The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Trump, Biden clash in dueling town halls
Separated by five states, two television news outlets and a deep trough of mutual animosity, President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden held dueling and distant town halls on competing networks Thursday night, replacements for a long-planned debate.
The separate events — with Trump on NBC from Miami and Biden on ABC from Philadelphia — provided a clear contrast in the candidates’ approaches to the coronavirus pandemic and other issues.
Under rapid-fire direct questioning, Trump questioned the wearing of masks, refused to denounce the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, repeatedly declined to say whether he was tested for the coronavirus before the last debate and battled with NBC moderator Savannah Guthrie over his position on white supremacy, which he denounced after largely avoiding the question two weeks ago.
He said his FBI director, Christopher Wray, was not “doing a very good job” because he did not embrace Trump’s false claims of widespread voter fraud. The president also predicted a “red wave” on Nov. 3, even though many of his campaign officials are skeptical.
“They are very strongly against pedophilia, and I agree with that,” he said about QAnon, after first saying he knew nothing about the movement, which was recently banned from Facebook after sharing false stories online, including ones about Democrats abusing children.
While Trump sparred with Guthrie, the Biden town hall proceeded with a far calmer tone, with moderator George Stephanopoulos deferring more to audience questions about issues such as taxes, the pandemic and Biden’s outreach to Black voters.
“He knew full well how serious it was,” Biden said of Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. “He said he didn’t tell anybody because he was afraid that Americans would panic. Americans don’t panic, he panicked, he didn’t say a word to anybody.”
Biden reiterated the importance of masks, saying again that if he were president he would pressure governors and local leaders to institute mask mandates. He criticized Trump at length for not modeling good behavior by wearing a mask.
“The words of a president matter — no matter whether they’re good, bad or indifferent, they matter. And when a president doesn’t wear a mask or makes fun of folks like me when I was wearing a mask for a long time, then people say: ‘Well, it must not be that important.’ ”
Biden and Trump were both on home turf Thursday night — Biden in the state where he grew up and the city where his campaign is headquartered, Trump in his adopted state that he now claims as his residence. As Pennsylvanians took turns introducing themselves and asking Biden questions, the former vice president often responded with how well he knows the city or town where they live.
The town halls took place on what would have been the night of the second scheduled presidential debate, from which Trump withdrew after the Commission on Presidential Debates announced plans to hold it remotely as a health precaution related to the president’s recent coronavirus infection. After a three-night hospital stay, Trump’s doctor has said he has tested negative for the virus and is no longer contagious.
The president said under questioning by Guthrie that his lungs were “infected” during the coronavirus scare and that he had a “little bit of a temperature.”
Trump did not answer repeated questions about whether he was tested on the day of the first debate, and would not say when his last negative test was. “I don’t know. I test all the time.” He said he “probably” took a test on the day of the debate.
“As president I can’t just be locked in a room someplace and not do anything,” he said. “I can’t be in a basement.” Polling that followed that initial meeting, which included the period during Trump’s treatment for COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, generally showed Biden’s lead increasing slightly. Nationally, Biden has a 12-point lead in a Washington Post average of national polls, and seven- or eight-point leads in the crucial Great Lakes states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, which flipped to Trump in 2016 to give him the presidency.
But political consultants in both major political parties do not consider the current advantage predictive of the election result. Trump eked out narrow wins in all three of those states after trailing by similar or slightly slimmer margins in public polling averages three weeks before the election. Those same polling averages, while not predicting Trump’s eventual victory, did show that he was able to close the gap in the final weeks.