In Calmer Debate, Biden and Trump Offer Sharply
Divergent Visions for Nation
In a more restrained appearance, President Trump told
Joseph R. Biden Jr., “You didn’t get it done” in Washington. Mr. Biden accused
the president of heartlessness for separating migrant families and inflaming
racial tensions.
Alexander
Burns Jonathan Martin
By
Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin
Oct. 22,
2020
Updated
11:21 p.m. ET
President
Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. delivered starkly divergent closing arguments to
the country in the final presidential debate on Thursday, offering opposite
prognoses for the coronavirus pandemic and airing irreconcilable differences on
subjects from rescuing the economy and bolstering the health care system to
fighting climate change and reshaping the immigration policy.
The debate
was, on the whole, a more restrained affair than the first encounter between
the two candidates last month, when Mr. Trump harangued Mr. Biden for most of
an hour and a half and effectively short-circuited any policy debate. But if
the tenor of Thursday’s forum was more sedate, the conflict in matters of
substance and vision could not have been more dramatic.
From the
opening minutes, the two candidates took opposing stances on the pandemic, with
Mr. Trump promising, in defiance of evidence, that the disease was “going away”
while Mr. Biden called for much more aggressive federal action in a “dark
winter” ahead.
Mr. Trump,
who badgered Mr. Biden with increasing aggression over the course of the
debate, appeared determined to cast his opponent as a career politician who
was, as he jabbed toward the end of the debate, “all talk and no action.” And
the president used the event as his most prominent platform yet for airing
unsubstantiated or baseless attacks about the finances of Mr. Biden and members
of his family.
Mr. Trump,
however, did little to lay out an affirmative case for his own re-election, or
to explain in clear terms what he would hope to do with another four years in
the White House. He frequently misrepresented the facts of his own record, and
Mr. Biden’s. And on his most important political vulnerability — his
mismanagement of the pandemic — Mr. Trump hewed unswervingly to a message that
happy days are nearly here again, even as polls show that a majority of voters
believe the worst of the coronavirus crisis is still ahead.
Trailing in
a series of crucial swing states, and with 48 million Americans having already
voted, the president was under more pressure. But while he proved he can engage
in a more conventional political jousting, it was less clear whether his
performance could prompt people who dislike him to reconsider their
well-ingrained perceptions.
Mr. Biden,
for his part, stuck to the core of the argument that has propelled his campaign
from the start, denouncing Mr. Trump as a divisive and unethical leader who has
botched the federal response to a devastating public-health crisis. Though Mr.
Trump pushed him onto the defensive repeatedly, the former vice president also
laid out a fuller version of his own policy agenda than he managed in the first
debate, calling for large-scale economic stimulus spending, new aid to states
battling the pandemic and a muscular expansion of health care and worker
benefits nationwide.
Significantly,
Mr. Biden made no serious error of the sort that could haunt him in the final
days of a race in which he’s leading.
Of all the
disagreements between the two candidates, none blazed more brightly than their
assessments of the American experience battling the coronavirus.
Prompted by
the moderator, Kristen Welker of NBC News, to explain his plan for the coming
months, Mr. Trump stuck to the sunny message he has delivered at recent
campaign rallies, promising a vaccine in short order and citing his own
recovery from a bout with the virus as an example of medical progress. The
president boasted that he was now “immune” to the disease, and insisted that
states like Texas and Florida had seen the virus fade away, even as case counts
are on the rise across the country.
“I’ve been
congratulated by the heads of many countries on what we’ve been able to do,”
Mr. Trump said, without offering any specifics.
Mr. Biden,
in response, pressed a focused and familiar line of attack against the
president, faulting him for doing “virtually nothing” to head off the pandemic
early this year and heading into the coldest part of the year with no defined
plan to control the virus. Holding up a face mask, Mr. Biden said he would
encourage all Americans to don them and would ramp up rapid testing on a
national scale.
“We’re
about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter, and he has no clear plan,” Mr.
Biden said. Mr. Trump shot back: “I don’t think we’re going to have a dark
winter at all — we’re opening up our country.”
But when
the president said “we’re learning to live with” the coronavirus, Mr. Biden
pounced. “We’re learning to die with it,” he said.
The
president did, however, say for the first time, “I take full responsibility”
for the impact of the virus. Then he quickly sought to skirt blame. “It’s not
my fault that it came here — it’s China’s fault,” he said.
“Anyone
who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the
United States of America,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “I will end this. I will
make sure we have a plan.”
The debate
on Thursday, at Belmont University in Nashville, represented perhaps the last
opportunity for Mr. Trump to shake up the presidential campaign and claw his
way into closer contention against Mr. Biden with just 11 days remaining.
Mr. Trump
was more coherent than in the first debate, getting off a series of attack
lines depicting Mr. Biden as a career politician and avoiding harsh personal
critiques of his children.
With the
candidates’ microphones turned off at times while the other was speaking, a new
rule implemented to avoid a repeat of Mr. Trump’s constant interruptions in the
first debate, their facial expressions often did the talking. When Mr. Biden
said Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, was being “used as a Russian
pawn,” the president gaped and jarred his head to the right. And when Mr. Trump
insisted, not for the first time, that he would release his tax returns after
an I.R.S. audit, Mr. Biden let out a wide, here-we-go-again grin.
