The consensus appeared to be that the tone and tactics of the debate in Cleveland, Ohio, on Tuesday night were a less than edifying advertisement for the American electoral process.
“Chaotic, childish, mad, grueling,” were the first four words of the assessment by Liberation journalist Isabelle Hanne.
“Debate moderator Chris Wallace…at times looked like a schoolteacher overwhelmed by unruly students,” she wrote, describing the debate as a “a mind-boggling spectacle for this traditionally solemn meeting watched by tens of millions of Americans.”
In Le Monde, in a piece headlined: “Donald Trump torpedoes his first debate with Joe Biden”, Giles Paris was no more flattering in his analysis of proceedings, which he described as a “terrible storm.”
After they had taken their places at at Case Western University, “chaos set in, sweeping away veteran moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News. And, in successive waves, there were surges of aggressiveness, bitterness and meanness.”
The Italian daily La Republica noted how the debate at times descended “into a verbal brawl. The two candidates interrupt each other and talk over each other. There were even insults on stage,” wrote Anna Lombardi.
“The debate has not changed one voter’s mind. An America more divided than ever has only been mirrored on the small screen,” she added.
Washington correspondent for the Spanish daily El Pais, Amanda Mars wrote that the first debate “turned into a chaotic and virulent spectacle, shocking in the most powerful country in the world.”
“This debate will not go down in history as one of those that ended up determining the fate of an election, but as a sign of the climate of hostility that the country is going through five weeks ahead of the polls,” Mars added.
The tenor of the debate also rattled teacups among those from the British press, with The Guardian’s Lauren Gambino writing how it “deteriorated into an ugly display of contempt,” during an “extraordinarily combative and chaotic 90-minute performance, a fitting coda to what has been one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in recent memory.” David Charter of The Times of London described the event as “the most rancorous and chaotic TV debate in U.S. election history.”
Further afield, Iran’s Mehr News Agency, which is owned by the regime’s Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization said the debate had “spiraled into a chaotic clash.” In Russia, Alexey Gryazev wrote on Gazeta.ru that “the candidates ended up giving people a show, but this is hardly what the voters expected of them.
“The level of discussion turned out to be extremely low and only once again demonstrated the depth of the split in American society,” he added.
Meanwhile in China, the Global Times also described the debate as “chaos” which showed “the sharp division within U.S. society.
“Trump and Biden are just representatives from the two opposing sides. Regrettably, from this debate, there was no sign that such confrontation and social divergences could be bridged, no matter who takes the reins,” the op-ed by Zhang Tengjun said.
