Jago Times "English Edition" Best Online Newspaper
WASHINGTON — Instead of a face-to-face debate Thursday night, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden squared off, sort of, in simultaneous prime-time town halls that forced voters to channel surf if they wanted to comparison shop.
In tone and content, these were less competing events than parallel universes.
As Biden sedately clarified his views on fracking and expounded on the wisdom of green infrastructure investment, Trump was defending QAnon, the shadowy conspiracy cult that holds that he will save the nation from a secret cabal of child molesters.
“They are very strongly against pedophilia. … I agree with that,” he said, after insisting, “I know nothing about QAnon.”
As Trump was boasting of his ability to tilt the Supreme Court to the right, Biden stoked controversy by again dodging questions about whether he would try to expand the court in response to the rush by Trump and his Senate allies to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace the liberal icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
“I have not been a fan of court packing,” Biden said, but “it depends on how it turns out.”
When moderator George Stephanopoulos pushed him to level with the American people, Biden insisted that the speculation was a diversion peddled by Trump, though his own refusal to give a straight answer has kept the issue alive for weeks.
“No matter what answer I give you, if I say it, that’s the headline tomorrow,” Biden said.
It was not exactly a debate, but if you took the time to watch both, or at least the highlights, it did the job in some ways — perhaps even better, since they couldn’t bicker or drown each other out, and the incentive to rehearse zingers was lacking.
Trump, vigorous and feisty after a bout with COVID-19, downplayed the efficacy of masks for himself and others to slow the pandemic. “People with masks are catching it all the time. … As president I can’t just be locked in a room someplace for the next year,” he said, working in a jab at Biden. “I can’t be in a basement.”
He also tried to defuse a simmering concern that he would cling to power no matter how the election goes, vowing to leave office peacefully unless there’s massive cheating. “Yes I will, but I want it to be an honest election, and so does everybody else,” he said.
At the same time he claimed, falsely, that “thousands of ballots with my name on them” have been found in garbage cans, injecting the specter of exactly the sort of fraud that, in his view, would excuse him from the duty to cede power.
NBC hosted Trump for an hour from Miami.
ABC booked Biden for 90 minutes from Philadelphia.
Both events started at 7 p.m. Dallas time with voters posing some of the questions, as they would have if the rivals had been sharing a stage for a town hall-style debate as planned. But two days after their first debate in Cleveland — a spectacle memorable for Trump’s relentless interruptions — the president fell ill with COVID-19 and then spent three nights in the hospital.
The bipartisan debate commission insisted the candidates could not participate in person for the next showdown. Trump refused, calling a virtual debate a waste of his time. The rest is network television history: two contenders commanding prime network airtime 1,000 miles apart — ample social distancing to prevent both contagion and a direct clash of ideas, though they covered some of the same topics, including the pandemic that has claimed more than 217,000 American lives.
The format made it impossible for Trump to hijack the conversation as he’d tried to do at the first debate, though he sparred repeatedly with moderator Savannah Guthrie of the Today show as she peppered him with questions about his own bout with COVID-19, his response to the crisis, his views on white supremacy and his personal finances.
In one startling exchange, Trump defended using Twitter to spread a wild, unsubstantiated claim that Biden had tried to have members of SEAL Team 6 killed to cover up failures in the hunt for terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.
“That was a retweet. That was the opinion of somebody. I put it out there. People can decide for themselves,” Trump said, shrugging aside the possibility that anyone might see this as irresponsible or unusual behavior for a president.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/Y2IDFO7XZTMNCJTVGJWNH2IVNE.jpg)
Offered a chance to clarify his views on white supremacy after an ambiguous answer in the first debate, when he seemed to call on the Proud Boys hate group to “stand by” for post-election violence, Trump insisted in the past tense that “I denounced white supremacy for years.” He quickly pivoted to drawing an equivalency, as he often does, between right- and left-wing wrongdoers.
