TRUMP, BIDEN GO AFTER EACH OTHER ON COVID-19
President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden squared off Thursday night in their final debate, which stood as the trailing incumbent’s best chance to change the race’s trajectory with just 12 days until the election.
The Nashville debate offered thema final national stage to outline starkly different visions for a country in the grips of a surging pandemic that has killed more than 225,000 Americans and cost millions of jobs.
The night opened with a clash over the president’s handling of the pandemic, which polling suggests is the campaign’s defining issue for voters, with Biden declaring, “Anyone responsible for that many deaths should not remain president of the United States of America.”
Trump defended his management of the nation’s most deadly health crisis in a century, dismissing Biden’s warning that the nation had a “dark winter ahead” due to spikes in infections. And he promised that a vaccine would be ready in weeks.
“It wi l l go away,” said Trump, staying with his optimistic assessment of the pandemic. “We’re rounding the turn. We’re rounding the corner. It’s going away.”
Despite historic tumult, the race has remained largely unchanged with Biden holding advantages in many battleground states while Trump faces a shortage of campaign cash and, crucially, time.
Worried that Trump could lose the White House and cost Republicans the Senate, some advisers urged him to trade his aggressive demeanor from the first debate for a lower-key style and put the spotlight on Biden, whom he derides as “Sleepy Joe.” But Trump made no such promise.
Biden, who has stepped off the campaign trail for several days in favor of debate prep, expected Trump to get intensely personal. Trump’s focus on the Biden family in recent days appeared to come at the expense of his last significant opportunity to offer a uni-
fying message to a nation reeling from a virus that killedmore than 1,000 people on the day the two men faced off.
The former vice president and his inner circle see the president’s approach chiefly as an effort to distract from
the coronavirus, its economic fallout and other crises of Trump’s term.
Final debates often play an outsized role in electoral outcomes. But Thursday night’s showdown was different from those past.
More than 47 million people have already cast their ballots as part of a pandemic- era rise in early voting. In an election dominated by a polarizing pres
ident, far fewer undecided voters remain than at this point in 2016.
In a visual reminder of the pandemic that has rewritten the norms of American society and fundamentally changed the campaign, sheets of plexiglass had been installed onstage Wednesday between the two men. But in the hours before the debate, they were removed.
The debate, moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker, was a final chance for eachman tomake his case to a television audience of tens ofmillions of voters. And questions swirled beforehand as to how Trump, whose hectoring performance at the first debate was viewed by aides as a mistake that turned off viewers, would perform amid a stretch of the campaign in which he
has taken angry aim at the news media and unleashed deeply personal attacks on Biden and his adult son.
In an effort to curtail interruptions this time, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that Trump and Biden would each have his microphone cut off while his rival delivered an opening two-minute answer to each of sixdebate topics.