Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Biden, Trump initial debate called debacle
Candidates agree to 2 more; changes in air for next one
PITTSBURGH — President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden kept up their debate-stage sniping from the road and the rails Wednesday, fighting for working-class voters in the Midwest while both parties — and the debate commission — sought to deal with the most chaotic presidential face-off in memory.
Despite calls by some Democrats for Biden to skip the next two debates, Biden’s campaign confirmed that he would participate in the subsequent meetings, as did Trump’s.
But the Commission on Presidential Debates said Wednesday that Tuesday night’s debate “made clear that additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues.”
One possibility being discussed is to give the moderator the ability to cut off the microphone of one of the debate participants while his opponent is talking, according to a person familiar with the deliberations who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said the commission was “only doing this because their guy got pummeled last night.
President Trump was the dominant force, and now Joe Biden is trying to work the refs.”
The next presidential debate is a town-hall-style format scheduled for Oct. 15 in Miami.
Meanwhile, the Nielsen company said 73.1 million people watched the debate on television, where it was shown on 16 networks. That’s more than any other television event since the Super Bowl, even if it fell short of the 84 million who watched the first debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016. That was the most-watched presidential debate ever.
Less than 12 hours after the debate concluded, Biden called Trump’s behavior in the primetime confrontation “a national embarrassment.” The Democratic challenger launched his most aggressive day on the campaign trail all year, with eight stops planned for a train tour that began midmorning in Cleveland and ended 10 hours later in western Pennsylvania.
Trump addressed voters and donors in Minnesota late in the day.
Trump gave himself high marks on his debate performance as he left Washington. He had spent much of the morning assailing Biden and debate moderator Chris Wallace on social media.
“It was an exciting evening. I see the ratings were very high, and it was good to be there,” Trump said.
TAUNTS AND CHAOS
The first of three scheduled debates between Trump and Biden deteriorated into taunts and chaos Tuesday night as the two repeatedly interrupted each other with jabs that overshadowed any substantive discussion of the crises threatening the nation.
Trump and Biden frequently talked over each other, with Biden eventually snapping at him, “Will you shut up, man?”
Some of the president’s supporters felt that Wallace was too hard on their candidate. Trump suggested that he was also debating Wallace, “but that’s no surprise.”
Wallace even got some criticism from opinion personalities on his own network. “Trump is debating the moderator and Biden,” primetime host Laura Ingraham tweeted during the debate.
Another Fox colleague, Geraldo Rivera, expressed more sympathy.
“The guy signed up to moderate a debate, and he ended up trying to referee a knife fight,” he said.
Wallace told the Los Angeles Times that he was reluctant to interject more frequently but that he grew alarmed when it was clear Trump wouldn’t stop interrupting Biden.
“If I didn’t try to seize control of the debate — which I don’t know that I ever really did — then it was going to just go completely off the tracks,” he said.
But Wallace wasn’t in favor of the power to shut off a candidate’s microphone, saying it may not have stopped Trump and those comments still could have been picked up by Biden’s mic.
There is some skepticism about what the commission can do that is really meaningful. “I’m not sure that there’s a format change that can solve that problem,” said Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican in battleground state Pennsylvania.
Wallace is the only presidential debate moderator this cycle with previous experience, after receiving praise for handling the final Clinton-Trump debate in 2016. The other two moderators are Steve Scully of C-SPAN and Kristen Welker of NBC News.
WHITE SUPREMACISTS
During the debate, Wallace asked the president if he would condemn white supremacists and militia groups that have shown up at some protests. Wallace specifically mentioned Kenosha, Wis., where a white teenager has been charged in the killing of two protesters during demonstrations over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man.
Trump has repeatedly blamed “antifa,” which stands for the anti-fascist movement.
“I’m willing to do anything. I want to see peace,” Trump said of condemning white supremacists. “What do you want to call them? Give me a name.”
“Proud Boys,” Biden chimed in, referring to a farright extremist group whose members have shown up at protests in the Pacific Northwest. The male-only group of neo-fascists describes its members as “western chauvinists,” and they have been known to incite street violence.
“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” Trump said. “But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.”
