CANDIDATES OFFER DIVERGENT VISIONS
Trump, Biden joust over pandemic response, climate change in their final encounter
NASHVILLE, Tenn.
President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden fought over how to handle the pandemic in Thursday’s second and final presidential debate, an exchange that highlighted their vastly different approaches to the major domestic and foreign challenges facing the nation.
With less than two weeks until the election, Trump sought to portray himself as the same outsider he first pitched to voters four years ago, saying he wasn’t a politician.
Biden, meanwhile, argued that
Trump was an incompetent leader of a country facing multiple crises and tried to connect what he saw as the president’s failures to the everyday lives of Americans.
The debate at Belmont University in Nashville was centered on the U.S. response to the pandemic, which has killed more than 225,000 Americans and cost millions of jobs.
Trump insisted that the virus will go away while Biden warned that the nation was heading toward “a dark winter.” Polling suggests it is the campaign’s defining issue for voters, and Biden said, “Anyone who is responsible for that many deaths should
not remain as 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 dire stretch ahead due to spikes in infections. And he promised that a vaccine would be ready in weeks.
“We’re rounding the turn. We’re rounding the corner. It’s going away,” Trump said.
Biden vowed that his administration would defer to scientists on battling the pandemic and said that Trump’s approach hindered the nation’s response.
“I don’t look at this in the way he does — blue states and red states,” Biden said. “They’re all the United States. And look at all the states that are having a spike in the coronavirus — they’re the red states.”
Their first debate was defined by interruptions but Thursday night featured a mostly milder tone.
This debate, moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker, featured a
significant change: a muted microphone at times when the other candidate was speaking.
In a visual reminder of the pandemic that has rewritten the norms of American society and fundamentally changed the campaign, plexiglass barriers had been installed onstage Wednesday between the two men. But in the hours before the debate, they were removed.
A Trump campaign official said the decision was made after White House chief of staff Mark Meadows called Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s highly respected top infectious-diseases expert, during a walkthrough of the venue site.
Meadows put Fauci on speakerphone, and Fauci told those in the room that all a barrier would do was provide a false sense of security, the official said.
Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 two days after the last debate, and he and the White House have refused to say whether he abided by commission rules and tested negative for the virus before that debate.
This time, Trump was given a test aboard Air Force One en route to Nashville on Thursday and tested negative, according to Meadows. Biden’s campaign reported he also tested negative.
The night featured a large amount of substantive policy debate as the two broke sharply on the environment, foreign policy, immigration and racial justice.
When Trump repeatedly asked Biden if he would “close down the oil industry,” the Democratic standard bearer said he “would transition from the oil industry, yes,” and that he would replace it with renewable energy “over time.”
Trump, making a direct appeal to voters in energyproducing states like Texas and the vital battleground of Pennsylvania, seized upon the remark as “a big statement.”
As the debate swept to climate change, Trump explained his decision to move the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord negotiated in 2015, declaring it was an “unfair” pact that would have cost the country trillions of dollars and hurt businesses.
Trump repeatedly claimed Biden’s plan to tackle climate change and invest in green industries was developed by “AOC plus three,” referring to New York Rep. Alexandria OcasioCortez.
Biden chuckled during much of Trump’s answer and said, “I don’t know where he comes from.”
“I know more about wind than you do. It’s extremely expensive. Kills all the birds,” Trump said to Biden, who laughed at the response.
On race, Biden called out Trump’s previous refusals to condemn White supremacists and his attacks on the Black Lives Matter move
ment, declaring that the president “pours fuel on every single racist fire.“
“You know who I am. You know who he is. You know his character. You know my character,“Biden said. The rivals’ reputations for “honor and for telling to truth” are clear, he said.
Trump countered by pointing out his efforts on criminal justice reform, blasting Biden’s support of a 1990s crime bill that many feel disproportionately incarcerated Black men. Staring into the crowd, he declared himself “the least racist person in this room.”
Turning to foreign policy, Biden accused Trump of dealing with a “thug ” while holding summits with the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un.
And closer to home, the former vice president laced into the Trump administration’s policy of separating children from their parents trying to illegally cross the
southern border.
Biden said that America has learned from a New York Times report that Trump only paid $750 a year in federal income taxes while holding “a secret bank account” in China.
The former vice president then noted he’s released all of his tax returns going back 22 years and challenged the president to release his returns, saying, “What are you hiding?”
Trump said he closed his former account in China and claimed his accountants told him he “prepaid tens of millions of dollars” in taxes. However, as he has for the past four years, after promising to release his taxes, he declined to say when he might do so.
Trump said that when it comes to health care, he would like “to terminate” the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, even amid a pandemic, and come up “with a brand new beautiful health care,”
that protects coverage for pre-existing conditions.
Biden said the president has been talking about making such a move for a long time but “he’s never come up with a plan.”
He also denounced Trump’s claim that Biden wanted to socialize medicine, creating daylight between himself and the more liberal members of his party whom he defeated in the Democratic primaries.
“He thinks he’s running against somebody else,” the former vice president said. “He’s running against Joe Biden. I beat all those other people because I disagreed with them.”
During the 2016 campaign, in an effort to def lect from the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which he is heard boasting about groping women, Trump held a news conference just before a debate with Hillary Clinton during which he appeared with
women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault. He then invited them to watch as audience members.
In a similar move, Trump’s campaign held a surprise pre-debate news conference featuring Tony Bobulinski, a man who said he was Hunter Biden’s former business partner and made allegations that the vice president’s son consulted with his father on China-related business dealings.
Trump made similar, if vague, accusations from the debate stage and exchanges about Hunter Biden did not dominate the night as aides on both campaigns thought might happen. Biden declared the discussion about family entanglements “malarkey” and accused Trump of not wanting to talk about the substantive issues.
Turning to the camera and the millions watching at home, he said, “It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family, and your family is hurting badly.”
Thursday’s debate represented perhaps the last opportunity for Trump to shake up the presidential campaign with just 11 days remaining.
Biden entered the debate with a wide lead over Trump in national polls and ahead of him by meaningful margins in most of the battleground states.
There are some signs that the president has recovered at least some of the support he had lost after the first debate last month and his subsequent hospitalization for the coronavirus.
More than 47 million people have already cast their ballots through early and mail-in voting, according to the nonpartisan U.S. Election Project.
That means the pool of votes available to either candidate is quickly shrinking as millions more are tabulated daily.