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Kamala Harris, unlike Donald Trump, was well prepared for this debate – and won | Rebecca Solnit
The Trump-Harris debate was the most unsurprising thing that ever happened, except maybe for the part when, unlike previous debates, the moderators, David Muir and Linsey Davis, pressed Trump to actually answer the question or noted that what he said was extremely not true at all.The former prosecutor and current vice-president Kamala Harris got on stage and spoke in lucid paragraphs that were clearly the result of careful preparation. She shared the stage with the adjudicated rapist who spoke in loose phrases that flapped and looped and circled around and usually reverted to some version of “millions of immigrants who are criminals and terrorists are why this country is in terrible shape worse than anyone thought possible and we are going to have world war three”, a litany of fear and rage and vagueness we’ve heard for eight years.Harris is widely said to have won the debate, by being herself, and being herself included a recurring facial expression of amused incredulity as the convicted felon on stage with her said yet another thing that was extravagantly untrue. One notable aspect of her rhetoric is how centrist it sounds – a bland but presumably strategic affirmation of support for a strong military, more healthcare, the usual Democratic party shout-outs to the middle class and support for Israel but also a two-state solution. She also expertly riled up Trump and let him go, and he went raging and free-associating throughout the 90 minutes. He is said to have lost the debate, also by being himself.His face crumpled into a resentful sulk when his mouth was closed, and it was more than closed at those times – it was clamped shut. But when he opened it, lurid, loopy stuff came out. He actually repeated onstage the grotesquely fearmongering racist untruth that JD Vance and Ted Cruz and other far-right Republicans had been spreading online, declaring: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” It’s an internet rumor as preposterous as offensive as untrue – one of the moderators actually interjected that it was untrue – but it was also classic Maga stuff, an incendiary distraction from actual policy and anything else that matters.Trump wasn’t quite as incoherent as in some of his recent public soliloquies, but he did say some very odd stuff, such as when he declared of Biden: “We have a president who doesn’t know he’s alive.” His most interesting slip-up came when the moderators asked him if there was anything he regretted about the 6 January 2021 attack on Congress he instigated. He inveighed and he waffled and he wove around and denied responsibility and tried to shift the conversation to Black Lives Matter protests and came back to blame Nancy Pelosi for what happened. But in one telling moment he said “we” of the insurrectionists and then shifted to say: “this group of people that has been treated so bad”.In other words, Trump was Trump and Harris was Harris, but the debate moderators were far, far better than Dana Bash and Jake Tapper of CNN during the disastrous 27 June debate. They and Harris went after Trump when he said, as he’s been saying since at least 2019 in defense of the anti-abortion position, that mothers and doctors are killing babies at or after birth – in other words that abortion rights are the same thing as infanticide (which, yes, is extremely illegal). “They have abortion in the ninth month,” he claimed. “The baby will be born and we will decide what to do with it, in other words they will execute the baby.” It’s the first time to my knowledge that he’s been told to his face that that’s extremely untrue.But still the questions came from within the bubble of assumptions and priorities that drive mainstream American media right now and drive media critics crazy. For example, a question about Harris’s position on fracking was an attempt to have a gotcha moment and portray her as a flip-flopper, and it came long before the final question, which was an afterthought of a throwaway question about climate.Harris’s answer was disappointingly all over the place – “I am proud that as vice-president over the last four years, we have invested $1tn in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” Trump didn’t answer the climate question at all, and that was that. The fate of the earth for the next 10,000 years or so was brushed aside, but on the other hand the world’s biggest pop star did choose this evening to endorse Harris, signing herself off as “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady”.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More
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A coal plant bulldozed an Ohio town displacing residents. Now its owners include a big Trump donor
Nestled beneath two precipitous spires billowing smoke from what has been called the deadliest coal plant in the United States lies the husk of the small but once-thriving town of Cheshire, Ohio.When residents here were routinely shrouded in a toxic, blue-tinged fog of pollution from the plant two decades ago, a unique yet telling solution was settled upon: the company causing the pollution would purchase the entire town to move people en masse from their homes.For the several hundred people who lived here beside a nook of the Ohio River on the eastern border of the state, the wrenching dismemberment of their community in 2002 is still raw. Yet looming stubbornly over the remnants of this ghost town is the imposing Gavin coal plant, as its owners battle federal regulators who allege ongoing violations of clean air and water rules.“Rather than deal with the source of pollution they thought it better to buy out and bulldoze a whole town,” said Neil Waggoner, an Ohio-based campaigner at the Sierra Club, which estimates Gavin’s pollution causes about 244 premature deaths a year, making it America’s most lethal coal plant, it said in a report last year based on Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and census data. “It’s extraordinary. In many ways, it’s dystopian.