But outside of Trump’s staff, even many of his staunch supporters struggled to make sense of his comments.
“I think he misspoke, I think he should correct it,” said Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican senator. “If he doesn’t correct it, I guess he didn’t misspeak.”
Facing widespread criticism for his failure to condemn the group, Trump on Wednesday clarified his stance. “I don’t know who the Proud Boys are,” he said, adding, “whoever they are, they have to stand down. Let law enforcement do their work.”
He also said he “always denounced any form of white supremacy.”
Trump spokesman Hogan Gidley defended Trump’s debate performance and insisted that the president had actually condemned white supremacists.
“He said ‘sure’ three times,” Gidley said on CNN, referring to Trump’s response to questions about whether he would condemn supremacists. “The president does, and he did call them out.”
‘LAW AND ORDER’
Trump said in Tuesday’s debate that Biden was afraid to say the words “law and order” and pressed him to give examples of law enforcement groups that support his campaign. Biden didn’t name any, but said he’s in favor of “law and order with justice, where people get treated fairly.”
Biden called antifa “an idea, not an organization.”
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a Republican, said on CNN that “the Democrats owe a lot to Chris Wallace,” blaming the moderator for having asked the question that elicited Trump’s Proud Boys comment.
“He was asking the president to do something he knows the president doesn’t like to do, which is, say something bad about people who support him.”
The Trump campaign released a video of the times over the years that the president has condemned the Ku Klux Klan. “Here Are 7 Examples Of President Trump Condemning The KKK,” the campaign’s “Trump War Room” account tweeted.
With just five weeks until Election Day and voting already underway in several key states, Biden holds a lead in national polls and in many battlegrounds.
Biden has distanced himself from some of the priorities of his party’s left wing — and Vermont’s U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Sanders said Wednesday on ABC’s “The View” that it was “terribly important” that Biden be elected, and campaign digital director Rob Flaherty said Biden had raised $3.8 million at the debate’s end in his best hour of online fundraising.
WORKING-CLASS VOTERS
Increasingly, the candidates have trained their attention on working-class voters in the Midwest, a group that helped give Trump his victory four years ago and will again play a critical role this fall.
Biden and his wife, Jill, traveled through Ohio and Pennsylvania aboard a nine-car train bearing a campaign logo, a throwback to Biden’s days as a senator when he commuted most days via Amtrak from his family’s home in Delaware to Capitol Hill.
He drew several hundred masked supporters to one afternoon stop in Greensburg, Pa., his largest crowd since he suspended traditional events back in March, according to his campaign.
Biden wrapped up his train trip with a nighttime drivein rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania’s poorest town. The campaign blocked off the surrounding street, and erected a stage and giant screen. About 50 cars were arrayed around the area, with most attendees standing near their vehicles or sitting on the hoods and roofs. They stood close together in small groups, but nearly everyone wore masks.
Biden called Trump a “self-entitled, self-serving president who thinks everything is about him. He thinks if he just yells louder and louder, throws out lie after lie, he’ll get his way.”
Ohio U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat, said Trump’s behavior in the debate was exactly why suburban voters across the Midwest and beyond have turned against him.
“I feel like he took an ax to one of the great American rituals we have in this country,” Ryan said.
Trump, meanwhile, attended an afternoon fundraiser in Shorewood, Minn., a suburb to the west of Minneapolis, before appearing at an evening campaign rally in Duluth on the shores of Lake Superior.
While Trump carried Ohio and Pennsylvania four years ago, he narrowly lost Minnesota, one of the few states he hopes to flip from blue to red this fall. That likely depends on finding more votes in rural, conservative areas and limiting his losses in the state’s urban and suburban areas. Information for this article was contributed by Steve Peoples, Will Weissert, Kevin Freking, Lisa Mascaro, Brian Slodysko, Laurie Kellman, Darlene Superville, Kathleen Ronayne, Michael Kunzelman, David Bauder, Bill Barrow, Zeke Miller and Alexandra Jaffe of The Associated Press; and by Janet Hook, Eli Stokols, Melanie Mason, Evan Halper, Chris Megerian, Sarah D. Wire and David Lauter of The Los Angeles Times.