The first presidential debate between President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. unraveled into an ugly melee Tuesday, as Mr. Trump hectored and interrupted Mr. Biden nearly every time he spoke and the former vice president denounced the president as a “clown” and told him to “shut up.”
In a chaotic, 90-minute back-and-forth, the two major party nominees expressed a level of acrid contempt for each other unheard-of in modern American politics.
Mr. Trump, trailing in the polls and urgently hoping to revive his campaign, was plainly attempting to be the aggressor. But he interjected so insistently that Mr. Biden could scarcely answer the questions posed to him, forcing the moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News, to repeatedly urge the president to let his opponent speak.
“Will you shut up, man?” Mr. Biden demanded of Mr. Trump at one point in obvious exasperation. “This is so unpresidential.”
Yet Mr. Biden also lobbed a series of bitingly personal attacks of his own.
“You’re the worst president America has ever had,” he said to Mr. Trump.
“In 47 months I’ve done more than you have in 47 years,” Mr. Trump shot back, referring to his rival’s career in Washington.
The president’s bulldozer-style tactics represented a significant risk for an incumbent who’s trailing Mr. Biden because voters, including some who supported him in 2016, are so fatigued by his near-daily attacks and outbursts. Yet the former vice president veered between trying to ignore Mr. Trump by speaking directly into the camera to the voters, and giving in to temptation by hurling insults at the president. Mr. Biden called Mr. Trump a liar and a racist.
Mr. Trump peppered his remarks with misleading claims and outright lies, predicting that a coronavirus vaccine was imminent when his own chief health advisers say otherwise, claiming that his rollback of fuel-efficiency standards would not increase pollution and insisting that a political adviser, Kellyanne Conway, had not described riots as useful to Mr. Trump’s campaign, even though she did so on television.
And even as he went on the offensive against Mr. Biden on matters of law and order, Mr. Trump declined to condemn white supremacy and right-wing extremist groups when prompted by Mr. Wallace and Mr. Biden. When Mr. Wallace asked him whether he would be willing to do so, Mr. Trump replied, “Sure,” and asked the two men to name a group they would like him to denounce.
But when Mr. Biden named the Proud Boys, a far-right group, Mr. Trump did not do so and even suggested they be at the ready.
“Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by,” the president said, before pivoting to say, “Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left.”
Mr. Trump also intensified his baseless claims of widespread electoral fraud from the debate stage. He again invoked the prospect of a “fraudulent election” and disregarded contrary evidence about mail-in voting offered by both Mr. Wallace and Mr. Biden. And Mr. Trump encouraged his voters to “go into the poll and watch very carefully” for any signs of misconduct — an encouragement that could cause disruption on Election Day.
Mr. Trump’s volcanic performance appeared to be the gambit of a president seeking to tarnish his opponent by any means available, unbounded by norms of accuracy and decorum and unguided by a calculated sense of how to sway the electorate or assuage voters’ reservations about his leadership.
In an election marked by sharply defined and stubbornly stable opinions about both candidates, the president’s conduct was the equivalent of pulling the pin on a hand grenade and hoping that the ensuing explosion would harm the other candidate more.
But Mr. Trump made no effort to address his most obvious political vulnerabilities, from his mismanagement of the pandemic to his refusal to condemn right-wing extremism, and it was not clear that he did anything over the course of the evening to appeal to voters who have disliked him, including those who reluctantly supported him four years ago.
The president did not take aim only at Mr. Biden; he also undercut his own advisers. After Mr. Biden criticized him for his handling of the coronavirus — “he’s a fool on this,” the former vice president said — Mr. Trump mocked his opponent for wearing “the biggest mask I’ve ever seen” and then belittled Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert.
“He said very strongly ‘masks are not good,’ then he said he changed his mind,” Mr. Trump said of Dr. Fauci. The president later said his own F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, was “wrong” after Mr. Biden noted that Mr. Wray had said the radical left group antifa is more of an idea than an organization.
The debate, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, quickly descended into name-calling and hectoring in the first 15 minutes, derisive attacks that were extraordinary even by the standards of Mr. Trump’s unruly presidency.
When Mr. Biden attempted to discuss voters who had lost loved ones to the coronavirus, Mr. Trump interjected. “You would’ve lost far more people,” he declared.
The former vice president alternated between smiling and shaking his head in bemusement and firing off attacks of his own as Mr. Trump kept interrupting.
In an exceptionally charged moment, Mr. Trump spoke dismissively about Mr. Biden’s deceased son, Beau, who died from brain cancer in 2015, rejecting an opportunity to show a modicum of personal grace toward his political opponent. Mr. Biden alluded to Beau Biden’s military service as he rebuked the president for having reportedly referred to America’s fallen soldiers as “losers.”
Source: The News York Times.
