Chaos reigns in first debate
With cross-talk and mockery, Trump tramples decorum versus Biden
President Donald Trump and Joe Biden clashed over health care and abortion rights in the opening minutes of their first debate Tuesday night, with Trump shrugging off the possibility that Roe v. Wade could be overturned and struggling to defend his health care record against determined criticism from Biden.
Trump resorted quickly to interrupting and taunting Biden, complaining about moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News and effectively threatening to turn the debate into a fog of bluster and cross-talk rather than a clear exchange of views. Biden attempted to talk past the president’s heckling, but seemed before long to decide that Trump’s insistent distractions were an unavoidable obstacle.
“Will you shut up, man?” he asked Trump in obvious exasperation. “This is so unpresidential.”
The debate, at Case Western Reserve Universitty in Cleveland, quickly descended into name-calling and hectoring in the first 15 minutes, derisive attacks that were extraordinary even by the standards of Trump’s presidency.
Trump, trailing in the polls and urgently hoping to revive his campaign, was plainly attempting to be the aggressor. But he interrupted so insistently that Biden could scarcely answer the questions posed to him, forcing the moderator, Wallace, to repeatedly urge the president to let his opponent speak.
When Biden attempted to discuss voters who had lost loved ones to
“
Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by, but ... somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.” President Donald Trump
“
He doesn’t have a plan. The fact is, this man doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Former Vice President Joe Biden
the coronavirus Trump interjected. “You would’ve lost far more people,” he declared.
The former vice president veered between smiling and shaking his head in bemusement and firing off attacks of his own as Trump kept interrupting.
“You’re the worst president America has ever had,” Biden said. “In 47 months I’ve done more than you have in 47 years,” Trump shot back, referring to his rival’s lengthy Washington tenure.
Trump’s volcanic performance appeared to be the gambit of a president seeking to tarnish his opponent by any means available, unbounded by norms of accuracy and decorum and unguided by a calculated sense of how to sway the electorate or assuage voters’ reservations about his leadership.
In an election characterized by sharply defined and stubbornly stable opinions about both candidates, the president’s conduct was the equivalent of pulling the pin on a hand grenade and hoping that the ensuing explosion would harm the other candidate more.
But Trump made no effort to address his most obvious political vulnerabilities, from his mismanagement of the pandemic to his refusal to condemn right-wing extremism, and it was not clear that he did anything over the course of the evening to appeal to voters who have deeply disliked him for years — including some who voted for him in 2016 in spite of that.
Even as he went on the offensive against Biden on matters of law and order, Trump declined when prompted by Wallace and Biden to specifically condemn acts of violence by white supremacists and right-wing extremist groups. When Wallace asked him whether he would be willing to do so, Trump replied, “Sure,” and asked the two men to name a group they would like him to denounce.
But when Biden named the Proud Boys, a far-right group, Trump did not do so.
“Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by,” the president said briefly, before pivoting to say, “Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”
Biden at times sought to ignore Trump by looking into the camera and speaking directly to the voters. He did so when the president brought up the overseas work of Hunter Biden, Biden’s younger son. And he did it again when he highlighted the New York Times‘ revelations about how little Trump has paid in taxes. “This guy paid a total of $750,” Biden said.
Pressed about how much he did pay in 2016 and 2017, the president claimed he paid “millions of dollars” but offered no evidence and declined to say he would release his tax returns.
The only phase of the debate that might have been taken by an open-minded viewer as an extended and articulate exchange of views came on the subject of the coronavirus pandemic, as Trump voiced impatience with a range of public-health restrictions and Biden criticized the president for being dismissive of measures like mask wearing and social distancing.
“If we just wore masks between now — and social distanced — between now and January, we would probably save up to 100,000 lives,” said Biden, who also alluded to the disclosure in journalist Bob Woodward’s recent book that the president had misled the American people about the severity of the disease last winter.
Trump, reiterating his demands that the country return quickly to normal, called on Democratic governors to “open these states up” quickly, and said without evidence, “They think they’re hurting us by keeping them closed.”
For all his evident frustration with Trump for not abiding by the rules, Wallace made no attempt to correct the president as he unspooled a series of falsehoods. Trump, for example, insisted that Biden had once called criminals “superpredators.” But it was Hillary Clinton who said that in 1996. Trump denied that one of his advisers, Kellyanne Conway, had described riots as helpful to him politically. But Conway did say that, on Wallace’s own network.
In addition to lobbing false allegations, Trump also was unable, or unwilling, to discuss policy issues in a detailed manner. Pressed on whether he believed in climate change, the president said, “I think to an extent yes,” before quickly adding: “We’re planting a billion trees.”
Overshadowed though it might have been, the policy content of the debate’s opening phase mirrored the stark contrasts already on display in the race. On the Supreme Court, the two men split over whether it was appropriate for Trump to name a new justice to the court in the final months of his term, with the president offering a defiant rationale for doing so: “We won the election,” he said, “and we have the right to do it.”
Perhaps more surprisingly, Trump dismissed Biden’s warning that Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision guaranteeing women’s right to abortion access, was “on the ballot.”
The president projected disbelief, though the decision would plainly be vulnerable to being overturned by a conservative court. “There’s nothing happening there,” Trump insisted.
Trump had no defense for Biden’s warning that if the Supreme Court struck down the Affordable Care Act it could imperil women and people with preexisting conditions, nor did he offer a substantive response to Wallace’s question prompting him to articulate a specific vision for health care policy.