Hey, we like to take ourselves seriously! That’s the flaw of these major electoral events, these exceptional face-to-face meetings followed by tens of millions of American voters and hundreds of millions of curious people around the world.
We like to delude ourselves that viewers, notebook in hand, are seriously weighing up the value of a particular policy or argument presented by the candidates.
In reality, it’s all in the image, in the impression left by Trump and Harris! Did he make a fool of him? Did she seem to know what she was talking about? Make no mistake, the topics discussed and the answers given deserve to be dissected and they will be. One of these two candidates, all the same, will lead the world’s leading economic, cultural and military power for four years.
What viewers saw, first and foremost, was an angry, disgusted man yelling his often-heard answers into the microphone. Facing him was a woman prepared in a way few expected her to be so well prepared.
The Republican candidate chose to multiply the exaggerations, to chain the approximations and the falsehoods in the hope, probably, of shocking the viewers. An apocalyptic vision of the United States under the Biden administration amplified to the point where we came to not even see with optimism his return to the White House.
The Democratic candidate, for her part, chose to fight, to fight back, with barbs that hit home – you should have seen her opponent’s face – when she recalled her criminal trials and her civil conviction for sexual assault.
Kamala Harris offered, and I quote, “a new generation of leaders, a generation that brings new dynamism to our country.” Donald Trump, for his part, had nothing better to offer than his old grudges.
