IS DONALD TRUMP PRESIDENCY A SUCCESS OR FAILURE: A DEBATE

Follow up with the previous debate about the death penalty, this time, our topic was about:

"Donald Trump's presidency was a success or a failure?"

This time, I had a chance to work with the rest of the class. Because of that, it made my interactions and teamwork between peers have gone way better. In addition, due to my perceptive personality, I could see how responsible people are from their work. My teammates were Y, Bach, Dao, Jisu, and Hai and we were on the negative side, which was concentrated on proving that "Donald Trump's presidency was totally a failure". 

A summary chart after our debate

TEAM 1 (AFFIRMATIVE): Donald Trump was a success

Nhi – improved the economy and Covid-19 was not his fault. Mostly anecdotal evidence

Phuong (Captain) – improved the economy with statistics (no citations). Increased GDP +4.2%

Duy Anh – Stopped dangerous Tik Tok and Tweets are nothing serious

Minh – helped stopped Chinese aggression against countries like Vietnam in the South China Sea

Vy – 1. Mexico wall. 

         2. Helped climate change 

         3. People are too sensitive

Alan – changed migration rules into the USA, some evidence offered

Due to my absence, I could not clearly saw how the other team presented and showed their ideas about Donald Trump. However, with this summary, I knew that they put a lot of effort into it, especially on the statistics and evidence part. My favorite part was the prohibition of Tik Tok and Wechat in the US because I've researched on it before and I think their evidence really satisfied me and I am pleased that they were the winner.

TEAM 2 (NEGATIVE): Donald Trump was a failure

Tilly - NA

Nhu Y – changed tax to only benefit rich people so rich get richer and poor get poorer

Bach – unable to keep country together leading to Black Lives Matter movement because of racism

Dao (Captain) – failure to build the Mexican border wall with good evidence. Also did not set a good

example as president

Ji Su – spread disinformation and lies and did everything for selfish reasons, not for the people

Hai – failed to protect people against Covid-19 and blamed it on China instead of accepting blame for his own failure. This lead to increased racism.

In my opinion, during our working process, we didn't talk much but still working quite well by helping and fixing each other's fault or help them write citations. Most of our members finished their work on time and it was very fortunate because it will leave spare time for us to practice speaking more.

I really like the way Jisu did the work, as she completed the work very fast and even help me adding evidence to the person who did nothing. Same as Bach, he did all the work himself without any help and it was very impressive to me. The other team members such as Dao and Y also did a pretty good job; also, they were very polite in asking me to let them take a look at my essay's pieces of evidence and having a double check on their grammar and mistakes. The only person that disappointed me was Hai, his effort in his work was simply not enough and so do was his attitude. It's not only affected him but other members of the group at the debate. 

Personally, as a self-reflection, I would not give myself a high grade on evidence because most of it was from my essays and I think I could be way better if I chose other ones on the internet to have a deeper look at the problems. However, I was very pleased about my contribution to the team because I accidentally saw the missing part on time and completed it before the debate day and it was very lucky.

Rebuttals:

Vy - Trump did reform tax and cut it/ Trump didn’t kill anybody, he was not a racist/ Great Wall

of China was not built in four years

I've just studied with Vy for the first year but I knew she was very good at debates and her rebuttals would be very sharp with her knowledge from books, statistics, and facts she self-studied. She gave a pretty good rebuttal on our tax cut and it impressed me because I thought this idea should be our main rebuttal to the other team :)) However, because I have seen her so much time and her contribution to the team could be considered as the most, it would be kind of more balance if other teammates did it too.

Ji Su – Covid-19 was Trump’s fault as he did not take it seriously

It surprised me that Jisu was the only person who gave rebuttals to the other team because I thought our team had lots of advantages in this debate. Anyways, her contribution to our team this time was very big and I feel very thankful to her to be on our team.

Results:

The debate's winner was Phuong's team, as they gave much more persuasive evidence and statistics than our team. I'm very pleased with the results, although I was also hoping for my team to win because we have lots of advantages in information-finding and rebuttals. From some of their teammates' words, I could see that their teamwork and effort were fantastic, as everyone was fully prepared and practiced for their part to ready to be heard.