One always reads the newspaper in a fit of irritability. So imagine, dear reader, how painful it is to return to newspaper articles and try to extract the pith (or ‘take the piss’ as we now more medically and less lispingly say). The subject today is the recent ABC televised debate between Presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. I usually tend to check three sources of news, which is perhaps a bit negligent of me, but it gives me a loose sense of what is going on: I read the Guardian for the standard absurd lines which are probably the-stating-of-the-obvious for everyone I used to know at university in the 1990s; I read the Spectator to try to hold falteringly onto the hope that there is sense and civilisation of a sort carrying on within the Overton frame; and I read the Sceptic just to keep up with whatever it is I really should know about and would have missed otherwise – not being on Twitter.
And so we find that the Guardian yesterday had a profusion of pieces: a clot of articles so great it threatened to give any reader of the newspaper a stroke. Let me simply quote some headlines:
- ‘How the Trump-Harris debate played out on social media: “Maga mad libs’”‘
- ‘Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris for president in post signed “childless cat lady”‘
- ‘Harris targets Trump for falsehoods on abortion and immigration in fiery debate’
- ‘Harris’s powerful abortion stance and Trump’s fact-checks: key takeaways from the debate’
- ‘Prosecutor Kamala Harris put Trump on trial, but the court of public opinion can be fickle’
- ‘Harris delivered a “masterclass” debate. Will it change the race?’
- ‘Who won Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s first debate? Our panel reacts’
- ‘Kamala Harris, unlike Donald Trump, was well prepared for this debate – and won’
- ‘Trump’s dour negativity contrasted with Harris’s optimism about America’
- ‘Fact-checking Trump’s debate claims: from abortion to Project 2025’
- ‘Trump Media drops to fresh stock market low after presidential debate’
- ‘Harris clearly beat Trump – not that you’d know it from the Right-wing media. Shame on them’
- ‘Trump campaign publicly claims debate win but privately express skepticism [sic, or perhaps I should say sik]’
- ‘Republicans dismayed by Trump’s “bad” and “unprepared” debate performance’
- ‘The Guardian view on the U.S. Presidential debate: Kamala Harris’s triumph isn’t transformative, but it was essential’
Good God. At least 15 articles. I think I innocently read four or five of them. I read the rest out of duty. So let’s examine some of them.
Canon wrote that Trump “spewed misinformation”, was “fact-checked”, and “spouted salacious and sometimes racist claims about immigrants”. Gambino quoted Gavin Newsome: “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. It was a terrible night for him, but it was, most importantly, a great night for the American people.” Her report was otherwise fairly balanced. It ended by observing that Taylor Swift had endorsed Harris on Instagram. Sullivan, who devoted an article to Swift’s endorsement, quoted Swift as saying that “the simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth”. Robert Tait quoted some Republicans, including Trump’s former rival Chris Christie, as saying that Trump was not prepared. This line was echoed in another piece by Rebecca Solnit, who offered the balanced analysis that Harris “spoke in lucid paragraphs that were clearly the result of careful preparation”, but 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” anti-immigration politics.
The Guardian panel was asked who won. This is amusing but you must be patient. First member of the panel: “Harris prevailed. Harris won the debate.” Second member of the panel: “Harris commanded the stage. While Harris sought to uplight and empower, Trump resorted to divisive language.” Third member of the panel: “Harris won easily. Trump… confused… angry… narcissistic… authoritarian.” Fourth member of the panel: “Harris won the evening and the debate.” Fifth member of the panel: “Harris dominated the debate. Trump… clutched at bigoted straws.” Sixth member of the panel: “All Harris had to do on Tuesday night to be celebrated by the media was to occupy it and string together sentences generally recognised as English. She managed to do that.”
I hope you persisted to the sixth. The Guardian sensibly placed this bit of free thinking at the bottom of the page, hoping that everyone would have been vaccinated into sweet sleep by the five kamala-lullabies before they reached this spiky protein hit. I should record the sixth panellist’s name so we can pay homage: Bhaskar Sunkara.
Back to the usual line was Brockes, who could not believe that other newspapers cared to differ with Guardian editorial standards. She quoted the Telegraph expressing some reluctance to admit that Harris won. And she also quoted the Daily Mail saying that both were “pathetic”. Brockes however, was unimpressed with this impressive display of scepticism, calling it “cognitive dissonance”, and calling Trump a “lunatic”. Best of all was Robert Reich who came in late with the sort of diatribe that makes me wish I was on the Guardian shilling (or on the Guardian, shilling): “blubbering idiot… lies… shambolic… failure… belligerence… ageing, cantankerous white man… mess of a human being… raging fount of grievance…personal malignancy… bottomless negativism.”
