President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden fought over how to tame the raging coronavirus during the campaign’s closing debate, largely shelving the rancor that overshadowed their previous face-off in favor of a more substantive exchange that highlighted their vastly different approaches to the major domestic and foreign challenges facing the nation.
With less than two weeks until the election, Trump portrayed himself as the same outsider he first pitched to voters four years ago, repeatedly saying he wasn’t a politician. Biden, meanwhile, argued that Trump was an incompetent leader of a country facing multiple crises and tried to connect what he saw as the president’s failures to the everyday lives of Americans, especially when it comes to the pandemic.
We recap.
With files from the Associated Press.
Guests:
Isaac Stanley-Becker, national political reporter for the Washington Post; he tweets
Josh Clark, head debate coach at Montgomery Bell Academy, a private 7-12 grade school in Nashville, Tennessee; he is a contributor to the book “The State of the Union is . . .: Memorable Addresses of the Last Fifty Years” (2019); he tweets