Why wasn’t Guthrie asking him about antifa? he demanded, referring to the “anti-fascist” movement that conservatives blame for upheaval over the summer.
“Antifa exists. They’re vicious, they’re violent, they kill people, and they’re burning down our cities, and they happen to be radical left,” Trump said.
Race and crime
In Philadelphia, a number of voters wanted answers on race and crime.
Biden admitted that the 1994 crime bill he championed was a mistake, conceding that it led to mass incarceration. He vowed to convene a national study group to propose reforms aimed at reducing police brutality.
One young Black voter asked why Black people under 30 should vote for him, recalling Biden’s quip that “You ain’t Black” if you don’t support him, a much-derided comment he made in May during an interview with Charlamagne tha God.
“If young Black women and men vote, you can determine the outcome of this election,” Biden responded.
He vowed to improve economic conditions for Black Americans, helping them accrue wealth in order to promote equality. “The vast majority of people of color are behind the eight ball,” he said.
Trump used his forum to unleash a torrent of unfounded claims, including a favorite involving Biden, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: “They spied on my campaign and got caught.”
On COVID-19, Trump offered an upbeat assessment of the battle against the pandemic.
“I believe we’re rounding the corner,” he said, adding that “we were expected to lose 2,200,000 people … if you look at the original charts.”
Guthrie shot down the claim, saying that was if the country did “absolutely nothing” rather than heeding public health guidance.
Trump didn’t deny owing big money to foreign lenders, though he explicitly ruled out Russia. And he brushed aside reports that his debt tops $400 million, insisting that with his vast wealth he’s actually “underleveraged. … It’s a tiny percentage of my net worth.”
While Trump was struggling to explain his minuscule federal income tax payments in most of the last 20 years, Biden was defending his plan to raise taxes on the wealthiest individuals and on corporations during an economic rough patch caused by the pandemic.
He said the revenue would allow for job creation and green infrastructure improvements, including 500,000 new electric-car charging stations along highways.
“When you allow people to get back into the game and have a job, everything moves,” Biden said.
Pandemic and panic
Attendance was sparse at Biden’s event, indoors at the National Constitution Center, giving a far more sterile and static impression than the lively outdoor give and take at Trump’s event at a Miami museum.
Trump defended the way he played down the dangers early in the pandemic, insisting that while he recognized and acted on the threat: “I don’t want to panic this country. I don’t want to go out and say ‘Everybody’s going to die! Everybody’s going to die!’”
On the other network, Biden offered a rebuttal.
“Americans don’t panic. He panicked,” he said of Trump. “He missed enormous opportunities and said things that were not true.”
Biden conceded that he didn’t immediately call on Americans to wear masks but said that now, with the pandemic further along and more known about the contagion, “there should be a national standard.”
But he avoided embracing the idea of making vaccination mandatory nationwide.
Kelly Leigh, a Pennsylvania resident who voted for Trump in 2016 and is undecided for this election, asked if Biden would take a COVID-19 vaccine and encourage Americans to do so.
Yes, he said, “if the body of scientists say that this is what’s ready to be done,” though he said requiring people to take it would depend on “the nature of the vaccine when it comes out and how it’s being distributed.”
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dmn/M2OYBHUUQFZ6JCULAZ2LXEM6IU.jpg)
Biden and Trump still plan to meet Oct. 22 for a final debate in Nashville. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, has vouched that Trump is no longer contagious.
Between the two of them, Trump is the one more in need of a jolt.
Polls show Biden comfortably ahead nationwide, and ahead by narrower margins in the half-dozen battlegrounds that are likely to determine the outcome. Trump holds only about a 4-point lead in Texas in the RealClearPolitics average of polls, which is better than he was faring a few months ago but still well below the 9-point victory margin he enjoyed in 2016.
Asked what it would mean for him to lose to Trump, Biden said: “It could say I’m a lousy candidate, that I didn’t do a good job. I hope that it doesn’t say that we are racially, ethnically and religiously at odds with one another as it appears the president wants us to be.”