Trump, Biden go after each other on coronavirus

NASHVILLE, TENN. » 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 them a 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 “darkwinter ahead” due to spikes in infections. And he promised that a vaccine would be ready in weeks.

“It will go away,” said Trump, stayingwithhis 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 unifying message to a nation reeling from a virus that killedmore than 1,000 people on the day the twomen 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 president, far fewer undecided voters remain than at this point in 2016.