It was in
the second segment of the debate that the exchanges turned sharply personal, as
the focus shifted to foreign interference in American elections. Mr. Biden
spoke first, warning that countries like Russia and Iran would “pay a price”
for tampering with the campaign. Alluding to unsubstantiated stories about him
that have circulated in conservative media, Mr. Biden chided Mr. Trump for the
actions of “his buddy Rudy Giuliani.”
Mr. Trump
rapidly escalated matters, brandishing the unproven allegations about Mr.
Biden’s son to accuse his rival of personally taking money from foreign interests.
“They were paying you a lot of money and they probably still are,” Mr. Trump
said, leveling a charge for which no evidence has surfaced. An investigation by
Senate Republicans found no evidence that Mr. Biden, the former vice president,
engaged in wrongdoing over his son’s business dealings.
Mr. Biden
rejected the charge, saying he had “not taken a penny from any foreign source
ever in my life.” Pushing back on the president, he cited a New York Times
report that Mr. Trump maintained a Chinese bank account and challenged the
president to release his tax returns. “Release your tax returns,” Mr. Biden
said, “or stop talking about corruption.”
The
extended back-and-forth was the most prominent airing so far of the negative
message that Mr. Trump clearly sees as his best chance of undermining Mr. Biden
in the final days of the presidential campaign. But the clash did not yield the
kind of explosive confrontation that strategists on both sides had anticipated,
and in some cases feared.
As Mr.
Trump peppered Mr. Biden with exaggerated or baseless charges, Mr. Biden
repeatedly countered, “Not true,” sometimes without elaboration, and the
segment took on a kind of flat and circular shape.
After the
protracted back-and-forth, Mr. Biden sought to pivot with a rehearsed line in
which he looked at the camera and said: “It’s not about his family and my
family. It’s about your family.”
Mr. Biden’s
strongest moment may have been when he looked into the camera and knowingly
addressed voters. “You know who he is,” he said, alluding to Mr. Trump. “You
know his character. You know my character. You know our reputations for honor
and telling the truth.”
At times,
the debate resembled a more conventional political clash between a Democrat and
a Republican, albeit with an incumbent president quick to distort his
opponent’s positions.
“He wants
socialized medicine,” Mr. Trump insisted of Mr. Biden, citing the stances of
more liberal Democrats, including Mr. Biden’s running mate, Senator Kamala
Harris, and Senator Bernie Sanders, both former primary foes of Mr. Biden.
“He thinks
he’s running against someone else,” Mr. Biden said, adding, “I beat all those
other people because I disagreed with him.”
The
candidates both expressed support for new federal spending on a large scale to
help prop up the economy and aid distressed individuals and households, an
initiative still gridlocked on Capitol Hill. Mr. Trump again blamed House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the holdup, promising that if a deal were arranged,
lawmakers from his own party would fall in line.
But he
continued to draw a firm line against Democratic-backed plans to help
distressed states and cities close immense budget gaps. That aspect of the
Democrats’ legislation, the president said, was merely “a big bailout for badly
run Democrat cities and states.”
Mr. Biden
called state relief an urgent priority and defended his party’s congressional
wing, pointing out that months ago it passed new relief legislation that had
languished before the Republican Senate. And he put the onus on Mr. Trump to
drum up support in that chamber. “Why isn’t he talking to his Republican
friends?” Mr. Biden said.
While Mr.
Biden lashed Mr. Trump on his hard-line immigration policies, invoking the
group of 500 children whose migrant parents now cannot be located, he also
suggested he would be more effective addressing the issue than the president he
served — Barack Obama.
“I’ll be
president of the United States, not vice president of the United States,” Mr.
Biden said, vowing to deliver an immigration overhaul that offers unauthorized
migrants a pathway to legal status in the first 100 days of his administration.
After Mr.
Biden described climate change as an “existential threat” requiring an all-out
government response, Mr. Trump made a counterargument riddled with inaccuracies
and some allegations that were simply perplexing. He claimed falsely that the
construction of renewable-energy facilities created more emissions than
traditional fuels, and accused Mr. Biden of trying to mandate that buildings be
constructed with “little, tiny, small windows.”
In a debate
that was originally planned as a forum on national security, the two candidates
devoted only a few glancing exchanges to the subject. In one, Mr. Trump took
credit for averting war on the Korean Peninsula, touting his “good
relationship” with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and faulting the Obama
administration for failing to establish such relations. Mr. Kim, he said,
“didn’t like Obama.”
Mr. Biden
defended the Obama administration’s view of Korean diplomacy, explaining that
it had not wanted to “legitimize” Mr. Kim.
At the end
of the debate, Mr. Biden said he would push the country to “transition from the
oil industry,” adding that “the oil industry pollutes significantly” and that
he would end federal subsidies. Sensing an opening, Mr. Trump said “that’s a
big statement” and then invoked a series of states with energy-heavy
industries. “Will you remember that Texas, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma?”
Alexander
Burns is a national political correspondent, covering elections and political
power across the country, including Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Before coming
to The Times in 2015, he covered the 2012 presidential election for Politico.
@alexburnsNYT
Jonathan
Martin is a national political correspondent. He has reported on a range of
topics, including the 2016 presidential election and several state and
congressional races, while also writing for Sports, Food and the Book Review.
He is also a CNN political analyst. @jmartnyt
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