With less than two months to go until November’s US presidential election, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump locked horns on Tuesday night in a hotly anticipated debate that could have major consequences for the White House race.
Trump, the former Republican president, was on the defensive for much of the live televised debate amid sustained attacks from Harris, the Democratic vice-president.
Here are five key moments from the 90-minute showdown that was expected to be watched by tens of millions of Americans.
Abortion rights
Harris tore into Trump on abortion access and reproductive rights, an issue her campaign sees a key vote winner after the 2022 US Supreme Court decision to strike down Roe vs Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that had enshrined a legal right to an abortion.
Democrats have pinned the blame for the decision squarely on Trump, who appointed three of the six Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe. The former president has recently walked a political tightrope as he tries to satisfy the religious right while also appealing to more moderate swing voters.
Harris on Tuesday night assailed Trump after he claimed the American public “wanted” Roe to be overturned, citing examples of several states that have since ushered in strict abortion bans and eliminated exemptions for rape victims.
“You want to talk about this is what people wanted?” Harris asked. “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the healthcare providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot?”
Immigration
Trump repeatedly tried to steer the conversation on to the topic of immigration as he railed against the Biden administration’s handling of the influx of migrants at the US-Mexico border and sought to stoke fear about illegal immigrants moving into communities across the US.
In one heated exchange, the former president repeated unsubstantiated claims that have been pushed by his running mate, Ohio senator JD Vance, that Haitian migrants are stealing household pets in Ohio to eat them.
Trump and Vance have repeated the claims in recent days and posted memes of cats and other animals to their social media accounts despite local officials in Ohio saying they have seen no evidence of animal abductions.
“A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump said. “They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”
The ‘stolen’ 2020 election
Trump again refused to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election on Tuesday night, telling the moderators that he had been speaking “sarcastically” when he was recently quoted as acknowledging that he had lost by a “whisker” to Biden. He insisted there was “so much proof” that the election had been stolen from him.
In a thinly-veiled reference to Trump’s tagline from his days hosting the reality TV show The Apprentice, Harris responded that the former president had been “fired by 81mn people”.
“Clearly, he is having a very difficult time processing that. But we cannot afford to have a president of the United States who attempts as he did in the past to upend the will of the voters in a free and fair election,” she said.
“And I’m going to tell you that I have travelled the world as vice-president of the United States. And world leaders are laughing at Donald Trump. I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you. And they say you’re a disgrace.”
A rattled Trump snapped back that Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — who he described as “one of the most respected men” — had said the world “need[ed] Trump back as president”.
Ending the war in Ukraine
Trump’s position on Ukraine, Russia and the Nato alliance came into sharp relief on Tuesday night when the debate moderator asked the former president point blank whether he wanted Ukraine to win the war.
Trump did not answer the question and instead replied: “I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly — people being killed by the millions.”
“I want to get the war settled,” the former president added. “I know [Ukrainian President Volodymr] Zelenskyy very well and I know [Russian President Vladimir] Putin very well. I have a good relationship. And they respect your president. OK? They respect me. They don’t respect Biden. How would you respect him?”
Harris — who became her party’s candidate for the White House only after Biden suspended his re-election campaign and has at times struggled to distance herself from her boss — later responded: “It’s important to remind the former president you’re not running against Joe Biden, you’re running against me.”
Harris’s ethnicity
Trump made waves earlier this summer when he questioned Harris’s racial identity, telling a gathering of Black journalists in Chicago: “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black.”
Harris’s father is Black, and emigrated to the US from Jamaica; her late mother moved to the US from India as a student. Harris attended Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington DC.
Trump tried to distance himself from his earlier comments when asked why he thought it was “appropriate to weigh in on the racial identity” of his opponent.
“I don’t care what she is. I don’t care. You make a big deal out of something. I couldn’t care less. Whatever she wants to be is OK with me . . . I don’t know. I don’t know,” he said.
“All I can say is I read where she was not Black, that she put out. And, I’ll say that. And then I read that she was Black. And that’s OK. Either one was OK with me. That’s up to her. That’s up to her.”
Harris responded it was a “tragedy” that Trump had “consistently over the course of his career attempted to use race to divide the American people”.
“You know, I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us. And we don’t want this kind of approach that is just constantly trying to divide us, and especially by race,” she said.
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