HIGH STAKES DEBATE
Trump, Biden go after each other on coronavirus, taxes
NASHVILLE, TENN. — President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden offered sharply different visions of how to handle the surging pandemic and fought over how much Trump pays in taxes during the final debate of a tumultuous campaign.
With Trump trailing and needing to change the campaign’s trajectory, the debate could prove pivotal though more than 47 million votes already have been cast and there are fewer undecided voters than at this point in previous election years. The debate did not feature the repeated angry interruptions of the candidates’ other showdown, although the men engaged in a series of clashes.
The night in Nashville began with a battle over the president’s handling of the pandemic, which has killed more than 225,000 Americans and cost millions of jobs. Trump declared 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 declared, “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 dire stretch ahead due to spikes in infections. And he promised that a vaccine would be ready in weeks.
“It will go away,” said Trump, staying with his optimistic assessment of the pandemic. “We’re rounding the turn. We’re round
ing the corner. It’s going away.”
“We can’t keep this country closed. This is a massive country with a massive economy,” Trump said. “There’s depression, alcohol, drugs at a level nobody’s ever seen before. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”
But Biden vowed that his administration would defer to the scientists and said that Trump’s divisive 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 he coronavirus — they’re the red states.”
Biden said that America has learned from a New York Times report that Trump only paid $750 a year in federal 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 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.
When the debate veered into talk of immigration, Trump defended his administration’s separation of immigrant children who remain away from their families following detentions along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Trump said during Thursday’s debate that children are often brought across the border not by families but “by coyotes and lots of bad people.”
The American Civil Liberties Union told a judge this week that there were still 545 children separated from their parents from 2018.
Trump said his administration had constructed more than 400 miles of his promised border barrier. He also said, “They built cages,” referring to Obama-era facilities depicted in media reports during the separations.
Biden disputed Trump’s answer, saying kids “were ripped from” their families in 2018.
As he has done since the primary campaign, Biden defended the Obama administration’s immigration policy, admitting that it “took too long to get it right.”
The two candidates were asked about where they stand on raising the federal minimum wage as part of their final debate Thursday night. The minimum wage is now $7.25 an hour. Proponents
of increasing it say the minimum wage has not kept up with inflation, making it harder for workers to make ends meet.
Biden says he would push for a $15-per-hour minimum wage and rejects the idea that it would hurt small businesses.
Biden said at Thursday’s debate: “There is no evidence that when you raise the minimum wage, businesses go out of business.”
Trump argued that the minimum wage should be left as an issue for the states to determine. He says, “How are you helping your small businesses when you’re forcing wages? What’s going to happen, and what’s been proven to happen, is when you do that, these small businesses fire many of their employees.”
The debate, moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker, was a final chance for each man to make his case to a television audience of tens of millions 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.
When he feels cornered, Trump has often lashed out, going as negative as possible. In one stunning moment during the 2016 campaign, in an effort to deflect from the release of the Access Hollywood tape in which he is heard boasting about groping women, Trump held a press 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 another surprise pre-debate news conference, this time featuring Tony Bobulinski, a man who said he was Hunter Biden’s former business partner and made unproven allegations that the vice president’s son consulted with his father on China-related business dealings.
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.”