This combination of pictures created on September 29, 2020 shows Democratic Presidential candidate and former US Vice President Joe Biden (L) and US President Donald Trump speaking during the first presidential debate at the Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio on 29 September 2020. Picture: by Jim Watson and Saul Loeb/AFP
White boys fighting over toys in the sandpit. That’s what it resembled.
It was anything but a presidential election debate between two men vying to control the most powerful country on Earth.
The verbal brawl between President Donald Trump and his Democratic presidential challenger, Joe Biden, this week was not a very good advertisement for America the country, or American democracy.
As expected, Trump led the way in boorish behaviour, repeatedly interrupting Biden and often even shouting over the debate mediator.
Yet Biden also lost his cool and didn’t offer up much to convince the world that he will be good news for the rest of us if he goes to the White House.
The debate did, however, crystallise an increasingly disturbing aspect of American politics – the loss of maturity, civility and even logic. It also highlighted the growing polarisation of a society which looks at war with itself.
It doesn’t help, of course, that Trump has appealed to right wing vigilante groups, nor that he has hinted he will not accept a poll result which doesn’t go in his favour.
Nor is Biden’s case helped by left-wing violence and intolerance.
This is more than a sideshow. An unstable United States means an unstable world.
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