Tuesday. Voters will be able to cast their conscience in November.
On abortion rights, we didn’t hear anything we haven’t heard before. Trump said he would leave legislation to states but didn’t answer whether he would veto a federal abortion ban. I previously wrote about Trump’s flip-flopping — nothing new here. Harris said she would “reinstate the protections of Roe v. Wade,” while sidestepping Davis’ question about what restrictions, if any, she would agree to.
And then there’s the issue of the closed microphones, which were supposed to diminish the cross-talk and keep candidates to their time limits. Closed mics don’t work if you don’t close them, and I felt whoever’s finger was on the button was way too lenient.
But why are we even talking about the debate when the biggest news of the night came from Taylor Swift, who finally endorsed Harris on her social media channels? “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election. I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.” Her accompanying photo posing with a cat and signing it “childless cat lady” wasn’t lost on her fans.
Am I kidding about this being the biggest news? Perhaps, but it’s not funny when I say Swift probably changed more minds with one post than this debate did.
