Trump’s taunts spark Biden’s ‘shut up, man’
The first debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden deteriorated into a bitter showdown yesterday as the president repeatedly interrupted his opponent with angry – and personal – taunts.
In the most chaotic presidential debate in recent memory, Trump refused to condemn white supremacists who have supported him. There were also heated clashes over the president’s handling of the pandemic, the integrity of the election results, deeply personal attacks about Biden’s family and how the Supreme Court will shape the future of the nation’s health care.
The two men frequently talked over each other with Trump interrupting, nearly shouting, so often that Biden eventually snapped at him, ‘‘Will you shut up, man?’’
With just five weeks until Election Day and voting already under way in some key states, Biden has maintained a lead in national polls and in many battlegrounds. It’s unclear whether the debate will do much to change those dynamics.
Over and over, Trump tried to control the conversation, interrupting Biden and repeatedly talking over the moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News.
The president drew a lecture from Wallace, who pleaded with both men to stop talking over each other. Biden tried to push back against Trump, sometimes looking right at the camera to directly address viewers and snapping, ‘‘It’s hard to get a word in with this clown.’’
Again refusing to commit to honouring the results of the election, Trump spread falsehoods about mail voting.
Trump tried to sidestep when he was asked if he was willing to condemn white supremacists and paramilitary groups.
‘‘What do you want to call them? Give me a name. Giveme a name,’’ Trump said, before Wallace mentioned the far Right, violent group known as the Proud Boys. Trump then pointedly did not condemn the group, instead saying, ‘‘Proud Boys, stand back, stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the Left because this is not Right-wing problem. This is a Left-wing problem.’’
Biden attacked Trump’s handling of the pandemic. He told Trump to ‘‘get out of your bunker and get out of the sand trap’’ and go in his golf cart to the Oval Office to come up with a bipartisan plan to save people.
Trump struggled to define his ideas for replacing the Affordable Care Act on health care and defended his Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett.
The scattershot debate bounced from topic to topic, with Trump again refusing to embrace the science of climate change while Biden accused Trump of walking away from the American promise of equity for all and making a race-based appeal.
‘‘This is a president who has used everything as a dog whistle to try to generate racist hatred, racist division,’’ Biden said.
Trump in turn claimed that Biden’s work on a federal crime bill treated the African American population ‘‘about as bad as anybody in this country.’’ The president pivoted to his hardline focus on those protesting racial injustice and accused Biden of being afraid to use the words ‘‘law and order,’’ out of fear of alienating the Left.
The attacks turned deeply personal when Trump returned to a campaign attack line by declaring that Biden’s son, Hunter, had inappropriately benefited from his father’s connections while working in Ukraine. Biden rarely looked at Trump during the night but turned to face the president when he defended his sons, including his son Beau, an Army veteran who died of cancer in 2015, after the commander-inchief’s reported insults of those who served in the military.
The debate was arguably Trump’s best chance to try to reframe the campaign as a choice between candidates and not a referendum over his handling of the virus that has killed more people in America than any other nation. Americans, according to polling, have soured on his leadership in the crisis, and the president has struggled to land consistent attacks on Biden. –