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenThe tale of the Gavin power station, one of the largest coal complexes in the US and the country’s sixth highest such emitter of planet-heating carbon dioxide, is one that illustrates deep seams of support for coal in this part of the midwest but also – with a looming presidential election – salient politics.Since 2017, the Gavin plant has been part-owned by Blackstone, a private equity firm whose billionaire chief executive, Stephen Schwarzman, is one of the leading backers of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, having donated $3m to a Trump-aligned Super PAC in 2020. Individuals connected to Blackstone are also among the most generous financial supporters of JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Trump’s running mate.Both Trump and Vance have lambasted moves by Joe Biden’s administration to regulate coal, the dirtiest of all fossil fuels and a catalyst of the climate crisis, with particular ire aimed at a recent EPA rule that requires coal-fired power plants to slash CO2 emissions by 90% within a decade or face closure.Trump has vowed to kill off the rule he’s called “a regulatory jihad to shut down power plants all across America” if he returns to the White House, while Vance has complained of “wanton harassment of fossil fuel companies” and joined with other Senate Republicans in attempts to block the regulation.The EPA edict poses an existential threat to the Gavin plant, which spews out 13m tons of carbon dioxide a year, along with a host of other toxins. Faced with the costly task of capturing the plant’s emissions, Lightstone Generation, the joint venture operator, is also wrestling with EPA allegations from this year that it violated clean air laws and failed to properly contain a vast nearby dump of coal ash – the leftover waste from burning coal that can leach arsenic, mercury and other cancer-causing toxins into rivers and streams – fed by a mile-long conveyor belt from the power plant.“Blackstone is used to playing that political game and it’s in their interest to keep the status quo so coal plants don’t face accountability,” said Alissa Jean Schafer, climate director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, which outlined in a recent report that Gavin’s operators face upwards of $40m in costs to remedy its pollution issues, recommending it join a spate of coal plants that have closed in Ohio and nationwide.“There is a trend of private equity walking away from polluting assets without being liable for the environmental cleanup,” Schafer added. “They want to squeeze as much profit as possible while they can from this outdated, dangerous coal plant.”View image in fullscreenBlackstone’s Schwarzman, who has previously warned of energy shortages and “real unrest” around the world if fossil fuels are phased out too quickly, has allied with Trump, who weakened rules around coal ash disposal and coal plant emissions when he was president. “You can imagine folks at Blackstone want to see similar rollbacks under a second Trump presidency, and you can imagine Vance towing the line,” said Schafer.A Blackstone spokeswoman said the Gavin plant is a “legacy investment” that has spent more than $1bn to update its air quality control technology, complies with federal and state limits on emissions, and is in the process of closing a coal ash pond. “All political donations by our employees are strictly personal,” she added.The reach of the Gavin plant, built in 1974 and named after Gen James “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin, is prodigious. It chews through about 20,000 tons of coal a day, enough to electrify 2m homes. A pair of enormous 800ft-tall rust-colored smokestacks, jutting imperiously above the treeline on the approach to Cheshire, waft a cocktail of emissions for hundreds of miles, with environmentalists blaming it for causing hazy skies as far away as the Shenandoah national park, in Virginia.The immediate surroundings of the largest power plant in Ohio, however, are denuded. The blue plumes are gone but the plant itself still gives off a pungent sulphur smell, a violent whiff akin to rotting eggs that stings the nose. The small cluster of Cheshire streets at the foot of the plant contain patches of grass where homes once sat, like a mouth that’s had most of its teeth knocked out.View image in fullscreenA church, a school and even the traffic lights here have been removed, along with the houses that were torn down. Just a few scattered buildings remain. During the exodus, some people lifted their entire wood-paneled homes on to trailers and moved them away. In all, 221 residents, the vast majority of the population, departed in just six months in 2002.“I couldn’t even watch my house being torn down, it was terrible,” said Jennifer Harrison, who grew up near Cheshire and moved to the town with her now late husband in 1980. “We spent the first 23 years of our married life and raised our kids here. I just can’t think about it too much, it’s horrible.”Harrison, who served as Cheshire’s town clerk and lived a short distance from the Gavin plant, remembers getting blurry eyes and tasting sulphur in the air in the late 1990s – a problem that worsened to the extent that a blue-hued haze of pollution would settle upon the town, particularly on humid days. It became so bad that residents had to stay indoors, the miasma so strong it would eat the paint off cars.“We had what we called ‘touchdowns’, where this plume would come from the smokestack and touch down in town,” she said. “It was like clouds on the ground. People got sores on their mouths, they got breathing problems, it affected lives.”View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenIronically, the problems worsened once the EPA, in 2000, cited the Gavin plant for violating the Clean Air Act for contributing to acid rain as far away as New York. In response, pollution controls installed by the plant triggered what American Electric Power (AEP), the plant’s owner until 2017, called a “totally unexpected” increase in sulphur trioxide that mixed with water vapor from scrubbers used to filter pollution from the smokestacks.This combination allowed a sulphuric acid mist to flood into Cheshire, causing what the EPA documented as “irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat; shortness of breath; and asthma-like symptoms” among residents in 2001. “We had to fight them continually,” Harrison said of the plant’s owner. “We had to become a pain in their ass just to finally get anything done.”AEP, facing mounting legal pressure over the toxic air, eventually offered a deal thought to be a US first: $20m to buy the town of Cheshire, with homeowners offered three times the asking price for their houses – around $150,000 each – in return for locals relocating and agreeing to not sue the company over any future adverse health impacts.Elderly residents who wished to stay in their homes were allowed to do so, with some holdouts remaining until they died, when their homes were bulldozed too. AEP, which had revenues of $14.5bn in 2002, was able to subsume a town founded in 1811, with lawyers taking around a quarter of the total buyout fund.Harrison, who was involved in the effort to pursue AEP through the courts, said she was initially “shocked” at the offer but came to realize it was the only viable choice. “We probably should’ve held out for more but the lawyers told us that was the final deal,” she said.“We felt if we didn’t take the deal we’d be stuck here forever and they wouldn’t fix the problem. Most of the people let them buy the property and got out of town because at that point our properties were worthless.”What was lost was a slice of Americana, a close-knit place of white picket fences, a church, village picnics and a trusted community. “Everyone knew everyone, you could hear your kids out playing on their bikes and know someone was looking out for them,” said Harrison. “It was very Norman Rockwell.”The grief of this loss stirred anger among some Cheshire residents, not so much at the coal plant in a stretch of Appalachia where the harms of coal have long been sold as a price worth enduring, but rather at town council leaders like Harrison who struck the buyout deal. Friendships were severed, angry words shouted and graffitied dollar signs were sprayed onto the Harrison family home.