Trump and Biden’s Debate: What to watch out for in the final showdown

The first question about Thursday’s debate: Will it really matter? At this point, haven’t most voters made up their minds? Many have already voted. And is there anything else to say? The answer is that it certainly may matter. There are always a few voters left who have not decided whom to support. And there are those who may need an extra last-minute nudge to turn out. Barring some cataclysmic event in the next two weeks, it is the last moment in the race guaranteed to draw a huge viewership, and it will be the final time Biden and Trump are scheduled to share a stage. And it is particularly important for Trump, who is trailing in most national and battleground state polls and whose performance at the first debate appeared to hurt his standing. The president pulled out of what was supposed to be a second debate after the Commission on Presidential Debates decided that the forum should be held virtually in light of Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis.

This may be the most intriguing question of the night. Will we see a reprise of the hectoring, interrupting president who frequently talked over the moderator, Chris Wallace, and Biden? Few people thought that did him much good. And it may be more difficult this time: Microphones will be muted during portions of the debate to prevent such disruptions.

“In the best of all words, he would watch the Pence-Harris debate three times and realize this isn’t 2016 and Biden is not Hillary Clinton,” said Newt Gingrich, the Republican former House speaker. “He has to move toward a calmer, more issue-oriented, less personality-driven debate. He has the perfect model with the vice president.”

But time is running out. At this point, Trump needs to try to accomplish what he has been unable to do so far: Give voters who are on the fence a reason not to support Biden.

“Anything Trump does now that doesn’t seek to make Biden an unacceptable alternative is a waste for Trump,” said Nelson Warfield, who was a senior campaign aide to Bob Dole, the Republican candidate for president in 1996. And Trump needs to do that while under the extra scrutiny of his manners that awaits him after their last debate.

Trump has every reason to seize this 90-minute debate to make the best case for his re-election and attack Biden. But Biden will walk on the stage with a decidedly less urgent to-do list.

Given his lead in the polls and his propensity for the occasional misstatement, Biden did not really need this final debate. When Trump balked at the virtual format for the second debate, Biden moved instantly to schedule a town hall event with voters. Both Democratic and Republican strategists said that Biden’s task at the first debate was to present himself as cogent and in command, to rebut with his appearance the suggestion by Trump that Biden at 77 was getting slow with age. (Trump is 74.) By every account, Biden crossed that barrier. Biden can use the debate to make a closing argument and to lay out his case against Trump, particularly for his faltering response to a pandemic that has killed over 220,000 people in the United States. Beyond that, Biden may well be tempted to simply run out the clock. A no-runs, no-hits, no-errors performance is probably all he needs.

Trump will be taking the stage this time as someone who has been a coronavirus patient, announcing he had the virus shortly after the first debate. He spent three days in the hospital, where he was the beneficiary of some of the most aggressive and cutting-edge treatment, and has proclaimed himself cured. It was not just Trump: Covid-19 swept the White House after the nomination ceremony there for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, an event distinguished by the lack of social distancing or masks. Trump has seemed eager to move on from talking about the pandemic. He has argued, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the nation has turned a corner on the virus. He has defied medical experts in traveling the country holding rallies and mocking the use of masks.

But no issue has defined this contest, or has hurt him politically, as much as the pandemic.

He has struggled, in interviews and the last debate, to defend his response to the crisis and suggest that many people, including Biden, also failed to appreciate the gravity of the threat in the early days. But 

Trump’s personal experience — the widespread criticism that his lack of precautions contributed to the outbreak at the White House — will be a subtext for at least part of the debate.

From the earliest days of this campaign, Trump has sought to damage Biden by disparaging the business dealings of his son Hunter and claiming that Biden, as vice president, embraced policies that allowed the younger Biden to enrich himself in his dealings with Ukraine and China. These allegations, many of them unproven or questionable, have circulated widely on Fox News and right-wing social media. But, to the frustration of the president and his advisers, they have so far not appeared to break through beyond that audience.

The Trump campaign could not have been clearer in recent days in telegraphing that Trump intends to use this final stage to raise the allegations again. “If the media won’t ask Joe Biden these questions, the president will, and there will be no escape for Biden,” Bill Stepien, the president’s campaign manager, said in a statement. At the last debate, when pressed by Trump on the issue, Biden appeared to struggle a bit with the question; presumably he will be better prepared on Thursday. For Trump, the goal is to tarnish his opponent. For Biden, at the very least, the attacks on his son might goad him into making the kinds of mistakes that might dominate a news cycle or two.

Biden managed to elude answering questions from Trump at the first debate about whether he would, as president, support expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court. He is under pressure from many Democrats who see an expanded court as the best way to counter Trump’s success in installing two (and very likely soon to be three) members of the court. After weeks of declining to clarify his position, Biden said in an interview that if elected, he would establish a bipartisan commission of scholars to study a possible court overhaul more broadly. “I will ask them to, over 180 days, come back to me with recommendations as to how to reform the court system because it’s getting out of whack,” he said, according to an interview excerpt.