Another Trump-Biden debate-nothing really decided?

 By SJ Otto

Donald Trump and Joe Biden managed to have a more civil and respectable debate. It is hard to imagine that this debate will cause anyone to change their mind about who they will vote for next month. Both candidates clarified their positions on the issues.

To be honest, Trump did not do too badly. He had quick answers for every question. That is not to say that his answers were right. But for those who haven’t seriously followed the issues in this campaign, or for those who are still undecided in this very hotly contested and divisive campaign, Trump may have affected some voter’s choices.

Some memorable moments included Trump claiming he has done more for the black African American community than any other president since Abraham Lincoln.  

Fabiola Cineas writing for Vox news differed with Trump’s statement:

 

“At last week’s NBC town hall event, President Donald Trump leaned in to the camera to recite a statement that has become a fixture of his reelection campaign: “I have done more for the African American community than any president with the exception of Abraham Lincoln.”

Over the past year, Trump has shouted this from the lectern at campaign rallies and from the balcony at the White House as a play to Black voters, a countermessage to his racist rhetoric. The phrase has morphed over time, starting in the fall of 2019 as something more restrained — “We’ve done more for African Americans in three years than the broken Washington establishment has done in more than 30 years” — and rising to the bold “No president has done more for our Black community” this year.

In June, Trump tweeted a similar statement bragging about what he has done for Black Americans. It came just days after George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed by Minneapolis police officers, setting off unrest and protests for Black lives across the country. He had not actually addressed the reason for millions of people marching in the streets: the institutional racism in policing.

The tone-deaf display continued earlier this month, when in his first address since announcing he had tested positive for the coronavirus, Trump confidently shouted the claim to hundreds of Black and Latinx voters standing on the White House South Lawn: “Nobody can dispute it. Nobody can dispute it. It’s true. Nobody can dispute it.” The very fact that the president encouraged Black people to assemble in his name just days after his diagnosis, forgoing social distancing and despite the devastation the virus has wrought on Black and Latinx communities, one could argue undermined his message.

While Trump may be confident in his claim of having done the most for Black Americans, his record begs to differ. He has repeatedly cited his efforts on criminal justice reform and the economy as the reasons he’s been the best president for Black America since Lincoln — who signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people in the Confederacy, and clearing the way for the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery across the US — but rarely does Trump put his supposed “wins” in context. For example, Trump often tries to take credit for a decline in violent crime, though the downward trend predates him by many years.”

Biden didn’t miss a chance to hammer away at Trump. He mocked the claims. “Abraham Lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history,” Biden said. “He pours fuel on every single racist fire.”

 

Another interesting topic was climate change. Trump claimed Biden’s plan to end fossil fuel use will cost workers their jobs. He also casually claimed that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (or AOC as he called her) knew nothing about the climate. According to Yahoo News:

 

“Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) delivered a signature Twitter takedown after she was name-checked by President Donald Trump over her climate policy during Thursday’s nationally televised presidential debate.

Ocasio-Cortez and her progressive House colleagues Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) were called out by the president in his debate with Democratic nominee Joe Biden in Nashville.

“You know who developed it? AOC plus three,” the president said of Biden’s climate plan.

“They know nothing about the climate. I mean she’s got a good line of stuff, but she knows nothing about the climate, and they’re all hopping through hoops for AOC plus three. Not a real plan. It costs $100 trillion.”

Trump has repeatedly conflated Biden’s plans to mitigate climate change with the set of policy proposals known as the Green New Deal, introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) in 2019. Biden has offered praise for it, but his own policy is different.

Biden appointed Ocasio-Cortez as co-chair of his climate policy task force earlier this year, which released a number of proposals in July that make no mention of the Green New Deal. His proposals include moving all electric power off fossil fuels by 2035, increasing energy efficiency by upgrading 4 million buildings and 2 million homes over four years, installing 500 million solar panels in the next five years and shifting major cities toward zero-emission public transportation options.”

To say that AOC knows nothing about the climate is a stretch. To develop the Green New Deal she had to know something about climate. And it doesn’t take much to believe that Trump knows very little about the climate and he cares even less about it. He cares about money and the economy. He ignores all information on our climate. He seems to ignore science all together.

Like all other issues, Trump has pretty much ruined our climate, our environment and he has taken needed benefits from poor people. In short he has been a disaster. For those of us who understand Trump’s agenda, we didn’t need a debate to determine that Trump is an empty headed ass hole. My opinion of him is the same now as before the debate.