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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year.

And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one, because we want to

and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

Tonight, in case you didn't know, Joe Biden and Donald Trump will face off in the first

presidential debate of 2024.

They faced off against each other twice in 2020, and it was quite an unappealing spectacle.

But like a great horror film, Joe Biden and Donald Trump debates are things that you don't

really want to watch, but you find yourself unable to resist watching.

So it will be very interesting to see what happens.

And I am delighted to be joined by Charles Lipson, who is a

spectator columnist and a professor at the University of Chicago to discuss what might happen.

Very quickly, you've watched a lot of presidential debates in your life. Please tell me what you expect to happen tonight. Well, I think that it's so

strange because nobody really knows which of the two candidates, the Jekyll or Hyde, is going to show up

for either candidate. My guess is that Trump really wants to stay under control,

and he's actually benefited by Joe Biden's demand, his team's demand, that there be no audience

and that the microphone be cut off when the speaker

hasn't been given permission to speak because in an earlier debate between the two for the last

campaign Trump kept interrupting in the first debate kept interrupting Biden and as a result looked like a bully and it looked like he was not giving his opponent time to make his argument.

...