Home WebMail Thursday, October 31, 2024, 10:33 PM | Calgary | -3.1°C | Regions Advertise Login | Our platform is in maintenance mode. Some URLs may not be available. |
Posted: 2024-09-11T02:55:28Z | Updated: 2024-09-11T13:45:25Z

In their first and maybe last face-to-face encounter, Vice President Kamala Harris successfully got under Donald Trump s skin early in their debate Tuesday night, putting him into angry rally speech mode where he spent the rest of the encounter shouting his usual lies and insults.

He claimed his top officials, from chief of staff John Kelly to defense secretary Mark Esper to joint chiefs of staff chair Mark Milley were all terrible people. So when somebody does a bad job, and you take a guy like Esper, he was no good, I fired him.

He claimed no one ever left his campaign rallies early: People dont leave my rallies, we have the biggest rallies, the most incredible rallies in the history of politics.

He brought up a debunked conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town were eating peoples pets: Theyre eating the dogs, the people that came in, theyre eating the cats!

Eventually he even claimed that President Joe Biden disliked Harris because she was now the nominee instead of him: Ill give you a little secret. He hates her. He cant stand her.

Trump began the debate relatively calm, as he was during most of his debate against Biden in June, but lost that composure within 15 minutes of the start. He shook his head when she spoke, but seemed unwilling to look her way. He badgered the moderators into turning his microphone back on as they would try to move to the next question.

As the night progressed, he seemed to spiral further, allowing himself to be drawn off-topic, wandering off onto unrelated tangents praise for Hungarys autocratic ruler Viktor Orban, for example and lashing out with personal attacks.

Shes a Marxist, he claimed. Her fathers a Marxist professor and he taught her well.

From there, Trumps lies came fast and at high volume. He falsely claimed that foreign countries pay U.S. tariffs, when in reality American importers and consumers do. He falsely claimed that some states allow parents to murder newborn babies if they decide they dont want them. He repeated a frequent claim without any evidence that crime rates are falling all over the world because they are sending their criminals to the United States.

When the ABC News moderators asked about his coup attempt to remain in office despite losing the 2020 election and his failure to end the violence at the Capitol he himself had unleashed, Trump again said he had done nothing wrong and repeated his lies that the election had been stolen from him.

On this issue, as in many others, Harris pointed out that he was lying and urged Americans not to let him back into office. Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people, she said. So lets be clear about that, and clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that. But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts, as he did in the past, to upend the will of the voters in a free election.

When Trump claimed that Harris would ban fracking in Pennsylvania and confiscate peoples guns, Harris responded more bluntly: Stop with the continuous lying with this stuff.