“It was really unsettling,” said Megan Lawhon, Harrison’s daughter who turned 18 the day before the buyout was agreed to. She’s now a high school teacher. “People blamed us for a lot of untrue things, said we were greedy for taking the buyout money. I find it really hard to even come back here.”Gesturing to the Gavin plant, Lawhon added: “The culprit is just still sitting here. It’s like a family member has been murdered and the killer was just allowed to pay out some money and that’s it. And everyone here accepts that’s just the price of living in Appalachia, that there is no other option. We just die with a smile on our faces.”Advocates for the Gavin plant point out that it generates about half of the economic activity in Gallia county, in which Cheshire sits. There remains a certain cynicism that anything, such as a clean energy boom that Biden has sought to spur, can replace the jobs and investment that coal has long conferred to the Ohio River valley.In 2020, Trump, who has offered unfulfilled promises to resurrect the ailing coal industry, amassed 77% of the vote in Gallia county. A barn sitting beside the Gavin plant features a large picture of the former president shaking his fist with the words: “The audits prove Trump won!”“I know if Kamala [Harris] and that other gentleman [Tim Walz] had their way this coal plant would be shut down right now and we’d be going back to the 1800s,” said Mark Coleman, who is mayor of Cheshire. Coleman lives on the outskirts of the town, which had its boundaries expanded to now cover a population of 124.“If that plant closed our area would be gone. I’ve lived here all my life, this has always been part of it, my dad was a coal miner. The problem was fixable and Gavin did fix it, we haven’t seen a blue plume in years. I was more frustrated with the people who sold out.”View image in fullscreenLightstone, Gavin’s operator, still owns the relic of Cheshire and has shown no willingness to sell the land to usher in new residents. Neither Blackstone nor ArcLight Capital, the two joint venture partners that form Lightstone, answered questions on Cheshire’s future.Coleman said attracting new businesses here is tough; a plan for a Dollar General was recently dashed, and even getting a street paved is difficult. Drug addiction, like in much of Appalachia, stalks this place. Cheshire’s future appears moribund, a marooned corner of a region where old certainties have evaporated.“Our town has lost its identity, it’s sad,” Coleman said. “It’s hard to get things started back up again. Time has healed wounds, but at the same time we don’t go out to dinner with everyone. People have drifted apart.”The mayor has not heard from Vance about Cheshire’s situation. The vice-presidential candidate didn’t respond to questions from the Guardian about his links to Blackstone and the Gavin plant, or what his plan is for communities exposed to coal-related pollution.“If JD Vance really feels a connection to Appalachia, which he has ridden hard, you’d think he’d at least ask some questions about all this,” said Lawhon.“But I’d be surprised if he even knew about us. I mean if it’s going to cut into profits, the environment won’t ever be a priority. Which means that this whole thing could happen again somewhere else in the United States, and somebody’s going to have to fight the exact same battle we did.” More
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Trump and Harris clash over abortion and immigration in fierce debate – live US election updates
US presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went head to head on Tuesday night in their first – and potentially only – debate before voters head to the polls on 5 November.Democratic candidate Harris put her Republican rival Trump on the defensive with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office, his support of abortion restrictions and his myriad legal woes.A former prosecutor, Harris, 59, controlled the debate from the start, getting under her rival’s skin repeatedly and prompting a visibly angry Trump, 78, to deliver a series of falsehood-filled retorts.At one point, she goaded the former president by saying that people often leave his campaign rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”Trump, who has been frustrated by the size of Harris’ own crowds, said, “My rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”He then pivoted to a false claim about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has circulated on social media and was amplified by Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Senator JD Vance.The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.More on that in a moment, but first here are some other key updates:Russia has accused both presidential candidates of using Vladimir Putin’s name as part of a domestic political fights, saying: “we really, really don’t like it”.Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday that the US was hostile and negative towards Russia, Reuters reports, and the Kremlin hoped that candidates would drop such references to Putin.Last week the White House said Putin should stop commenting on the US election after he said in an apparently teasing comment that he favoured Harris over Trump and that her “infectious” laugh was one of the reasons why.Trump Media & Technology Group shares fell 17% in premarket trading on Wednesday following the combative presidential debate between the former president and Kamala Harris.After the debate, pricing for a Trump victory slipped by 6 cents to 47 cents on online betting site PredictIt, while Harris’s odds climbed to 57 cents from 53 cents.Harris’s candidacy also received a boost after pop star Taylor Swift said she will vote for the Democratic candidate to her 280m on Instagram.Trump is the biggest shareholder in Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the parent of Truth Social app, which is popular among retail traders and is often sensitive to the former president’s chances of winning the 2024 US election, Reuters reports.According to a flash poll by CNN, registered voters who watched Tuesday’s presidential debate broadly agreed that Kamala Harris outperformed Donald Trump.This is based on a CNN poll of debate watchers conducted by SSRS, that also found that Harris “outpaced both debate watchers’ expectations for her and Joe Biden’s onstage performance against the former president earlier this year”.The CNN snap poll found:
Watchers said, by 67% to 37%, that Harris turned in a better performance onstage in Philadelphia
96% of Harris supporters who watched said that their chosen candidate had done a better job
A smaller 69% of Trump’s supporters thought he had done a better job
Voters who watched the debate found their views of Harris were improved
Trump was seen to have an advantage on the economy, immigration and being commander in chief. Harris was more trusted on abortion and protecting democracy
