NASHVILLE, Tenn. — President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden are set to face-off for their second presidential debate on Thursday, with the final match-up between the two taking place with less than two weeks left until election day.
The debate — which was supposed to be the final of three debates between the candidates before the second was scrapped in favor of competing town halls — will take on much the same format as the first debate, with 15 minutes allocated for each topic.
On Friday, the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates announced the six topics for the event: "Fighting COVID-19," "American Families," "Race in America," "Climate Change," "National Security" and "Leadership." The topics may be changed subject to breaking news and will not necessarily be broached in the order listed, the commission said.
NBC’s Kristen Welker will serve as the moderator for the night, and will open each segment with a question before facilitating further discussion between the candidates.
In the announcement, the commission did not mention if there would be any rule changes for the upcoming debate, a topic hotly debated following the crosstalk-filled debate on Sept. 29. The commission will meet on Monday afternoon to discuss potential regulation changes for the final matchup, per a report from CNN.
Thursday’s faceoff in Nashville represents a big opportunity for Trump to generate some badly needed momentum. There will be no moment before Election Day in which more persuadable voters are paying attention to the Republican president’s message.
Trump cannot afford another bad performance. His angry and aggressive posture that marred the first debate was widely considered a blunder, and it helped Biden extend his polling advantage.
But there is also significant pressure on Biden. Given Trump’s persistent questions about the 77-year-old former vice president’s age and mental health, Biden cannot afford to have anything resembling a “senior moment” on such a large political stage.
With Thursday’s showing set to be the last face-to-face matchup between the candidates before Nov. 3, here is some of what both Biden and Trump have previously said about the planned debate topics.
The president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic is likely to be a large topic of discussion during the final debate. Trump himself announced that he had contracted the disease just a few days after attending the first presidential debate, opening the doors to speculation about when he last tested negative before taking the stage with Biden.
In the weeks since his hospitalization at Walter Reed, Trump has taken the approach that the pandemic is not as serious as his candidate wants the public to believe, saying the virus is “rounding the corner” as cases surge around the world. Speaking Monday to campaign staffers, Trump said people are tired of hearing from Dr. Anthony Fauci “and all these idiots” about the coronavirus.
But this talking point might not go over as well as the president hopes.
Across the country, coronavirus infections are surging to their highest levels since July. At least 10 states reported their highest single-day number of infections ever over the weekend, and some health experts are predicting the possibility of 100,000 daily U.S. infections in the near future.
This is bad news for the nation on multiple fronts, and it adds a new layer of uncertainty to an election already plagued by ballot access questions. From a policy and political perspective, this is more evidence of Trump’s failure to control the nation’s worst health crisis in a century. But given the timing, it also raises real questions about whether voters might alter their behavior to protect themselves.
Biden has repeatedly slammed the president’s mismanagement of the pandemic, frequently using Trump’s own words against him.
At a campaign event in North Carolina on Sunday, Biden noted that Trump had said at one of his rallies that the country had turned the corner on the pandemic.
“As my grandfather would say, this guy’s gone around the bend if he thinks we’ve turned the corner. Turning the corner? Things are getting worse,” Biden said.
Biden similarly targeted the president’s rhetoric during a campaign stop in Florida last week, leaning on Trump’s previous comment that the coronavirus pandemic “affects virtually nobody,” saying he was specifically talking about senior citizens.
“Just elderly people with heart and other problems. Nobody. Think about that. He was talking about you, he was talking about family. You've worked hard your whole life, you deserve security, respect and peace of mind,” Biden said to the audience.
“You're expendable, you are forgettable, you're virtually nobody,” Biden said of Trump’s views on seniors. “That's how he sees you.”
At the time, Biden was speaking at a senior center in Pembroke Pines, betting that a voting bloc that buoyed Trump four years ago has become disenchanted with the White House’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
This will likely be a hot-button topic for both candidates, as Trump and Biden have been pressed on their approach to racial issues in recent weeks.
In an ABC News town hall event on Oct. 15, a Black student named Cedric Humphrey said that young Black voters are torn over whom to vote for, with some conflicted between voting for Trump or not voting at all.
"So my question for you then is, besides 'you ain't black,' what do you have to say to young black voters who see voting for you as further participation in a system that continually fails to protect them," he asked Biden.