I should say that I listened to the debate and thought that everyone did as well as could be reasonably expected: which is not very well. How well would you do? How well would I do? I can speak quite well when lecturing; but I doubt it would transfer very well to a debate. Trump is the master of the homily and digression: no one on God’s earth should ever have supposed that Trump is ever going to be the master of a brief or exhibit forensic accuracy. He is a trumpet-blower and a powder-monkey and a town-crier: he is not a barrister.
The Spectator also mostly told us, in articles by Kate Andrews, Amber Duke and Charles Lipson, that Trump lost the debate. Not great. Less amusing to read than the Guardian pieces, which at least showed spirit.
Who won the debate? I have four answers.
First answer. Trump won the debate.
Against the media consensus that Harris won the debate, I recognise that politics is entirely subjective, and if I am forced to take sides I take the side of the man who thinks for himself, is more amusing, and is more or less aware that there is a glitch in the Matrix: also that Kamala Harris may be one such glitch. I admit that this is not a very sceptical answer. Fear not. The next three answers are more sceptical.
Second answer. No one won the debate.
How can one ‘win’ a debate? There are no points. There was no audience, who expressed a preference before the debate and then another preference afterwards. There was no phone-in. Hitting was not allowed. There was no possible metric except the one the Guardian and Taylor Swift mentioned, ‘truth’. To which we have to say, as Pilate said, speaking as a man-of-the-world, “What is truth?” Jesus did not answer, but we suppose he at least could have done. Whereas one would not like to trust Rebecca Solnit or the ABC fact-checking moderators with an answer. The whole thing is a circus of motes and beams.
Third answer. Trump won the debate, Harris won the debate, both Trump and Harris won the Debate, neither Trump nor Harris won the debate.
The third answer should always be the cleverest one. Have you heard of the catuskoti of Nagarjuna? Nagarjuna was a Buddhist philosopher, an adept of the Mahayana sect. He was an extremely clever casuist. His version of scepticism was not simply the epoche of the Greek sceptics. The Greek sceptics like balancing two propositions, or the supposed truth and falsity of one proposition, and declaring that they were equal in status. But the ancestor of the sceptics, one Pyrrho, arranged the original sceptical insight into a fourfold chant: he said that of any proposition, “it no more is than it is not or it both is and is not or it neither is nor is not”. Pyrrho went to India with Alexander and may have picked this argument up there: or taught it to the Indians – no one knows – or perhaps they were both taught it by a Scythian sage. But it is the same argument that Nagarjuna used a few hundred years later when he wrote arguments of the form “all things exist, all things do not exist, all things both do and do not exist, all things neither do nor do not exist”.
This sort of casuistry appears, at first sight, to be a cause of logical exhaustion. But the purpose was, at least for Nagarjuna, to intensity the Buddhist’s awareness that, even in following the Buddha, he might be attached to something, namely, the Buddha, and that this might be a cause of suffering. Buddhists were (and are) famous for the distinction between nirvana, the world of indifference, and samsara, the world of attachment, frustration and suffering, that is, the ordinary world. Nagarjuna was the philosopher who paradoxically took this distinction and argued that nirvana was samsara and samsara was nirvana. What he meant was that anyone who attempted to hold onto or define or enter nirvana had fixed it and therefore lost it, and that samsara was in fact the same world as the world of nirvana but experienced in suffering and attachment rather than experienced in the right way.
Anyhow, all that aside, it is a pretty good argument. Your friend says, “Harris won the debate.” You suck on your briar, and after a pause, say, “Yes. Harris won the debate, Trump won the debate…”
“Pardon…”
“Both Trump and Harris won the debate…”
“Er…”
“And neither Trump nor Harris won the debate.”
That’ll be the best pipe you ever smoked.
Fourth answer. Nick Clegg
No one in the entire history of the world — with the singular exception of the Right Hon. Sir Nicholas Clegg — has ever ‘won’ such a debate. And Clegg only won because he was a third candidate, with both David Cameron and Gordon Brown taking it in turns to appeal to him: “I agree with Nick.” If only RFK had been there, alongside Trump and Harris, he would have won the debate. But since he wasn’t, the correct answer is “Nick Clegg”.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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OFF -T When the WEF 2nd in command Noah Harari proclaimed “We now have the technology to hack humans”…..We must assume through some sort of micro chip unless there is technology that we don’t know about. Some say the general public is ten years behind what the military intelligence already has.