However, the vast majority who tuned in said the debate had no effect on who they were going to vote for in the November election.Following the debate between Trump and Biden in June, watchers said, 67% to 33%, that Trump outperformed the president.And finally, the fifth key exchange of the night was on the Biden legacy, writes Bland:Donald Trump: Where is our president? We don’t even know if he’s a president.Kamala Harris: You’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.This line from Harris, clearly scripted, was nonetheless a useful shorthand for the way she wants the race to be framed: as a chance to move on from the political division that has exhausted Americans for the last eight years, with her as a candidate who is not wedded to every aspect of the Biden record. In her closing statement, she said: “You’ve heard tonight two very different visions for our country: one that is focused on the future and the other that is focused on the past, and an attempt to take us backward. But we’re not going back.’”In his own closing statement, Trump finally did what his team would have wanted him to do throughout – blame Harris relentlessly for everything voters dislike about Biden. “She’s been there for three and a half years,” he said. “They’ve had three and a half years to fix the border. They’ve had three and a half years to create jobs and all the things we talked about. Why hasn’t she done it?”But by then, it felt like the narrative of the night was irreversibly set. And when Trump rambled into the claim that “we’re going to end up in a third world war, and it will be a war like no other because of nuclear weapons, the power of weaponry,” it merely seemed like normal service had been resumed.The third key exchange, writes Bland, is on abortion. Namely, the last night’s factcheck on a wild claim that Democrats will execute babies after birth.Donald Trump: Her vice-presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth … and that’s not OK with me.Moderator Linsey Davis: There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.While it’s not exactly a Woodward and Bernstein moment to observe that murdering babies is illegal in America, it was significant that Trump was much more thoroughly factchecked by the debate moderators than he was when he faced Biden. And it was part of a section on abortion rights, up there with the economy as one of the key issues driving this election, which did him few favours.Meanwhile, if you had “baby killers” on your bingo card, you may nonetheless have been caught unawares by Trump’s other truly wild lie of the night: his reference to false claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating their neighbours’ pets. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” he said. “The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” Harris turned to a visual shorthand she used repeatedly over the course of the debate (above) – cocking her head and looking at Trump with a bemused look on her face and her chin resting on her hand. You will certainly see this memed endlessly in the days ahead.The Spingfield city manager said that there have been no such reports, moderator David Muir noted. “But the people on television say their dog was eaten,” Trump replied. After the debate, Trump and his supporters characterised this kind of exchange as evidence of a “three-on-one” debate, which you can make your own mind up about. Harris, for her part, responded by saying “talk about extreme” and immediately pivoting to her own attack lines – the inverse of Trump’s approach.The fourth key exchange was on healthcare:Linsey Davis: So just a yes or no, you still do not have a plan?Donald Trump: I have concepts of a plan.By coincidence, this is exactly what I told my editor when she asked how close I was to filing about an hour ago. It is also the kind of wafty answer on a matter of substance that is likely to be clipped up and used in Harris attack ads repeatedly over the next few weeks.Trumps “concepts of a plan” refer to how he would replace the Affordable Care Act, the popular Obama era law that mandated the availability of health insurance to low-income families. There were other evasions, too, like his complicated language on abortion, and on whether he had any regrets about January 6. On Ukraine, Trump would not say that he wanted Kyiv to win, instead saying “I want the war to stop” and claiming that he would end it before even taking office by making Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskiy talk to each other.Archie Bland writes that there are five key exchanges that are likely to dominate the campaign in the days ahead. The first is on the economy, as Kamala Harris promised to lift up the middle class while Donald Trump blamed her for high inflation.Moderator David Muir: When it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off than they were four years ago?Kamala Harris: So, I was raised as a middle-class kid. And I am actually the only person on this stage who has a plan that is about lifting up the middle class and working people of America.Donald Trump: We have inflation like very few people have ever seen before. Probably the worst in our nation’s history.The debate kicked off with a section on the economy, arguably the toughest section of the night for Harris, who must contend with the fact that many voters blame the Biden administration for years of high inflation. While Harris set out more details of her own agenda, from a $6,000 child tax credit to a tax deduction for small businesses, her point that she and Biden were dealing with the Trump legacy of “the worst unemployment since the Great Depression” did not really make an affirmative case for the record of the last four years.Trump did land his points about inflation and the dubious claim that he created “one of the greatest economies in the history of our country” in his first term. But he also got distracted: by Harris calling his plan to raise tariffs a “Trump sales tax”, and by his own digression into a claim that “millions of people [are] pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums”. That was a hint of what was to come.Second, writes Bland, is Harris tempting Trump into going off topic:Kamala Harris: You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about “windmills cause cancer”. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.Donald Trump: People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics. That’s because people want to take their country back.Can it really be this easy to wind him up? Again and again, Harris chose lines that keyed into Trump’s personal preoccupations – and managed to goad him into responding to them at length instead of focusing on the kinds of issues that matter to voters. This exchange about crowd sizes, during a section of the debate that was supposed to be about immigration, meant that he had less time to talk a subject that is one of the areas where voters have the most doubts about Harris.Similarly, during a section about Harris’ changing position on fracking, he allowed himself to be sidetracked by her claim that he was given $400m by his father. Then there was the sales tax thing; the controversial conservative roadmap for a second Trump term, Project 2025; and the way he let a discussion about the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal turn into one about his invitation to Taliban leaders to come to Camp David for talks.None of these subjects would have been on his campaign managers’ list of the talking points they would have wanted him to hit – and none of them mean very much to swing voters.After a period of undoubted momentum for Kamala Harris, the vice-president came into this debate having stalled somewhat. Recent polls suggest that the race is effectively tied, both nationally and in most of the battleground states that will likely decide the outcome. Because the way voters are distributed gives Republicans an advantage in the electoral college, and because you would usually expect to see Harris’ post-convention bump fade somewhat, polling experts like Nate Silver have recently seen Donald Trump as the favourite to prevail.Many presidential candidates have “won” debates and ultimately lost the race – but there is little doubt that Harris had a good enough night to change those odds in her favour. Trump’s team wanted him to hang the Biden administration’s unpopular policies around her neck, but instead he repeatedly lapsed into rambling and extreme Maga talking points that seem likely to have left many voters nonplussed.The problem is not so much that he revealed himself as an erratic character, which any swing voter surely already knows: the problem is that he gifted Harris, who appeared supremely well-prepared, the chance to present him as the exhausting candidate of the all-too-familiar past – and herself as the optimist with a vision for the future.In the Guardian’s First Edition newsletter, Archie Bland writes that even Fox News said Kamala Harris won last night’s presidential debate. Bland writes:Democrats’ moods can only have been improved by the news, a few minutes after it ended, that Taylor Swift had endorsed Harris, and signed her post “childless cat lady”. And CNN’s snap poll suggested that voters thought Harris won by a margin of 63% to 37% – nearly as big a margin as Trump achieved over Biden last time around. Key to Harris’ success was baiting her opponent into rants on marginal topics, instead of talking about the issues that voters are interested in.But while millions watched, Harris and Trump will reach millions more through the clips that will now be distributed through news and social media. For further reading on the debate, take a look at Gabrielle Canon’s key takeaways and this factcheck on both candidates.Investors were watching for any market impact from the debate between the US presidential candidates, vice-president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump.Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports that the yen hit a nine-month high after a Bank of Japan official hinted at more monetary tightening. But, the news agency reports, the Japanese unit was also boosted by bets on a Harris presidency after she was considered to have come out on top in the US presidential debate.According to AFP, The chances of Trump losing also weighed on bitcoin after he had previously vowed to be a “pro-bitcoin president” if elected in November.US presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Kamala Harris went head to head on Tuesday night in their first – and potentially only – debate before voters head to the polls on 5 November.Democratic candidate Harris put her Republican rival Trump on the defensive with a stream of attacks on his fitness for office, his support of abortion restrictions and his myriad legal woes.A former prosecutor, Harris, 59, controlled the debate from the start, getting under her rival’s skin repeatedly and prompting a visibly angry Trump, 78, to deliver a series of falsehood-filled retorts.At one point, she goaded the former president by saying that people often leave his campaign rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”Trump, who has been frustrated by the size of Harris’ own crowds, said, “My rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”He then pivoted to a false claim about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, that has circulated on social media and was amplified by Trump’s vice-presidential candidate, Senator JD Vance.The debate ended with Harris vowing to be “a president for all Americans” while Trump attacked her as “the worst vice-president in the history of our country”. It was a fitting end for two candidates who offered starkly different visions for the nation in what might be their only presidential debate.No other presidential debate has yet been officially scheduled, so the face-off on Tuesday may represent the last time that Harris and Trump meet before election day. The days ahead will determine whether the debate made a lasting impression on the undecided voters who will decide what appears to be a neck-and-neck race.More on that in a moment, but first here are some other key updates: More - in US Politics
Who won Donald Trump and Kamala Harris’s first-ever debate? Our panel reacts
Moustafa Bayoumi: ‘Trump was flailing’For the entirety of this debate, Donald Trump never once uttered Kamala Harris’s name, a sign of enormous disrespect. What he did do was try to shush Harris with a “quiet, please”, silence her with an “I’m talking now. Does that sound familiar?” (an apparent reference to her famous line during the vice-presidential debate four years ago), and brazenly state that President Biden “hates her. He can’t stand her.”Harris smiled confidently at the ludicrous barbs.Meanwhile, Trump reacted to his own statement that he lost the 2020 election “by a whisker” first by stating: “I said that?” and then by saying he was “being sarcastic”. Asked about his ideas for healthcare for Americans, he replied with: “I have concepts of a plan.” Challenged on his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he responded with: “I had nothing to do with that except they asked me to make a speech.”Trump was flailing. Under pressure, he took no responsibility for his past actions and instead threw invective and invented facts as he went along.Harris prevailed. She came out swinging, pointed her attacks on Trump’s record, and presented a future that wasn’t based on fear but on opportunity. She intelligently called Trump “someone who would rather run on a problem rather than fixing the problem”.But her policy positions were also clearly leaning to the right of the Democratic agenda. She called for many more agents patrolling the border (rather than real and comprehensive immigration reform), defended the right to abortion by extreme examples of injury (such as incest) rather than an ordinary woman’s right to choose, and offered no policy change for Palestinians beyond “working round the clock” for a ceasefire. In other words, more of the same.Harris won the debate. Her performance and ideas are better. But many of those ideas, shared by both parties, need rethinking.
Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist
LaTosha Brown: ‘A steady hand versus reckless impulsiveness’This debate was a defining moment for the American people, as the stark contrast between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was laid bare. From the start, Harris commanded the stage, demonstrating poise, preparation, and a clear vision for the future of the country. She didn’t just introduce herself to Trump – she reintroduced herself to the American public as a strong, competent leader ready to serve as Commander in Chief.In contrast, Trump appeared undisciplined and unhinged, offering a reminder of the chaotic leadership that defined his time in office. His performance highlighted a lack of preparation and an inability to engage thoughtfully on critical issues. While Harris sought to uplift and empower, Trump resorted to divisive rhetoric, further alienating a nation in need of healing.The American people witnessed the difference between a steady hand and reckless impulsiveness. The choice could not be clearer; according to Trump himself, he has no plan. She has a plan and represents a new generation of leadership moving us forward. As the Vice President says: We are not going back.LaTosha Brown is the co-founder of Black Voters Matter
Ben Davis: ‘Harris didn’t sketch out much of a governing agenda’This debate will not be anywhere near as consequential as the last one, between Biden and Trump, which reoriented an election overnight. It remains to be seen how much a debate like this can move voters. That said, Kamala Harris won easily. Trump was at his most narcissistic, impulsive and racist, lashing out incoherently.In the past, while he was, of course, narcissistic, impulsive and racist, he was at least relentlessly on message, setting the tempo of the debate with attacks and forcing his opponents to adopt his framing. With this debate, he was on the defensive and seemed angry and confused throughout. Much of the credit for this goes to Harris, who clearly prepared well and expertly baited Trump into his worst areas. Every time the question was about an issue where Trump has a polling advantage over Harris, like the economy, foreign policy and the Biden administration’s record, she would sneak in a line about him and his past that he couldn’t help but chase.His most memorable lines were mostly notable for being bizarre and nonsensical. All in all, Trump showed who he was: a rightwing authoritarian, and a confused and incompetent one at that.This was a deeply sad debate. Harris didn’t sketch out much in the way of a governing agenda, and the aspects she did expound on, like her policies on the border, fracking and Israel, were bad, politically and morally. Instead of a debate about policy and plans, what we saw was a debate about Trump, with Harris dancing around her own record and policies to skillfully prosecute the case against Trump instead. It’s a dark time for the country when the choice we are presented is a referendum on a dangerous narcissist. Hopefully, Americans will choose not to put Trump back in the White House, but no matter how bad his performance, he still has a serious chance of winning.Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC
Lloyd Green: ‘Harris won the evening’Kamala Harris won the evening and the debate. By the end, the betting markets had shifted back to a coin-toss. Trump no longer led. The vice-president stayed on offense. He flailed and scowled all night. Trump garnered the majority of speaking time, but it did him no favor.The former president attacked Harris over immigration and inflation. He labeled her a Marxist, and bragged about the size of his rallies. He paid tribute to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and accused immigrants of chowing down on Fido: “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”Harris chivied Trump on abortion and democracy and lambasted him over China and Covid. “He actually thanked President Xi for what he did during Covid,” she said. “When we know that Xi was responsible for not giving us transparency about the origins of Covid.”Harris played prosecutor, Trump self-pitying victim. She reminded him of his rap-sheet, January 6, and his affinity for the Proud Boys: “‘Stand back and stand by.’”The election is a footrace. Trump and Harris appear tied in Pennsylvania while the Democrats hold narrow leads in Michigan and Wisconsin. Post-convention excitement recedes. The attempt on Trump’s life is history. Brat summer has yielded to political trench warfare. Election day is less than two months away, in politics an eternity.Lloyd Green is an attorney in New York and served in the US Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
Arwa Mahdawi: ‘The real stars were the moderators’Have you ever wondered whether men might be too emotional to be president? Because Donald Trump was extremely emotional on Tuesday night. And by “emotional”, I mean unhinged.In contrast, Kamala Harris was in full-on prosecutor mode and pushed all the convicted felon’s buttons. She mocked the size of Trump’s rallies – a sore spot – and he immediately unraveled. Lacking serious policy points, he clutched at bigoted straws. He referenced a wild and unsubstantiated rumor about immigrants eating dogs. He said: “Prices are quadrupling and doubling!” And he called Harris a “communist”.After a slightly shaky start, Harris dominated the debate. Her responses about abortion were a particular high point. Many of us watching were weeping with relief it wasn’t Joe Biden at the podium, stumbling over sentences about one of the most important issues on the ballot.Harris wasn’t the only star. Though they got a little more lenient towards the end, ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis did a brilliant job fact-checking in real time, calling Trump out on his lies about Democrats wanting to execute babies after they’re born. I hope CNN’s Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, who did a horrendous job “moderating” the June debate between Trump and Biden, were taking notes.I would have been mostly thrilled by Harris’s performance had it not been for her pathetic and disrespectful response on the carnage in Gaza. She gave no indication of how she would de-escalate the destruction of Gaza, just kept paying empty lip service to a ceasefire. It’s been 11 months; if Biden-Harris seriously wanted a ceasefire, there would be one by now. It’s clear that, when it comes to Gaza, Harris is a new and wholly unimproved version of Biden.Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Harris was at her best portraying Trump as an out-of-touch elite’Joe Biden set a very low bar – the president’s June debate performance was so disastrous that it catapulted him out of the race and Kamala Harris into his seat. All Harris had to do on Tuesday night to be celebrated by the media was to occupy it and string together sentences generally recognized as English. She managed to do that.However, her success was muted. Harris was at her best when she was able to portray Trump as an out-of-touch elite who doesn’t care about ordinary Americans, including his base. Yet rather than continuing that line of thought and painting him as part of a wider establishment pursuing policies against the interests of working people, she undermined her position by celebrating the endorsements of figures like Dick Cheney and John McCain and the “sacred grounds” of Camp David.Trump’s 2016 version of populism focused heavily on the economic grievances facing American workers. His 2024 version is far more unhinged – lies about the election, lies about immigrants eating pets, lies about abortion laws, lies too many to recount. That makes it very easy to take the safe route and draw contrasts between a competent establishment politician and a dangerous would-be tyrant. But I worry that without speaking to justified anger in the country, Harris is setting herself up to be Hillary Clinton 2.0.Bhaskar Sunkara is the president of the Nation, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequalities More
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Prosecutor Kamala Harris put Trump on trial, but the court of public opinion can be fickle
