Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are veering sharply in how they gear up for Tuesday’s presidential debate, setting up a showdown that reflects not just two separate visions for the country but two politicians who approach big moments very differently.
The vice president is cloistered in a historic hotel in downtown Pittsburgh where she can focus on honing crisp two-minute answers, per the debate’s rules. She’s been working with aides since Thursday and chose a venue that allows the Democratic nominee the option of mingling with swing-state voters.
Trump, the Republican nominee, publicly dismisses the value of studying for the debate. The former president is choosing instead to fill his days with campaign-related events on the premise that he’ll know what he needs to do once he steps on the debate stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
“You can go in with all the strategy you want but you have to sort of feel it out as the debate’s taking place,” he said during a town hall with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Trump then quoted former boxing great Mike Tyson, who said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Kamala Harris will be spending a great deal of time both studying policy and practicing with seasoned opponents and people with a deep understanding of Trump’s psychology.
Trump will argue with a cheeseburger.
Hamberder.
cheeberder
Trump will argue with a cheeseburger
And will angrily eat it when it wins the argument
Loses
That’s a far better summary than anything I’ve seen in the press. Good work!
Hahahaha!!!
Kind of ironic that Donnie uses that particular Mike Tyson quote because he’s a whiny little bitch who is afraid of direct confrontation and has only ever punched women.
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Yes they do Donnie. I wonder if you’ll remember that when you’re laid out on the debate stage from the beatdown Kamala inflicts on your orange ass.
He’s into being spanked on the ass. Ask Stormy Daniels.
You don’t think that maybe this was a figure of speech? Like saying, “life slaps you in the face”.
The “beatdown” the comment refers to is also a figure of speech.
So Trump’s plan is to punch her in the face on live TV?
It’s a bold move…If he does I would like the Secret Service let her punch him back just to see his orange surprised pikachu face.
You know. That’s actually an interesting hypothetical. How does the Secret Service react if two people with Secret Service protection try to fight each other? I imagine they would first protect whoever has the most seniority, as in the current serving president, then current vice president, etc. But what if say, two former presidents try to duke it out?
Or can the president waive Secret Service protection? Since the president has broad immunity for ‘official acts’, does this mean the president can now duel someone on the White House Lawn at dawn?
They each have their own protection detail. Each will quickly move to protect the one they are responsible for, which will mean separating them (probably by a lot of distance).
Someone under SS protection can choose to waive it. There are some former presidents who deemed it unnecessary later in life.
No idea about the rest of your hypothetical
I imagine it would look something like NFL refs trying to breakup a fight.
I’d assume that they’re different details and chains-of-command so each to their own.
let_them_fight.jpg
I hope Harris doesn’t over prepare, she does need to maintain a certain level of off the cuff affability.
Over preparation was Biden’s fatal error, he was struggling so hard to hit his talking points he couldn’t keep things straight. Obviously things are vastly different with Harris, but she’d be best to not just be a talking point machine.
That’s the main reason I gave up on watching political debates years ago, because nothing ever gets directly answered. It’s all fillers and boasting about past hurrahs and talking points.
If they just answered the fucking questions I’d be happy.
Calling these things presidential “debates” is rich, indeed.
I totally see your point.
But with the switch from “when they go low,…” to “fuck it, we can hut below the belt even better”, I gotta admit I am quite interested to see how she will handle a formal debate: Hammer phrases like everyone before or hitting hard and agile.
Idk, somehow I feel we might see something refreshing this time.
Maybe I’ll watch the highlights or something 'cause I can’t stand Trump’s voice, his meandering and the bullshit he spews. His mere existence just pisses me off to no end.
Preach
The media spent so much time focusing on zingers over ideas, they kinda created the mess.
Biden’s stutter leads him to greatly overprepare.
well one advantage she has is that she’s not legally dead.
also she seems to actually study things to understand them, not to parrot them by heart. being a prosecutor she probably knows how to study things and make cases.
What she needs to be doing is trumping all over Trump. Like farting all over his face. No cancel that. Not farting. She needs to be consistently SHARTING all over his face, all over his whiskers and in his mouth.
Yessss… yessss.
Side note: fuck Shapiro that guys a fucking sellout like I’ve never liked the guy at all. Obviously. And I’ve never really thought he was actually principled. But like he has always tried to act like he’s super rational and it just makes no sense that he could still be supporting someone who blatantly tried to steal the election to stop the transfer of power.
