WATCH LIVE: Trump, Biden to face off in first presidential debate
President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden will face off in their first debate tonight, a crucial meeting for both candidates as they head down the home stretch in an election roiled by a pandemic, a Supreme Court vacancy and ongoing protests over racial injustice.
The 9 p.m. debate in Cleveland comes at a pivotal moment in the presidential race with just five weeks to go until Election Day and early voting already underway in many states. Trump, consistently trailing Biden in national polls and locked in a dead heat with his Democratic rival in several battleground states including ones he won in 2016, needs to shake up the race.
Biden, with his penchant for gaffes and his uneven debate performances this cycle, faces his biggest test as he prepares to square off three times against his most unorthodox opponent yet.
Six topics predetermined by moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News will dominate the 90-minute tilt: the coronavirus crisis, the Supreme Court, the economy, race and violence in American cities, election integrity and the candidates’ political records.
Biden has sought to make the election a referendum on Trump’s handling of the pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 people in the U.S. and infected some 7 million.
The president is working to push through conservative federal appeals court Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court in part to redirect the spotlight off his leadership amid the public health crisis and onto a more favorable topic.
But Republicans’ fast-tracking of Barrett’s confirmation hearings appears to be energizing Democrats just as much as it is Trump’s base, and recent polling shows voters believe the winner of the Nov. 3 election should fill Ginsburg’s seat.
Trump has been sowing doubts about the integrity of the presidential election for months as states push massive expansions of mail-in voting amid the pandemic, and has been laying the groundwork for a legal challenge should initial results not end up in his favor. Biden warned over the summer that Trump would try to “indirectly steal” the election.
Looming over it all is the unrest over racial injustice roiling cities from Louisville, Ky., to Portland, Ore. Trump is trumpeting himself as a “law and order” leader while seizing on pockets of violence and looting that have cropped up among largely peaceful protests to stoke fear. Biden, who has also denounced the violence and said he opposes activists’ cries to “defund the police,” generally supports the demonstrations over racial inequality.
One topic not on the list but at top of mind for many this week is the bombshell report from the New York Times that showed Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, and paid no income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years.
Biden and Harris released their 2019 state and federal tax returns in the run-up to the debate Tuesday. Biden and his wife had an adjusted gross income of $985,233 and paid nearly $300,000 in federal income taxes. Harris and her husband had an adjusted gross income of more than $3 million and paid nearly $1.2 million in federal income taxes, according to the returns.
The run-up to the debate was marked by a flurry of national and battleground state polls and a stream of accusations over alleged demands for the televised face-off. Trump’s campaign said in a statement that Biden’s team declined to allow a third party to check the candidates for ear pieces ahead of the debate and had asked for multiple breaks during the hour-and-a-half-long bout.
Kate Bedingfield, a Biden deputy campaign manager, told reporters the allegations were “completely absurd” and said Biden would not be wearing an earpiece and his team “never asked for breaks.” She then lobbed a grenade of her own, saying Trump’s team asked Wallace not to mention the number of people who have died from COVID-19, which Trump’s team denied.
from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/3cI3y4R
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September 29, 2020
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