Biden, in a long and winding answer, touched on the criminal justice system, suggesting it needed to be made “fair” and “more decent” before moving on to an assortment of economic and educational policies, adding that Black Americans need to be given tools to help generate wealth, including increased loans for Black-owned businesses and homeowners.
Biden also said that he believed that the 1994 crime bill was a mistake.
"Things have changed drastically," he said. "That crime bill, when we voted, the black caucus voted for it, every black mayor supported it across the board."
Trump will likely fall back to his oft-repeated claim that he’s done more for the African American community than any president except Abraham Lincoln, who signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
In late September, the president unveiled his Platinum Plan, which aims to “increase access to capital in black communities by almost $500 billion,” according to a government press release. The proposal includes “diversity training" for law enforcement, increased access to grants for businesses supporting Black entrepreneurs, as well as a proposal to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.
Trump has made it clear in the past that he stands with the police, often saying that the majority of police are good people whose profession is tarnished by a few “bad apples.”
The Trump administration has also pushed the claim that far-left extremists, or antifa members, are responsible for growing violence nationwide, although they have offered little evidence to support this theory.
President Donald Trump has said the federal government would designate antifa as a “terrorist organization” and has blamed it for violence at protests against racial injustice and police brutality. Attorney General William Barr has claimed groups using “antifa-like tactics” fueled violent clashes in Minneapolis after the killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white police officer pressed a knee into his neck for several minutes.
However, FBI Director Christopher Wray told a congressional panel in late September that antifa is more of an ideology or a movement than an organization.
Joe Biden has taken significant heat for his perceived flip-flopping on the topic of fracking specifically, although the former vice president has attempted to clear up his view on the controversial extraction method in the weeks leading up to the election.
Biden in a 2019 Democratic primary debate said he would ban fracking, but his campaign quickly said he misspoke and corrected the record. Biden supports banning new oil and gas leases on public lands but says he does not want a fracking ban and considers such a ban probably impossible.
Biden did not flip-flop, as Trump likes to suggest, but rather flubbed his position at one event, his campaign said.
During a recent campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump said that Biden’s weakness on fracking will lead to outsourcing of jobs for the steel and coal industries.
“The Democratic party hates fracking, they hate coal,” Trump said. “They hate domestic energy production … Biden will shut you down,” he said of the state’s economy.
“With me, you will frack,” Trump later added.
Biden’s climate plan does not call for a complete ban on fracking; the former vice president has proposed allowing existing fracking to continue, but would stop the issuance of new permits to frack on public land.
During the first presidential debate, Biden distanced himself from some of his more liberal colleagues when he stated that he does not support the Green New Deal, a proposed piece of legislation that would employ renewable energy and resource efficiency to address climate change and economic inequality.
“I don't support the Green New Deal,” Biden said. “I support the Biden Plan.”
While Trump said this was a “big deal,” Biden was not an original supporter of the Green New Deal. He did, however, release a comprehensive climate change plan in July that acknowledged the Green New Deal is a “crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.”
The two candidates could not be further apart when it comes to global climate policy — while the Trump administration has effectively pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, Biden has repeatedly said he will rejoin the agreement immediately should he win the elections.
Trump’s public comments as president all dismiss the science on climate change — that it’s caused by people burning fossil fuels and it’s worsening sharply. As recently as last month, Trump said, “I don’t think science knows” what it’s talking about regarding global warming and the resulting worsening of wildfires, hurricanes and other natural disasters. He’s ridiculed the science in many public comments and tweets.
As for his actions, his regulation-cutting has eliminated key Obama-era efforts to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
A topic that was not explicitly touched on during the first presidential debate, it’s anyone’s guess what the candidates will discuss during this portion of the event.
It is notable, however, that a coalition of nearly 500 former military and national security officials endorsed Biden in late September, writing in an open letter that Trump “cannot rise to meet challenges large or small.”
“The president has ceded influence to a Russian adversary who puts bounties on the heads of American military personnel, and his trade war against China has only harmed America’s farmers and manufacturers,” the letter read in part. “The next president will have to address those challenges while struggling with an economy in a deep recession and a pandemic that has already claimed more than 200,000 of our fellow citizens.”
Biden will likely point to Trump’s incendiary rhetoric surrounding white supremacist groups, which the Deparment of Homeland Security named as the single most dangerous domestic extremist threat to the nation in their first-ever “Homeland Threat Assessment” released in early October.