She frowned. She narrowed her eyes. She pursed her lips. She rested her chin on fingers. She shook her head or threw it back with disdain. She laughed with a mixture of bemusement, peevishness and contempt.Chief prosecutor Kamala Harris was putting Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement on trial for nearly 10 years of crimes against civility, democracy and reason. And she wasn’t buying his story.Trump has got away relatively scot-free with his criminal cases so far this year but the first presidential debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday night put him firmly in the dock. Harris brought all her lawyerly experience to bear, just as she did against Brett Kavanaugh and William Barr when she served in the Senate.Debates can be raucous affairs but the rules permitted no audience, ensuring a courtroom-like hush on a stage set surrounded by empty seats in the National Constitution Center. Harris and Trump stood at curving blue lecterns. “This is an intimate setting for two candidates who have never met,” said moderator David Muir, making it sound like a very improbable episode of Love Island.But then it became clear this was no love story. In a neat reversal of Trump’s invasion of Hillary Clinton’s personal space a debate eight years ago, Harris zipped across the stage and forced the ex-president into one of the most awkward handshakes in television history – the first at a presidential debate since 2016.“Kamala Harris,” she announced, as he mumbled a reply. She might have added: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Trumps.”From that moment, Harris – wearing navy suit, white pussy-bow blouse, pearl earrings and small gold American flag pin – owned the stage. She was judge, jury and executioner. With mics muted she was unable to interject when Trump told ludicrous lies, but conveyed her disapproval with a kaleidoscope of facial expressions.Trump – wearing blue suit, white shirt, red tie and American flag pin – refused to meet her gaze but determinedly looked ahead. Both of them were miles ahead of poor old Joe Biden’s gazing and gaping in June.After some early exchanges on the economy, Harris went on the attack. “Donald Trump left us the worst unemployment since the Great Depression,” she said. “Donald Trump left us the worst public health epidemic in a century. Donald Trump left us the worst attack on our democracy since the civil war. And what we have done is clean up Donald Trump’s mess.”He did not like that. A little later, he tried to fire back by going personal. “She’s a Marxist. Everybody knows she’s a Marxist. Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics. And he taught her well.”Harris laughed derisively and rested her chin on her hand, glaring at Trump like a principal listening to the lame excuses of a student who burned down the school.There was worse to come for the ex-president on his weakest issue: abortion rights. He claimed that the American people wanted the overturning of Roe v Wade. Harris, who has been touring the country and talking about it for two years, had an aria ready: “You want to talk about this is what people wanted?“Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”The debate moved on to Trump’s supposed strong suit: immigration and border security. But Harris was like a prosecutor baiting a witness, setting traps that he kept walking into, talking himself into a case-closed confession.She said: “I’m going to actually do something really unusual and I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies because it’s a really interesting thing to watch. You will see during the course of his rallies he talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about windmills cause cancer. And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom. And I will tell you, the one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”No matter that it was obviously carefully rehearsed. It was a smart way to lift the curtain to reveal that the wizard of Oz is actually a feeble old man operating a contrived spectacle. It was also the perfect way to get under Trump’s skin. Trump is prouder of his crowd sizes than his children (well, maybe not Ivanka but certainly Eric).He whined: “She said people start leaving. People don’t go to her rallies. There’s no reason to go. And the people that do go, she’s busing them in and paying them to be there. And then showing them in a different light. So, she can’t talk about that. People don’t leave my rallies. We have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.”If proof were needed how agitated he was, Trump amplified false rumours, pushed by his campaign and rightwing influencers, that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating pets (officials have said there have been no credible or detailed reports about the claims).“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” the former president said. Objection, your honour. The moderators, who did a decent job of fact checking all night, noted that the city manager of Springfield, said there had been no credible reports to support Trump’s claim.Ah, but Trump had evidence! “Well, I’ve seen people on television,” he blurted. “The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that and maybe that’s a good thing to say for a city manager.”The “I saw it on TV so it must be true” defence will never stand up in court, even coming from a reality TV star.If this had been a real trial, the judge would surely have stepped in and asked if Trump wanted to change his plea to guilty rather than prolonging the agony. But under the bright lights of the debate stage, there was no mercy.Harris said: “Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people … And clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that … And world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump. I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you. And they say you’re a disgrace.”In the old days candidates might have riposted by saying Nelson Mandela or some other moral paragon was on their side. Trump reached out for Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán. “He said the most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president.”But Harris had more ammunition: “It is well known that he admires dictators, wants to be a dictator on day one according to himself … And it is absolutely well known that these dictators and autocrats are rooting for you to be president again because they’re so clear, they can manipulate you with flattery and favours.”A dictator like Putin, she added, “would eat you for lunch”.Prosecutor Harris had done a decent job of that while also making a case for herself to be president. In the post-debate spin room, the mood was a world away from the Atlanta debate in June, when Democrats looked forlorn and funereal as they tried to defend Joe Biden. This time it was Republicans making feeble excuses about moderators.Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas bleated: “Where were the fact checks of Kamala Harris? Where were the calling out of Kamala Harris and all of her false statements tonight?” Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy insisted: “Kamala Harris tonight was about words, Donald Trump was about running on a record of action.”Trump himself made a surprise entrance to claim victory, which was about as convincing as his claim that his inaugural crowd size was bigger than Barack Obama’s, or that he beat Joe Biden in the 2020 election, or that he can weave sentences together like a genius. And he was upstaged by the news that Taylor Swift had endorsed Harris.Anthony Scaramucci, a former White House communications director turned Trump critic, told reporters: “She dismantled him. She handled him delicately and then she handled him firmly. She handled with a prosecutorial scalpel. She handled him with the presence of an American president.“She embarrassed him and, as a human being, I actually felt bad for him towards the end because he’s too old to be running for president and he’s not cognitively there and you could see that in the 90 minutes of the debate.”The trial of Trump was over. The verdict: guilty of American carnage. The sentence: unknown until 5 November. The court of public opinion can be fickle. Just ask Hillary Clinton.Read more about the 2024 US election:
Fact checking the presidential debate
Trump rambles falsely about immigrants and fumbles question about Harris’s race
Taylor Swift endorses Harris in post signed ‘childless cat lady’
‘Maga mad libs’: How the debate played out on social media
ABC News hosts praised for keeping candidates on-topic
Presidential poll tracker More
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Harris delivered a ‘masterclass’ debate. Will it change the race?
