The vice president is cloistered in a historic hotel in downtown Pittsburgh where she can focus on honing crisp two-minute answers, per the debate’s rules.
Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are veering sharply in how they gear up for Tuesday’s presidential debate, setting up a showdown that reflects not just two separate visions for the country but two politicians who approach big moments very differently.
The vice president is cloistered in a historic hotel in downtown Pittsburgh where she can focus on honing crisp two-minute answers, per the debate’s rules. She’s been working with aides since Thursday and chose a venue that allows the Democratic nominee the option of mingling with swing-state voters.
Trump, the Republican nominee, publicly dismisses the value of studying for the debate. The former president is choosing instead to fill his days with campaign-related events on the premise that he’ll know what he needs to do once he steps on the debate stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
“You can go in with all the strategy you want but you have to sort of feel it out as the debate’s taking place,” he said during a town hall with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
Trump then quoted former boxing great Mike Tyson, who said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
Looking forward to the grand American tradition of having candidates accuse each other of doing good things while vehemently denying the other's slanderous accusations that they would ever do anything good.
Hah! In that case, what you should propose is that we have a different event that's actually a serious debate, and rebrand what we have now as comedy roasts, without changing a thing.
Debates are pure entertainment, it's just a bunch of quips, one-liners, and power plays. There's no serious, formal discussion of anything. It's glorified reality TV for nerds who would be too good for it otherwise. And that's something that predates Trump, it's part of what set the stage for him.
He gets accused of wanting to deescalate conflicts, pull out of NATO, and generally refusing to uphold the constant state of war that every single US politician wants. The fact that he isn't ideologically invested in stupid pointless conflicts is literally his only positive quality, so of course it's where a lot of criticism gets directed, in order to uphold the grand American tradition. Of course, he's not actually ideologically opposed to stupid pointless wars, so the machinery still gets to run uninterrupted, but he did at least give us an excellent roast of John Bolton, a notorious hawk.
I wish we could ever get offered a candidate who's actually as isolationist as Trump gets accused of being, but unfortunately he's not it. We got rising tensions and a trade war with China, which Biden normalized, and we got pushed to the brink of WWIII with the assassination of Soleimani, which Biden's also following up by supporting Israel's antics. Voters will never be given any sort of choice or input about such matters, and Trump is no exception, despite what people say.
He gets accused of wanting to deescalate conflicts, pull out of NATO, and generally refusing to uphold the constant state of war that every single US politician wants.
Just going off e.g. the stunt he pulled with moving the embassy to Jerusalem, I would say this sentence is giving him way too much benefit of the doubt.
The way see it, what he is mostly accused of is claiming to want to do those things (and most candidates would claim they wanted to "solve" e.g. the middle east conflict) but not actually having any kind of realistic idea of how to achieve any of them. Possibly besides pulling out of NATO, which, given the current state of the world, is a stretch to call this a "good thing".
Also, when it comes to stupid pointless conflicts, I think we can rest assured that he will always be invested in them on the side he believes he can personally profit off the most. Which is an ideology too if you think about it.
I don't think I've ever heard a politician accuse Trump of just "not having a realistic idea to achieve" isolationist goals. They attack him for having isolationist goals at all (which he doesn't actually have, really), because all of them are extreme interventionists.
Now you're jumping from "deescalating conflicts" to isolationist goals. That's not the same thing. However it beautifully illustrates the point of my original comment. It's highly debatable if "isolationist goals" are a good thing he would be accused of.
(Actually) Deescalating conflicts would be a good thing, I think most would agree. He just won't be able to, because his idea of deescalating is submitting to dictators. His interest isn't solving anything, just blocking out the noise and taking credit.
Well, I mean, if you're invested in the preservation of US hegemony for some reason, then I guess it's debatable whether keeping up a constant state of war and bloodshed is a good or bad thing. I, however, am not. I don't give a rat's ass about US hegemony and I would love to have a president who's willing to """submit to dictators""" to avoid conflict.
The only people who actually gain anything at all from US hegemony are the people at the top. Nobody else, at home or abroad, benefits from it at all. Rather, we get all our domestic programs cut to fund a war machine that spreads fear and destruction to innocent people around the globe. Unless you're part of the elite, invest heavily in companies like Lockheed Martin, or have confused national interests with your own, then yes, isolationist policies are a good thing.
What, that not everyone agrees with me on what things are good or bad? No shit, that's why politicians are constantly accusing each other of doing good things as if they were bad.
I'd love it if you could point me to someone not in the defense industry, politics, or journalism who actually benefited from the Iraq War. What a great idea that was, to avoid """submitting to a dictator""" by randomly invading a country on the other side of the globe.
Why don't you tell the Libyans about how "defensive" of an organization NATO is? It's "defensive" in the same way the US department of "defense" has led invasions of countless countries and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even if that were true, the US is an extremely belligerent and aggressive country, so giving it cover only enables it to act aggressively without fear of repercussions or backlash.
Wtf is y'all's deal with this shit? You bring up these same two things in every conversation, regardless of how completely irrelevant they are, and then if the other person doesn't kowtow you act like you "busted" them? Absolutely bizarre, nonsensical behavior.
Congratulations, you revealed that I'm not a part of your tribe, which I never pretended to be in the first place. I guess now it doesn't matter that I proved you objectively wrong now, because I'm the "other," so your little in-group can write off anything I say, no matter how correct and sourced it is. Blue MAGA shit.
Never been. US News and World Report rates it as the #6 thing to do in Beijing, so I will defer to their take on it. Apparently, the square itself is just a big concrete area but it's nearby some other tourist attractions.