The report stated that “ideologically motivated lone offenders” and small groups of extremists pose the greatest terror threat to the country, with what the department refers to as “Domestic Violent Extremists” presenting the most “persistent and lethal threat.”
Trump has notably failed to condemn white supremacist groups multiple times in recent months, including during the first presidential debate when he told the Proud Boys to “stand back” and “stand by.” The president later clarified that he did not know who the Proud Boys were.
But Trump also failed to denounce QAnon, the collective delusion that paints President Donald Trump as a secret warrior against a supposed child-trafficking ring run by celebrities and “deep state” government officials, during an appearance at NBC’s town hall event last week.
Instead of disavowing the conspiracy group, Trump said he knows QAnon is “very much against pedophilia.”
Leadership — or the lack thereof — could fall into any one of the categories mentioned above. In the weeks leading up the debate, both Trump and Biden have coined specific talking points when targeting their opponent’s style of governing.
Biden will likely continue to hammer the president for knowingly misleading the public about the threat of coronavirus at the start of the pandemic. In his book “Rage,” legendary journalist Bob Woodward alleged that President Trump privately discussed how deadly and problematic the virus could potentially be while simultaneously downplaying the threat to the public even before the United States recorded its first case.
“He told Bob Woodward he didn't want to panic the American public,” Biden said of Trump at a rally in Ohio earlier this month. “Americans don't panic. Trump panicked. Trump is the one who panicked.”
On Monday, Biden’s campaign released a statement that called Trump’s refusal to listen to science “negligent.”
“Trump’s closing message in the final days of the 2020 race is to publicly mock Joe Biden for trusting science,” the statement read. “Trump is mocking Biden for listening to science. Science. The best tool we have to keep Americans safe, while Trump’s reckless and negligent leadership threatens to put more lives at risk.”
Biden has frequently slammed Trump’s presidency as “reckless,” saying there has never been so divided a country in United States’ history. The former vice president has taken up the tactic at recent campaign stops to pledge to be a president for all Americans, regardless of who votes for him.
"We need to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in this country,” Biden said at his Ohio rally, adding: “It's time to unite America, and we'll do that by choosing hope over fear, science over fiction, truth over lies, and unity over division. Democracy requires consensus. I'm running as a proud Democrat, but I will govern as an American president.”
Trump, on the other hand, will likely continue his attacks on Biden’s ineffectual leadership. One of the president’s more commonly-used talking points during recent rallies has been to compare his record as president to Biden’s decades in public service.
“The fact is, I did more in 47 months as president than Joe Biden did in 47 years,” Trump told supporters at a September rally in Nevada.
In recent days, Trump’s campaign has tried to weaponize potentially hacked emails about Biden. Trump’s inner circle has been largely whittled down to the familiar faces of four years ago. A fundraising email sent late Friday was entitled “Lock her up,” the rallying cry against Clinton.
None of the efforts had the impact of Trump’s claims four years ago that Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state endangered national security and alleged she used her government connections to enrich her family. Nor have the Biden emails gained the traction of those hacked from the Clinton campaign and distributed by WikiLeaks.
As broad as the American public is diverse, there are many ways moderator Kristen Welker could take this topic. While it is not exactly clear what exactly will be asked of the candidates during this portion, President Trump has recently been making a pitch to “suburban women” as the campaigns head into the final stretch.
"Do me a favor, suburban women, would you please like me?" President Trump asked during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last week.
Trump has repeatedly said that the “suburban housewife” will support him out of a desire for safety, tweeting in August: "The 'suburban housewife' will be voting for me. They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood. Biden would reinstall it, in a bigger form, with Cory Booker in charge!"
Some recent polls show Biden winning support from about 60% of suburban women. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton won 52%, according to an estimate by the Pew Research Center.
Biden will likely combat Trump’s claims by saying he has failed American families altogether, as Congress is quickly moving past the point at which it can deliver more coronavirus relief before the election.
Significant differences remain in the way of an informal Tuesday deadline set by Speaker Nancy Pelosi if the talks are going to lead to legislation being delivered to Trump before the election.
The last coronavirus relief package, the $1.8 trillion bipartisan CARES Act, passed in March by an overwhelming margin as the economy went into lockdown amid fear and uncertainty about the virus. Since then, Trump and many of his GOP allies have focused on loosening social and economic restrictions as the key to recovery instead of more taxpayer-funded help.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.