US President Joe Biden and his rival, former Republican President Donald Trump, avoided shaking hands as they began the first televised electoral debate of the November 5 elections.
The first to enter was Biden, who smiled and greeted the moderators, followed by Trump, much more serious, who did not look at his opponent.
As agreed, the current president sat on the podium on the right side of the screen and the former president on the left.
The first face-to-face of this year takes place at the CNN studios in Atlanta, Georgia, lasting 90 minutes and without the presence of an audience.
US President Joe Biden called Donald Trump a fool and a loser. “My son was not a loser or a fool. You are the fool. You are the loser,” the president noted.
What did they think about abortion?
Donald Trump affirmed that he will not block abortions that are performed through drugs if he wins the November elections, which represents a slight clarification of his position on reproductive rights, a central issue for the elections.
Trump also said he believes in three exceptions to allowing abortion: in cases of rape, incest and risk to the mother’s life.
Biden, for his part, took advantage of the issue to attack his opponent. The current president promised that if he is re-elected and gets the support of Congress, currently divided between Democrats in the Senate and Republicans in the House of Representatives, he will codify into law the Roe v. Wade ruling, which protected the right to abortion from 1973 until June 2022, when it was repealed by the Supreme Court.
Trump lashed out at Biden for his immigration policy
Donald Trump has accused the current US leader, Joe Biden, of opening the country to criminals and causing citizens to currently live in a “rat’s nest”, with murders perpetrated by immigrants.
“We’re living in a rat’s nest right now. They’re killing our people in New York, in California, in every state, because we don’t have borders anymore,” he told Biden.
In his speech, he mentioned the case of 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray, murdered on June 17 in Houston, Texas, and for which two Venezuelans who recently entered the country were arrested and each was given a bail of 10 million dollars.
“It’s horrible,” he said, accusing his opponent of a complete lack of control.
Biden called that accusation ridiculous: “There are many women raped by their partners, brothers and sisters. That is simply ridiculous,” he said, highlighting how his Administration has worked to significantly increase both the number of agents at the border and asylum capacity.
Trump has promised that if re-elected, he will close the southern US border on his first day in office and repeal all measures issued by Biden, including restrictions on asylum seekers. He will also order a “mass deportation” of criminals, as part of his rhetoric that illegal immigrants are violent.
Topic of economics: what they both said
Joe Biden and Donald Trump traded attacks on his management of the economy in the first minutes of their debate, offering voters a rare face-to-face between the two oldest candidates ever to run for the presidency of the United States.
Biden acknowledged that inflation had caused prices to rise substantially since the start of his term, but said he deserved credit for “getting things back on track” following the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump claimed he had overseen “the best economy in the history of our country” before the pandemic and said he took steps to prevent the economic free fall from deepening further.
News in development…
