TOWN HALLS
The event will on the east terrace of the Pérez
Art Museum Miami, overlooking Biscayne Bay. NBC hosted Biden last week for a town hall at the same location.
Miami Beach Police announced that the president’s visit will force the closure of the MacArthur Causeway on Thursday night from 7-11 p.m.
Trump, who tested positive for COVID-19 on Oct. 2 and spent three days at the Walter Reed military hospital, took a coronavirus test Tuesday administered by the National Institutes of Health, NBC said.
Both NIH clinical director Dr. Clifford Lane and Fauci reviewed Trump’s medical records and said they had a high degree of confidence that the president is “not shedding infectious virus.”
Trump’s ability to reach a national television audience on Thursday was in part dependent on Fauci, who had expressed anger at the Trump campaign in recent days for using one of his statements in a campaign ad. The member of the coronavirus task force said a quote used in the campaign ad was taken out of context.
A formal Trump-Biden matchup that was scheduled for Thursday in Miami by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debate was canceled. In light of the president’s infection, the commission shifted the format to a virtual meeting, and Trump declined to participate.
Both town halls will begin at 8 p.m., but Biden will have the last word. The ABC event, moderated by George Stephanopoulos, will last 90 minutes with an additional half hour of analysis. Trump’s town hall on NBC is scheduled for an hour.
Critics of NBC questioned why the network scheduled Trump for the same time, making viewers have to choose if they were interested in seeing both candidates react live in a similar format.
Veteran journalist Jeff Greenfield called it “indefensible” in a Twitter post.
“They rewarded Trump by giving him this time,” Greenfield said in an interview.
He questioned whether NBC acceded to a demand by the president, but the network said in a statement that “the Trump campaign did not dictate or request the time slot nor express any preference.”
NBC considered it important that Trump be given the same format, day of the week and length of time that Biden had last week in Miami — although he will have a different moderator. Lester Holt hosted the Biden event.
In addition to preventing viewers from getting a side-by-side comparison of the two men, the dueling events will likely be seen by far fewer people.
The first debate between the two men last month was watched by an estimated 73.1 million people, the
Nielsen company said.
An estimated 6.7 million people saw Biden at an NBC News-sponsored town hall last week. Like the Trump event on Thursday will be, it was simulcast on MSNBC, CNBC and streamed online.
Trump’s town hall with Stephanopoulos on Sept. 15 was seen by 3.8 million people, Nielsen said.
Trump’s campaign intends to blanket South Florida on Thursday, with
Vice President Mike Pence scheduled to appear twice in Miami-Dade County and the president’s son, Eric Trump, scheduled to appear at a Southwest Ranches megachurch in Broward County.