His excuses to justify still supporting Trump make me sick and he also needs a caking of shart IMO.
On one hand, my knee jerk reaction is to say debates don’t really matter.
On the other hand, Biden literally dropped out over the last one.
71% of voters say that their mind is made up about Trump. 51% of voters said the same about Harris. There’s a lot of ground for Harris to gain.
Yeah kinda special case there though I think. But of course they matter to an extent. I think there’s trumps strong hardcore nutter fans who would rather have Putin govern them than Biden or Kamala (actually heard one of them say this on a YT video about Biden).
These people won’t be swayed away from him by anything, therefore debate is irrelevant for them.
Then there are also hardcore anti trump people, the only sensible position to have, frankly. That would be the category I fall into but I’m not American so irrelevant for me lol.
But yeah, for those people, whatever percentage that is the debate doesn’t really matter either.
Then there are some people who are hardcore republicans. Really don’t like Dems but also do kind care about trump being cray cray and maybe cancelling all future elections if he gets in. So these people might be swayed I guess? I dunno. As I’ve wrote this out, I’ve actually more or less come to the conclusion that there really shouldn’t be many people who the debate will change their mind on anything.
But there has to be some undecided but it’s a weird position that I can’t really understand so who knows if it will sway those people either way. Some of them I guess. Also the evidence for these charges against Trump are coming out in a week or so I think, whenever that happens, that’s not gonna be good for trump. That’s for sure. How bad it will affect him I can’t really say, but it’s certainty not gonna increase his support.
So I can only imagine it will thankfully DECREASE IT. Overall I think Trumps bitten off more than he can chew. With these charges and with him basically alienating half the population (women) over abortion, I’d like to THINK, the Dems have this in the bag. But fucking vote people!
Anyone with sense was saying Biden needed to step down before the debate. It was plain as day to everyone except the Democratic strategists, and, well, Lemmy.
I think Harris may be neglecting a key part of necessary prep. She should spend some time at the zoo outside the monkey enclosure dodging their flung shit, or I fear she might lose.
It’s Pennsylvania, so they’re flinging batteries, but otherwise you’re right.
Well yeah. Because Trump’s strategy will just be to talk about all the shit he already talks about, regardless of the question. If he does actually try to answer the question he will likely just waffle, call things fake news, call Kamala a communist, shit like that. Kamala will have a normal strategy of actually answering the questions like literally any other politician would in any other debate. Hopefully she can also shut down Trump with a few simple similar to “he’s weird” comments, because even though it’s a shame that they work, they do actually work for just dismissing his bullshit and are simple to understand for the simple minded.
As I say, it’s a shame so many people are apparently that simple, that stuff like “make America great again” and “fake news, that’s just fake news” actually work: but they do work for persuading certain simple minded people who the Democrats need votes from.
It’s kinda how the whole “when they go low we go high” thing doesn’t actually work as a complete strategy.
Yes she needs to be making coherent, actual points as well. But having the odd simple put down and knowing when something Trump has said is so insane, that it actually doesn’t deserve a proper answer, but simply a dismissal is important.
Otherwise you end up being on the defensive constantly and run out of time to actually make your own coherent points.
Will you shut up, man?
I doubt it. I don’t usually.
Sorry, I agree with you. It reminded me of this line from Biden during the 2020 debate with Trump. It had similar energy to what you’re saying and just cut through Trump’s bullshit to highlight what we were all thinking.
The sad part is his base won’t care how stupid he looks and how great she does. They’re beyond reasoning. I do look forward to our future President kicking the shit out of him at the debate though.
Debates aren’t for the candidate’s supporters. They’re for the undecided voters. How anyone is still undecided at this point is the real mystery
I’m convinced anyone who claims they’re undecided is just being polite to the pollster instead of telling them “none of your business”. Or “undecided” is some statistical construct based on the last 70 years of data. Or, someone who hasn’t been paying attention and doesn’t want to admit to their own apathy.
The idea that someone has thoroughly weighed the offerings and is still waiting for more information to make a decision is utter fucking nonsense.
I think it’s not so much people who are undecided about who they will vote for, and more people who are undecided whether they will bother to vote for their preferred candidate or just stay home.
