On Tuesday, November 5, 2024, Americans will elect their next president for four years. They have the choice between former Republican President Donald Trump or current Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris. Since Joe Biden withdrew from the race for the White House, the campaign has taken a different turn.
The two candidates are neck and neck in the polls, as they took part in their first – and probably last – televised debate, on the ABC News channel. The week was once again full of twists and turns across the Atlantic. Excerpts chosen by L’Express.
Conspiracy Theory of the Week: Trump and Haitian Immigrants
The former president, who has been multiplying diatribes, partly false, against migrants all week, once again brought up the fallacious and racist claim that Haitians steal dogs and cats to eat them in the city of Springfield. In his debate with Kamala Harris on Tuesday, September 10, during which he was in difficulty, Donald Trump loudly repeated this conspiracy theory.
Immediately corrected by a journalist on the set, the former president maintained his false statements, taken from far-right social networks. “We are going to organize mass deportations” in this small town in Ohio, Donald Trump even promised, pretending to ignore that many of these migrants have a residence permit. The former president has placed this theme at the heart of his new candidacy for the White House. He promises, in the event of victory on November 5, to fight against illegal immigration with mass deportations.
Supporters of the week: Taylor Swift, Laura Loomer
Tuesday, September 10, shortly before midnight. Singer Taylor Swift, with half a billion followers on social media, announced her support for candidate Kamala Harris. For months, observers and strategists have been scrutinizing her public appearances, dissecting her every statement. Thus, the pop star waited until the end of the Harris-Trump debate to share, or rather confirm, swifties – the nickname given to his fans – his support for the Democratic camp for the vote on November 5.
Donald Trump also registered a support this week that has caused a lot of ink to flow. The effervescent and ultra-criticized Laura Loomer was seen prominently on Wednesday, alongside the Republican candidate at the ceremony commemorating the September 11 attacks in New York. The day before, this 31-year-old activist was backstage at his debate against Kamala Harris, in Philadelphia. If Kamala Harris is elected, “it will smell like curry in the White House”, she wrote on social networks, referring to the Indian origins of the vice president’s mother.
Laura Loomer has made a name for herself for her homophobic, sexist, racist, and anti-Semitic antics, and is also known for her adherence to numerous conspiracy theories. On her social networks, she has notably claimed several times that the attack on the World Trade Center was ordered from “the inside”.
Quote of the week: Pope Francis says Trump and Harris are both “against life”
Pope Francis said Friday that Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were both “against life.” “Whether it’s the one who sends back migrants, or the one who kills children,” he told reporters on the plane returning to Rome after a long tour of Asia and Oceania. “I’m not American, I can’t vote there, but let’s be clear, whether it’s sending back migrants, denying them the opportunity to work, denying them welcome, is a sin, it’s serious,” the pope continued. “In political morality, in general, not voting is wrong. It’s not good, we have to vote and we have to choose the lesser evil. What is the lesser evil? This lady, or this gentleman? I don’t know, everyone has their own conscience,” he concluded.
Podcast of the week
Two months before the American presidential election, La Loupe, the podcast of L’Express, which was back this week, tells you the story of five historic “losers” of the elections in the company of Françoise Coste, professor of American civilization at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. In the first episode: how Al Gore narrowly lost the American electoral college.
Threat of the week: shutdown
The threat of a federal shutdown is resurfacing in the United States, with a vote scheduled for Wednesday in Congress having been postponed due to a lack of sufficient majority among Republicans who are at loggerheads over the issue. “We’re going to be working on this issue throughout the weekend,” said Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson. He is facing opposition from elected officials in his own camp, worried about seeing the budget limit pushed back again and who want greater fiscal rigor.
The 2025 budget must be passed by Congress by the end of September – the end of the fiscal year – to keep all services funded. Otherwise, there would be a “shutdown”: millions of civil servants furloughed, some food aid suspended, air traffic disrupted, among other things. The United States is used to it. Since 1976, the country has experienced 21 “shutdowns”. The most recent: that of December 2018 and January 2019, which lasted 35 days because Democrats refused to vote for funding for the wall on the border with Mexico.
The figure of the week: in the polls, a small difference of one point
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris remain neck and neck in new polls released Sunday, September 8. A series of opinion polls have shown that the 78-year-old Republican billionaire remains in a position to become president of the United States again, despite his legal troubles and the chaos that surrounded his departure from the White House in 2021. Kamala Harris, who remobilized the Democratic camp after her late entry into the campaign to replace Joe Biden, is also in a position to win, according to these polls.
Nationally, Donald Trump is just one point ahead of the vice president of the United States (48% against 47), according to a study New York Times/Siena College held from September 3 to 6.
This week’s report: Kamala Harris wins back Latinos
This week, L’Express’s US correspondent, Hélène Vissière, went to the town of Reading, Pennsylvania, where 68% of the 95,000 inhabitants are Latinos. In this eastern American state, as in the rest of the country, they may be the ones who will make the difference in the November 5 election.