Kamala Harris and Donald Trump to square off in crucial US presidential TV debate

US presidential nominees Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are preparing to take the stage in Philadelphia for a Tuesday TV debate that could change the course of this year’s election — a contest that polling says remains too close to call.

The debate follows a previous televised encounter in the summer between Trump and President Joe Biden, in which the sitting president performed so poorly that his party successfully persuaded him to drop out of the election altogether.

Tonight’s debate is potentially the only one between Harris and Trump before the election on 5 November. Their running mates, Tim Walz and JD Vance, will take part in a TV debate of their own on 2 October.

The Harris-Trump debate will be held without a studio audience. Microphones will be muted alternately to allow each candidate to speak, and no written notes will be allowed.

Tonight’s debate is a chance for Harris to spell out a policy agenda that the campaign’s compressed schedule has left her little time to articulate.

So far, she has pledged to chart a new way forward for the country, but she has also held fast to many of President Joe Biden’s ideas, among them middle-class tax cuts, tax hikes on corporations and the restoration of abortion rights.

Trump’s stated policies, meanwhile, are largely an extension of what he didn’t accomplish during his term as president.

Along with the extension and expansion of his 2017 tax cuts and a massive increase in tariffs on foreign imports, the ex-president’s main promise is a far greater concentration of government power in the White House and draconian enforcement of law and order.

Trump’s consistently bellicose rhetoric has turned more ominous in recent weeks, pledging to prosecute anyone who “cheats” in the upcoming election. He claimed he was referencing everyone from election officials to attorneys, political staffers and donors.

He has also drawn attention lately for his increasingly rambling and incoherent speech.

In once incident, he wandered off script to ramble about the relationship between bacon and wind energy, while an appearance at the New York Economic Club saw him answer a question about childcare with an unintelligible answer referencing his trade plan.

Trump has also struggled to shake off associations with Project 2025, a plan to restaff the federal bureaucracy with right-wing loyalists, shutter federal agencies and departments, and implement extreme policies including a radical crackdown on contraception.

While Trump claims to have no knowledge of the plan, which has been published by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, he has publicly thanked several of its named contributors for their contributions to his campaign.