Next presidential debate will see mics occasionally muted
This time, the candidates will get the silent treatment. The microphones of President Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be muted during portions of the final presidential debate Thursday, the organizers said late Monday, in an unusual effort to avoid the unruly spectacle of the candidates’ first meeting in Cleveland last month.
The debate’s rules remain the same: Each candidate will be allotted two minutes to initially answer the moderator’s questions. But the Commission on Presidential Debates said it would turn off each candidate’s audio feed while his rival had the floor.
Once each candidate has delivered his two-minute reply, Trump and Biden, the Democratic nominee, will be allowed to freely engage with each other for the remainder of each 15-minute segment, with both microphones fully functional.
The incoherence of the first debate — during which Trump’s relentless interruptions of Biden and the moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News, derailed the proceedings — put pressure on the nonpartisan debate commission to improve enforcement of the rules, despite its members’
long-standing reluctance to change any aspects of the debates in the middle of a campaign.
The moderator of Thursday’s debate in Nashville, Tenn., Kristen Welker of NBC News, will not be in control of turning the candidates’ microphones on and off; that task will be left to the commission’s production crew.
There is also the potential for a new kind of gaffe: Trump’s voice may be picked up by Biden’s microphone, and vice versa, meaning that an attempted interruption may still be heard, at least faintly, by viewers.
In a statement, the commission said it had acted out of concern that the first debate had fallen short, “depriving voters of the opportunity to be informed of the candidates’ positions on the issues.”
But it also acknowledged that the two campaigns, which were notified only shortly before the announcement, might not “be totally satisfied.”
“We are comfortable that these actions strike the right balance and that they are in the interest of the American people, for whom these debates are held,” the commission said.
Trump and his aides have signaled deep hostility to any outside control of his microphone at the debate, even sending a belligerent letter to the commission calling it “completely unacceptable” for “an unnamed person” to shut off a microphone.