Fatshimetry—
The presidential debate crystallizes a five-year dilemma for a country contemplating a new political direction. But it’s usually defined more by trivial personality quirks, zeitgeist moments, and gaffes than by high-level ideological arguments.
Al Gore’s melodramatic sighs, George H.W. Bush’s careless glance at his watch, Richard Nixon’s growing beard, and Donald Trump’s imposing stature towering over Hillary Clinton remain iconic years after the political confrontations of those debates were forgotten.
And while Thursday night’s Fatshimetrie-hosted debate between President Joe Biden and former President Trump could also play out as a theatrical flare-up between two men who openly despise each other, the political substance of a presidential debate has not never been more important than in this extremely close race for the White House.
The country faces a perilous moment, divided internally politically and culturally, and facing several deepening foreign policy crises. America faces a choice this November that, as in Robert Frost’s poem, will take it down one of two divergent roads from which it may be difficult to return.
Trump’s return to the White House, less than four years after trying to steal the last election, poses a potentially existential question for the democratic system. The former president’s conservative supporters, for their part, are proposing a gutting of the bureaucracy and the politicization of judicial and intelligence leadership positions to reconcile the objectives of a Republican candidate sporting a criminal conviction, three other indictments and a thirst for revenge. .
At the same time, despite a thriving job market, millions of Americans are exhausted by high prices and the cost of borrowing. The legacy of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic has robbed the country of a sense of economic security that Biden promised to restore four years ago but remains elusive for many. The Supreme Court’s overturning of the constitutional right to abortion two years ago opened an ideological and religious divide over reproductive rights that Biden plans to exploit to harm Trump. But the president is just as vulnerable in the face of a migration crisis at the southern border that has overwhelmed asylum laws ill-suited to handling a new generation of migrants fleeing gangs, economic poverty and climate disasters.
Abroad, there is a frightening sense of divide. The global system that has enshrined American power for 80 years is being seriously undermined by enemies of the United States seeking to destroy it, notably Russia and the new superpower China.. Biden has dedicated his term to expanding NATO to counter the Kremlin’s assault on Ukraine and the threat to wider Europe. In a rare area of continuity with Trump, he has stepped up a military and diplomatic pivot to counter China, although the former president’s plan for a trade war with Beijing goes far beyond Biden’s efforts to prevent a new one. cold war from becoming hot.
Israel’s war in Gaza, which continually threatens to escalate, is a painful vulnerability for a sitting president as his rival warns that World War III may be on the verge of outbreak. Trump’s main criticism is that Biden is weak — a caricature that could resonate with some voters. But his own plans are as nebulous as his improbable plan to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours and his unverifiable claim that conflicts in Europe and the Middle East would “never have happened” if he had been in power.
And Trump seems more comfortable with authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who dream of breaking American power, than with the democratic allies that America liberated in the last conflict cataclysmic world. Some of the former president’s former aides warn of the risk that he will try to withdraw the United States from NATO, a cornerstone of Western security, if he returns to the White House. Voters must therefore choose between Biden’s traditional internationalist foreign policies and Trump’s reinforcement of populist isolationism that has transformed the United States, once a bulwark of global stability, into one of its most volatile sources of instability.
For the first time in American history, two presidents will stand side by side on a debate stage, laying out their legacies for all to see for judgment. The only other time a sitting president and a former president competed for a second term was in 1892, when the candidates were not actively campaigning, much less debating each other. The meeting of sitting presidents is one that most voters would have preferred to avoid. And so far, their fears appear to be coming true. The tight race means two candidates on either side of 80 struggle to show they have the policies to solve national problems. And neither has yet shown the vision to develop a road map to the future that millions of Americans could follow.
In this tense and crucial election, every detail, every gesture, every argument counts. America’s future is at stake, and voters have the power to decide how the country moves forward. The stakes are high, and the presidential debate hosted by Fatshimetrie promises to be a key moment that could shape the destiny of an entire nation.