US presidential debates rarely feature much in the way of substantive policy debate, and last night’s showdown between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris was no different. Commentators praised Vice President Harris’s style, exemplified in her walking over to Trump’s end of the stage to introduce herself and ensure he shook her hand, “taking the fight directly to him,” as CNN’s Jake Tapper put it. There’s no doubt that the Democrats made a wise decision swapping Harris in for a declining President Joe Biden, a man who, as Trump absurdly put it, “doesn’t even know he’s alive.”
Yet it’s hard to avoid noticing that neither candidate is particularly forthcoming about policy details. At several points during the debate, Harris said she would explain her plans, only to then move on. Trump, meanwhile, merely claimed to have “concepts of a plan”; of Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for turning the United States into a union-free theocracy, the former president claimed not to have read it. (No surprise, either, that neither candidate mentioned Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, the twenty-six-year-old American who the Israel Defense Forces killed last week in the West Bank.)
Despite the paucity of substance, there was a back and forth on jobs around ninety minutes into the debate. In response to a question about climate change, Harris claimed that the Biden administration has created some 800,000 manufacturing jobs, in contrast to a decline in manufacturing work under Trump.
“I’m also proud to have the endorsement of the United Auto Workers and Shawn Fain, who also knows that part of building a clean-energy economy includes investing in American-made products, American automobiles,” Harris continued.
Trump responded by asserting that Chinese companies are building up operations in Mexico so as to undercut US automakers’ costs, flooding the domestic market with their products, which will “kill the…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Alex N. Press