I was going to say the real mystery is how anyone could vote for the racist, but then yeah, that’s why they’re voting for him. We have a lot of shitty people in this country, but then again, the world is full of shitty people.
Back in 2000 60 Minutes commentator Andy Rooney said that if you couldn’t decide between George Bush and John Kerry in five minutes you were too stupid to have a vote.
There’s a lot of Americans who don’t follow news and to them they only started paying attention after Labor Day.
If the article said that Trump was huffing paint and doing whippits as prep I would believe it.
I would enjoy it if she brought out a large 2 minute countdown timer to start every time he starts talking.
Wait, is he gonna take a swing at Harris?
Looking forward to the grand American tradition of having candidates accuse each other of doing good things while vehemently denying the other’s slanderous accusations that they would ever do anything good.
Preposterous! Nobody has ever accused Donald Trump of doing a good thing.
He gets accused of wanting to deescalate conflicts, pull out of NATO, and generally refusing to uphold the constant state of war that every single US politician wants. The fact that he isn’t ideologically invested in stupid pointless conflicts is literally his only positive quality, so of course it’s where a lot of criticism gets directed, in order to uphold the grand American tradition. Of course, he’s not actually ideologically opposed to stupid pointless wars, so the machinery still gets to run uninterrupted, but he did at least give us an excellent roast of John Bolton, a notorious hawk.
I wish we could ever get offered a candidate who’s actually as isolationist as Trump gets accused of being, but unfortunately he’s not it. We got rising tensions and a trade war with China, which Biden normalized, and we got pushed to the brink of WWIII with the assassination of Soleimani, which Biden’s also following up by supporting Israel’s antics. Voters will never be given any sort of choice or input about such matters, and Trump is no exception, despite what people say.
He gets accused of wanting to deescalate conflicts, pull out of NATO, and generally refusing to uphold the constant state of war that every single US politician wants.
Just going off e.g. the stunt he pulled with moving the embassy to Jerusalem, I would say this sentence is giving him way too much benefit of the doubt.
The way see it, what he is mostly accused of is claiming to want to do those things (and most candidates would claim they wanted to “solve” e.g. the middle east conflict) but not actually having any kind of realistic idea of how to achieve any of them. Possibly besides pulling out of NATO, which, given the current state of the world, is a stretch to call this a “good thing”.
Also, when it comes to stupid pointless conflicts, I think we can rest assured that he will always be invested in them on the side he believes he can personally profit off the most. Which is an ideology too if you think about it.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard a politician accuse Trump of just “not having a realistic idea to achieve” isolationist goals. They attack him for having isolationist goals at all (which he doesn’t actually have, really), because all of them are extreme interventionists.
Now you’re jumping from “deescalating conflicts” to isolationist goals. That’s not the same thing. However it beautifully illustrates the point of my original comment. It’s highly debatable if “isolationist goals” are a good thing he would be accused of.
(Actually) Deescalating conflicts would be a good thing, I think most would agree. He just won’t be able to, because his idea of deescalating is submitting to dictators. His interest isn’t solving anything, just blocking out the noise and taking credit.
Well, I mean, if you’re invested in the preservation of US hegemony for some reason, then I guess it’s debatable whether keeping up a constant state of war and bloodshed is a good or bad thing. I, however, am not. I don’t give a rat’s ass about US hegemony and I would love to have a president who’s willing to “”“submit to dictators”“” to avoid conflict.
The only people who actually gain anything at all from US hegemony are the people at the top. Nobody else, at home or abroad, benefits from it at all. Rather, we get all our domestic programs cut to fund a war machine that spreads fear and destruction to innocent people around the globe. Unless you’re part of the elite, invest heavily in companies like Lockheed Martin, or have confused national interests with your own, then yes, isolationist policies are a good thing.
You want America to be isolated? In a world where we have a Russia and a China? Are you for real dude?
When the US finally pulled it’s finger out of its arse and stopped just benefiting financially from world war 2 and decided (more like was forced but whatever) to join in and fight Hitler, they were able to end it.
That was a good thing. The UN and NATO originated off the back of that stuff.
You cannot be isolated in a 2024 globalised world. Absolutely bizarre take. I suppose you don’t want to trade with anyone else either right?
