CLEVELAND — The stage is set and the chairs spaced apart for the first debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, which kicks off at 9 p.m. ET Tuesday.
Biden enjoys a comfortable and consistent lead in most national polls and only a tiny fraction of voters remain undecided, so the pressure is on Trump to shake things up in the waning weeks before Election Day. Biden, who has spent the summer months avoiding the campaign trail because of the coronavirus pandemic, will have to confront the acid-tongued Trump's attacks on his mental faculties.
Moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News and the two candidates will be the only people not wearing masks in the cavernous atrium of the Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic, where security is tight and everyone in the smaller-than-usual audience was tested for Covid-19.
Wallace selected the six topics the candidates will debate over 90 minutes — their records; the Supreme Court; the coronavirus crisis; the economy; race and violence in American cities; and the integrity of the election.
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Each candidate will have 2 minutes to answer questions in each segment, with additional time divided for responses.
Wallace has said he does not believe debate moderators should provide live fact checks and that he wants to be “as invisible as possible," getting out of the way to let the candidates duke it out with each other.
Trump and his allies spent the hours leading up to the debate lobbing baseless accusations against Biden. First, Trump attacked him for declining to take a drug test, then accused him of trying to avoid detection of a secret earpiece. Biden's campaign dismissed the claims as ludicrous said he, of course, would not wear an earpiece.
The earpiece theory — Donald Trump Jr. made the same unfounded claim in 2016 about Hillary Clinton — started in viral memes on Facebook and other social media sites before being repeated by the Trump campaign.
Trump and Biden are scheduled to debate three times, while Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris will debate once.
The first debate has historically attracted the largest audience. Nearly three-quarters of voters — 74 percent — said they plan to watch live, according to a new Monmouth University poll, even though just 3 percent said it was very likely to change their minds.
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September 30, 2020 at 05:15AM
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Trump and Biden to clash in first debate in Cleveland - NBC News
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