Technology to hack humans has been readily available since the 5th millenium BC. One can only wonder why it took the WEF so long to learn that.
Technology to hack humans has been demonstrated in Rwanda on a lage scale, and the progeny of that great step forward for ma kind are now living in the UK and rolling out the same here.
Lucky us!
Never watched debates, never shall. Theatre and largely uninformative.
Who won the debate?
I read that the ABC ‘moderators’ won the debate and are now running to replace on-her-knees-Harris as the unDemocratic Communist Party boss.
Drumpf is a quackcine, lockdown, abortion salesman. Harris is as stupid as a bag of rocks and has done nothing to earn a nomination to run anything. The US is a failed state as given by the 2020 election fraud, massive criminality and the endless wars and inevitable bankruptcy.
It does not matter who won anything. The CIA-DoD decide.
Trump winning won’t change the long term trajectory of the world by itself, but it could provide enough breathing space to allow other developments, such as in free speech and crypto, have an impact. Things are moving very fast now and a 4 year window is not nothing.
Just a big club
They look like actual sisters to me!
ABC and Disney killed future traditional debates between candidates vs. debates between moderators and one candidate.
I would question just how meaningful this debate was in the first place. It was more like a tick box exercise that had to be completed because this is protocol. I can see it changing nothing, to be honest. I can’t imagine people who would’ve voted Trump being swayed and now voting Harris, or vice versa. Surely if there were any debate that may have swayed people it was the one with Biden, but the thing is people will vote Harris just because they hate Trump, but paradoxically still refer to themselves as ”patriots” despite the never-ending stream of evidence that demonstrates the Dems are the polar opposite of patriotic, democracy being the last thing they’re interested in. It’s not just a case of double-standards, it’s like they’re actually schizophrenic or something.
Anyway, not sure how accurate this is or what difference it’ll even make. After all, how many of those millions of immigrants are going to vote Trump, whether they’ve become ‘legalized aliens’ in time or not? And that’s before we mention the *many* traitorous Leftards who demonstrably hate their country over there.
I thought Trump would have this in the bag but with the level of corruption and general shady shenanigans going on I’m starting to have my doubts. Surely to God that stupid, lying, incompetent, untrustworthy, treacherous biatch can’t possibly win??!
”BREAKING: Trump wins the undecided vote post-debate with 60%, according to the 10 Reuters interviewed.
Trump – 60%
Harris – 30%
Unsure – 10%”
https://x.com/LeadingReport/status/1833924905685094702
Whether it is meaningful or not depends on what happened to the host’s advertising revenue, a cynic might observe.
I think this is good advice from Billboard Chris. Talk less about the economy and more about the kids, specifically the toxic gender ideology. People could genuinely switch parties over this issue;
”Dear Trump advisors,
Please impress upon President Trump the importance of how he should be all over the gender ideology issue.
Not a word was spoken tonight about the abuse of kids or the madness of men in women’s sports.
You destroy Kamala Harris on this issue, and win so many independents and voters from traditional Democrat demographics.”
More agreement from this Texas State rep;
”Agreed! Perhaps people are telling him not to touch it but you’re 100% correct. It is a huge issue where moderate voters 100% will agree with Donald Trump and be shocked to learn her stance.
I know for a fact that most Black American voters have no idea that she supports castration of boys and sterilization of girls which is clearly what the procedures do she had never been asked why she supports giving children estrogen and testosterone and sex change surgeries. If she says she doesn’t, she’ll finished the LGBTQIA transgender vote. If she says she does support it (or tries to pivot) she’s finished with moderate Americans. If she lies and says it’s not happening, he can flat out expose the fact that Democratic lawmakers and the Biden Harris administration are opposing every single bill to raise the age to 18.
Donald Trump should be able to ask directly if she would agree to issue an executive order that transgender drugs and surgeries can’t be administered to children in our country under the age of 18. She will never, ever say it.
I wish I could help with a debate prep on this issue!! It’s time for the Democrats and Kamala to admit the truth and not keep gaslighting about the dangers of transgender ideology on America’s children.”
https://x.com/ShawnieT146/status/1833880188246966397
My memory is vague but didn’t Harris try to block information about someone on death row, that would surely be an open goal.
Rings a bell. It’s all become a blur, if I’m honest. There’s just so much controversy and corruption associated with her.
Maybe not all share this view, but I find Kamala Harris instantly dislikeable in a way that Biden is not, with Obama and Clinton being positively likeable (ignoring their policy stances). Kamala Harris comes across as as a thick, condescending boss girl, which is what she is. This may be enough to cancel out the aspects of Trump’s personality that some dislike and could help flip some of the more working class states like Pennsylvania.
