COVID TAKES CENTER STAGE
Trump, Biden clash over coronavirus
The decision to suspend in-person learning in Boston schools this week amid rising coronavirus cases became a flashpoint in the final presidential debate Thursday as President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden clashed over their responses to the pandemic.
Moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News cited Boston’s move to fully online learning in asking Trump to address parents “who worry that sending their children to school will endanger not only their kids but also their teachers and families?”
“I want to open the schools, the transmittal rate to teachers is very small,” Trump said.
“We have to open our country or we’re not going to have a country,” he continued, going on to note issues with mental health and substance abuse amid the pandemic and blasting Biden for wanting to “close down the country.”
That’s “simply not true,” Biden retorted. “We ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, we ought to be able to safely open.”
The coronavirus pandemic that’s killed 223,000 Americans and infected 8.4 million took center stage at the debate in Nashville, Tenn., that marked one of the last major chances for the candidates to appeal to Americans who haven’t yet voted.
Biden declared that “anyone responsible for that many deaths should not remain president of the United States of America.”
But Trump said the virus “will go away” and that a vaccine is “going to be announced within weeks” as several companies, including Cambridge-based Moderna, make progress in clinical trials.
“We’re rounding the corner,” the president said.
It didn’t take long for the bitter rivals to circle in on allegations of the former vice president’s involvement in son Hunter Biden’s foreign financial dealings, as reported by the New York Post.
“The kind of money you were raking in, you and your family,” Trump said, “I think you have to clean it up and talk to the American people.”
Biden shot back, “I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life.”
As Biden hit Trump for inflaming racial tensions in America, Trump again skewered Biden over his support for the 1994 crime bill that he claimed promoted mass incarceration.
Thursday’s debate proved
much calmer than the crosstalk chaos that dominated the candidates’ first clash, in
part because the debate commission muted the candidates’ microphones while
the other spoke during the first two minutes of each segment.