Source: The Washington Post / Getty
The first and perhaps only Presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and Donald Trump will likely draw millions of viewers and voters who are intensely curious about how each candidate will bolster his or her position in the hotly contested race for The White House. According to MSNBC’s on-air reporting via Nielsen, the largest viewership of a debate came in 2020 during the Vice Presidential debate when then-Senator Harris stood toe-to-toe-to-wing with Vice President Mike Pence and the infamous fly that refused to depart from the top of his head. 58 million people tuned in to watch the exchange-of-ideas-turned-viral-spectacle and tonight’s proceedings should easily surpass that number when the ratings are released.
Source: NurPhoto / Getty
Both candidates have agreed to the rules set forth by the host, ABC, and here they are via CNN:
The network’s rules also state that there will be no audience, the candidates will not be permitted to have written notes, no staff can visit them during the two commercial breaks and the candidates cannot ask questions of one another.
The one unmentioned rule that the Harris campaign fought to change is that each candidate’s microphone will be muted while the other speaks. Harris’ handlers wanted the microphones to be open, ostensibly to allow the Vice President to fact-check Trump’s…loosely-based-on-reality comments and to potentially catch him on a hot mic making offensive comments about Harris that would dominate social media and the subsequent news cycle. Unfortunately for the Harris campaign, their protests fell on deaf ears.
Despite this, Trump couldn’t control his ramblings and word salad outbursts. In one particularly strange moment, Trump went on a wildly nonsensical rant about pets being eaten by illegal immigrants.
In another “WTF?!” moment, Trump claimed that VP Harris supported “transgender surgery for illegal immigrants in prison”. We can’t make this s#!t up.
The election is on November 5, 2024. Be ready. Get your people ready. Don’t boo, vote!