I don’t disagree, but I’m reminded of a friend who finds Trump and Putin instantly dislikeable, and it’s easy to pin it down to the image deliberately formed of them by the media over the years. We find Hitler instantly dislikeable too – forgetting that he was the darling of both Germany and Britain in the 1930s – the dynamic new saviour of a failing nation.
What do we know about Kamala that wasn’t fed to us by a press that labelled her as a buffoon until she replaced Biden as a candidate and became a Wise Stateswoman? And why did we like Clinton or Obama (knowing neither) except through how they were presented by the press back then as young, gifted and (in one case) black?
Could say the same for the pocket tyrant Macron that the BBC were salivating over in 2017.
I think it’s obvious that Clinton and Obama were fairly likeable – although maybe it wasn’t obvious at the time they were first campaigning for the presidency.
Given the way the human mind is programmed, the correct answer is whichever one hears most times.
So for Guardian readers it’s obviously Harris.
I haven’t heard that Trump won practically at all, so I don’t think that’s the right answer.
All that said, Trump isn’t quite himself. His heart doesn’t feel in it in the same way any more.
I reckon he’s been told to ease up or the next assassination attempt won’t fail, or it will be on one of his kids, or he’ll be sentenced to prison (they’ve moved the sentencing of his NY hush money case to just after the election, pretty suss).
It feels like this is a cakewalk from here on out for the half black half Indian puppet doll.
Totally agree – Drumpf has been warned. The July assassination failure was a warning and like you said, his family is now in the frame for target practice. The CIA-DoD have must have given the quackcine salesman an in person and very personal warning. Drumpf is a part of the Establishment, buddies with the Clintons etc etc. as well so he ain’t going to save anyone.
Neither won, it was the moderators wot won it.
Babylon Bee…
Democrats To Replace Kamala On Ballot With ABC Moderators
— Following last night’s debate in which David Muir and Linsey Davis employed an impressive strategy against former President Donald Trump, news broke that Democrats have decided to replace Kamala Harris on the ballot with the ABC moderators.
Discussions began almost immediately after the debate to replace the Harris-Walz ticket with Muir-Davis based entirely on the moderators’ ability to articulate Harris’ positions and attack Trump better than she ever has.
At publishing time, Muir and Davis released a statement that they were looking forward to their next debate against Trump, which they would moderate themselves.
“Who won Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s first debate? Our panel reacts”
That is the only neutral statement but it’s a fair bet who the ‘panel’ will be in favour of. And Harris couldn’t give an answer on abortion regarding at how many months including nine months would be OK for her to neutralise the unborn. That seemed a back of the net as they say.
” “all things exist, all things do not exist, all things both do and do not exist, all things neither do nor do not exist”…..That’s cleared that up!
I read this for amusement and it was amusing. But why the outcome of the debate matter? Both Trump and Harris are running in the US presidental elections and I neither have a right to vote for either of both nor do I live in the USA. Personally, I consider Trump less unsympathetic but he certainly doesn’t care and neither do I, at least not really. Once the election is over, we’ll know who became POTUS and will have to deal with the fallout of that. I think that’s enough.
Trump could have done better I suppose.——-He jumped straight into the migrant issue with tales of Haitians eating cats. Now there is truth in this but sometimes you have to be more subtle in the immigration issue than jumping straight to something like that which makes it sound that this is the most important issue regarding why immigration is too high. —-It isn’t.
—–I think many got the impression that Harris won this debate because she always had this large grin on her face as if she was listening to a lunatic and everything he was saying was beyond parody. —-It isn’t. —-Notice though how when Trump called her a Marxist her head was not waving back and forth indicating she disagreed with that assessment of her. Which means she agreed she is a Marxist, and if Americans want Marxists running the show then go ahead and vote for the laughing smiling cuddling person, but they will regret it, because these people are One World Government People that believe in wealth redistribution all over the globe, and who has the most wealth? —The good old USA. –Watch your wallets guys and watch your energy bills because they are going to skyrocket just as Obama had the decency to admit.
Did Harris ‘win the debate’? Maybe yes, maybe no. But she still has to get from now until November with out some foible or weakness being exposed.
It was 3 v 1 but just as no one can barrage the Farage so nobody can give Trump the hump.. Vote President Trump as if your freedoms depend on it because they do
Pointless article.
Pointless debate.
Pointless outcome with no measure to act as a metric of success or failure.