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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.

Today we are going to be talking about the debate which happened last night between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the first debate between these two, indeed the

first time those two politicians have ever met. I think I can say fairly-ish that it went

pretty badly for Donald Trump and pretty well for Camilla Harris.

That seems to be the unanimous opinion. And I'm very pleased to be joined to discuss this by

Sarah Elliott of Republicans overseas. Sarah, it was a bad night for Trump. There's no sugar-coating it.

Yeah, I mean, he didn't live up to expectations, you know, when the race is as close as it is.

And this is the one agreed to debate. It could turn it either way. There was a lot of expectation.

I do think that the expectation on Kamala was, well, we have very low expectations for her.

So she didn't have to do exceptionally well to surpass them because of the CNN interview and

her just word salad style. But Donald Trump was not focused. He took her bait and went down rabbit holes. And it was a real

missed opportunity for him to define her as that radical politician, which she is, which her

record is that she will not talk about, will not put on her website. And she was able to say things during the debate, saying that she was

against a fracking ban, and she would never touch her guns. And that was never fact-checked by the

moderators. So she got away with making herself appear more moderate than she is.

But at the end of the day, I'm not sure what a difference this will make.

...