asianbrides.xyz — The outcome of November’s presidential election is expected to have huge implications for Europe’s security and economy.
As US presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris and Donald Trump clashed in a televised debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, many across Europe watched in the hope of gleaning how the November election might affect the continent and the world as a whole.
Although both candidates expectedly focused on domestic issues, such as the economy, gun laws and abortion, both Harris and Trump touched upon several topics that could prove to be key to the future of Europe.
Here are the six main talking points for Europeans from the first — and likely only — debate between the two candidates.
Trump’s name-drops Orbán as an ally
Following Vice President Harris’ claims that some world leaders do not regard Trump as highly as he thinks, the former US president argued that Hungary’s Premier Viktor Orbán would back his administration.
“Let me just say about world leaders: Viktor Orbán, one of the most respected men, they call him a strong man. He’s a tough person. Smart prime minister of Hungary,” Trump said.
“They said, ‘Why is the whole world blowing up? … ‘Because you need Trump back as president. They were afraid of him. China was afraid. And I don’t like to use the word ‘afraid’, but I’m just quoting him,” Trump went on.
“‘China was afraid of him. North Korea was afraid of him.’ Look at what’s going on with North Korea, by the way. He said, ‘Russia was afraid of him,'” he added, supposedly quoting Orbán.
“The most respected, most feared person is Donald Trump. We had no problems when Trump was president,” Trump said.
Harris replied that it was well-known that Trump “admires dictators” and “wants to be a dictator on day one”.
“It is well known that he said of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that he can do whatever the hell he wants and go into Ukraine,” she said.
‘Putin would eat you for lunch’, Harris tells Trump
When confronted over whether he supports Ukraine in Russia’s war of aggression against its neighbour, Trump dodged a straight answer by stating he wanted to “end the war” instead.
Although Trump said that it’s a war “that’s dying to be settled … I will get it settled before I even become president,” he offered no specifics on how he planned to accomplish that. “What I’ll do is I’ll speak to one and I’ll speak to the other,” he said. “I’ll get them together.”
Trump again stated that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine would have never happened if he had been in office in early 2022, stating that Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy would have valued him over Biden.
“I know Zelenskyy very well, and I know Putin very well,” he said. “They respect me. They don’t respect Biden.”
Trump did however reiterate that the Biden administration has spent more in comparison to Europe on military aid to Ukraine, despite the numbers showing the opposite.
Harris fired back, saying that if Trump in fact had been president during Moscow’s all-out assault, “Putin would be sitting in Kyiv with his eyes on the rest of Europe,” with Poland being next in his crosshairs.