The debate began on her terms. The vice-president of the United States walked across the stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, stretched out her hand and introduced herself“: “Kamala Harris.”It was, incredibly, the first time Harris had ever met Donald Trump, whose election to the White House in 2016 coincided with her election to the Senate. Since then, they have circled each other, Harris carving out a reputation in the Senate for grilling Trump administration officials. Four years later, she helped defeat Trump as Joe Biden’s running mate.Then, for more than 90-minutes on Tuesday night, Harris put Trump on the defensive, taunting him about the size of his crowds and pressing him over his shifting positions on abortion. It clearly rattled the former president, who took the bait again and again.“Donald Trump actually has no plan for you, because he is more interested in defending himself than he has been looking out for you,” Harris said, in what amounted to the former prosecutor’s opening argument to the American people.With the race on a knife’s edge, and Trump’s support relatively stable despite his 34 felony convictions, an assassination attempt and the replacement of his Democratic opponent, Harris could hardly afford a shaky performance, much less a defeat. In the end, she delivered what fellow Californian, the governor Gavin Newsom, described as a “masterclass”.“She kept looking in the camera, talking about you, talking about me, talking about the American people, talking about the issues they care about, and he was talking about dogs, and he was talking about crowd sizes and his grievances and his little pity party and his victim mindset,” he said. “It was a terrible night for him, but it was, most importantly, a great night for the American people.”During the debate, Trump wouldn’t commit to vetoing a national abortion ban, arguing the question was meritless because neither party would conceivably win the 60 votes needed to pass such legislation in the Senate. He declined to say he lost the last election, or that he regretted any of his actions on January 6, when he delivered an incendiary speech before his supporters stormed the US Capitol.Trump attempted to press his strengths, turning nearly every question back to the issue of the immigration. “She’s been so bad, it’s ridiculous,” he claimed at one point. But in the spin room following the debate, even his strongest supporters conceded Harris had delivered a decent performance.“We heard a lot of words better delivered than usual, I will admit, from Kamala Harris,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential hopeful turned Trump surrogate. “But actions speak louder than words.”Trump certainly landed some punches, and even a few laughs. He claimed Harris had adopted “my philosophy now” on the economy. “I was going to send her a Maga hat,” he quipped, as Harris threw her head back and laughed.Navigating rounds of testy exchanges, Harris sought to outline her policies while embracing the mantle of change, telling viewers that Trump would rely on “the same old, tired playbook: a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling”.“Let’s turn the page on this. Let’s not go back,” she said.Trump in turn sought to cast Harris as a carbon copy of the unpopular president, an attack line his surrogates had previewed in the spin room before the debate. At one point, Trump accused Harris of ripping off Biden’s economic plan.“It’s like, four sentences, like: ‘Run, Spot, run,’” he said.Trump also challenged Harris on abortion, trying to pin her down on whether she would approve legislation that allowed women to end a pregnancy into the third trimester. Deflecting the attack that she was a “Marxist” who supports far-left climate policies, Harris repeated that she would not ban fracking and touted the Biden administration’s energy agenda, prompting some liberal climate activists to decry the event as a “missed opportunity”.“Harris spent more time promoting fracking than laying out a bold vision for a clean energy future,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, the communications director of the Sunrise Movement, a climate advocacy group.But Trump ended the evening aggrieved by his treatment at the hands of the ABC News hosts, David Muir and Linsey Davis.“It was obviously three-on-one,” Trump told reporters in an appearance in the spin room after the debate, repeating the claim made by his surrogates that the moderators had treated him unfairly.In a departure from past presidential debates, the moderators played a fact-checking role in addition to asking questions, which infuriated Trump and his supporters. Davis pushed back on his claim that Democrats supported abortions after birth, which is illegal in all 50 states, while Muir refuted the false claim raised by Trump that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are abducting and eating pets.The significance of the debate, perhaps the candidates’ single biggest audience before election day, was underlined by Biden’s disastrous performance in June. But a good performance – or, perhaps more relevant in today’s fractured media environment, a viral moment – does not necessarily spell victory in November.The national mood remains sour. A strong majority – 61% – of voters say they want the next president to bring a “major change” to the country, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. Only 40% of voter say the vice-president represented “change” compared with 61% who said the former president did.And in 2016, Hillary Clinton was deemed the winner of all three of her debates against Trump, and he still won. It remains unclear whether there will be another debate between Harris and Trump.Speaking at Cherry Street Pier, a short distance from the debate site, Harris told a crowd that she and her running mate, Tim Walz, were still the “underdogs” in the race for the White House. But they ended the evening on a high note.“Tonight highlighted for the American people what’s at stake,” Harris said. “Hard work is good work and we will win.”As she finished her remarks, The Man by Taylor Swift blared at the venue just moments after the pop star, one of the music industry’s most celebrated cultural icons, announced her endorsement of the vice president.“Like many of you, I watched the debate tonight,” Swift wrote in an Instagram post. “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 Presidential Election.” More
