NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Joe Biden unleashed a blistering attack on President Donald Trump's ability to lead the country through the pandemic, arguing Thursday night that he already has too much blood on his hands to deserve a second term.
"220,000 Americans dead," he said at the outset of their second and final debate, holding up a black facemask he'd deliberately removed as he walked onstage. "Anyone who's responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States. ... We're about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter, and he has no clear plan.
"It's his ineptitude that caused the country to have to shut down," Biden asserted.
Trump defended his leadership, insisting that the death toll from COVID-19 is well below projections of 2.2 million people — though that was only if no public health measures were taken, including widespread mask usage that he has mocked, or social distancing, contact tracing and shutdowns.
"We're fighting it and we're fighting it hard," Trump said, acknowledging "spikes and surges" that generally have subsided and promising that a vaccine will be announced "within weeks."
"I've been congratulated by the heads of many countries for what we've been able to do. ... It will go away. We've rounded the turn," Trump said, warning that the economic recovery would be in peril if Biden wins, because "he'll close down the country if one person in the massive bureaucracy says we should close it down."
So often, the run-up to a presidential debate is marked by jostling to set expectations.
But after the Cleveland spectacle three weeks ago, expectations were set in cement for Thursday night's final showdown. TV pundits went through a thesaurus of options all afternoon: slap fight, dumpster fire, sandbox scuffle, national embarrassment.
Speculation was scarce that this would play out as a civil, low octane exchange of ideas, though that didn't rule out the possibility that the debate could change the trajectory 12 days out from Election Day.
For the first half of the 90-minute primetime event, though, Trump was measured — combative, but focused on the attacks he'd clearly come prepared to deliver.
The mutual contempt was unconcealed and the rancor unbridled as the rivals traded corruption allegations. But the give-and-take followed the norms of high-stakes debate, with each taking turns with their jabs and explanations.
Tens of millions of voters tune in to these events, and while hardly any tell pollsters they're seriously undecided between the nation's 45th president and its 47th vice president, each side is hoping to use the debate to rev up enthusiasm.
Hanging over the proceedings: a pandemic that has cost more than 223,000 deaths this year. More than 17,000 have died in just the 23 days since Biden and Trump faced off in Cleveland, despite Trump's claims in recent days that the crisis is waning and the country has "turned the corner."
Trump's incessant interruptions at the Sept. 29 showdown prompted the bipartisan debate commission to introduce a mute button, a first since televised presidential debates began in 1960.
Trump chafed but agreed to participate anyway.
With Biden in solid command in national polls, and leading in battleground states the president can't win without, Trump's need for this 90 minutes of primetime exposure outweighed his annoyance at being muted for 2 minutes at a time.
And interruptions were still possible, because mics were to be turned off only during the initial statement in each 15-minute segment.
With 12 days left, the clash in Nashville was Trump's best chance to press corruption allegations against Biden involving his son Hunter Biden, even as he faces a new revelation this week of a secret bank account in China tied to the Trump empire's expansion efforts.
"I don't make money from Ukraine. You do. I don't make money from Russia. You do," Trump said at the debate, days after demanding his rival face prosecution for unspecified crimes. "Joe Biden is a criminal, and he's been a criminal for a long time."
Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani have latched onto an unverified New York Post report last week about emails from a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden, purportedly showing influence peddling involving a Ukrainian energy firm he worked for.
"His buddy Rudy Giuliani is being used as a Russian pawn," Biden asserted, counterpunching more than he had in the first debate. "I don't know why this president is unwilling to take on Putin, when he's actually paying bounties" for the deaths of U.S. servicemen in Afghanistan, and interfering in U.S. elections.
Biden denies the allegations. Independent intelligence experts say the sketchy evidence, and the timing so close to the election, suggest a Russian disinformation tactic that Trump is amplifying.
"Nobody's tougher than me on Russia," Trump said, insisting that Biden and his family have received millions from Russia, one of many dubious claims he has leveled in his effort to paint Biden as corrupt.
For Biden, this was a final chance to offer a vision more compelling than just ousting Trump and a promise to restore normalcy and competence to the White House. Many Democrats have found that motivation enough. But many progressives and independents remain uninspired, which could dampen turnout.
Trump tried his best to paint Biden as a frightening radical. "If he's elected the stock market will crash."
Biden shot back that the stock market isn't the only or the best metric to judge economic progress.
"That's his only measure. What happens to the ordinary people out there?" Biden said.
"401ks are through the roof," Trump responded.
He also pressed his allegation that Biden would take the country down the road to socialism, especially when it comes to health care, by expanding on the decade-old Affordable Care Act.
"He wants socialized medicine," Trump said. "You're going to have socialized medicine."
"It's ridiculous," Biden said, calling it rich for someone who "hasn't done a thing for people on health care" to lecture him on the topic. Besides, he said, the Democratic candidates who advocated for single-payer, government controlled health care all lost, to him. "He thinks he's running against somebody else. He's running against Joe Biden. I beat all the other people."
Frank Fahrenkopf, a former GOP chairman who co-chairs the debate commission, noted that the first debate drew 78 million viewers according to Nielsen, not counting anyone who watched on C-Span and online. "We think this debate tonight will reach 100 million people," he said.
That would be a record.
Officially, the half-dozen topics on the table were to be the coronavirus, race relations, climate change, national security, American families and leadership.
The debate was held at Belmont University's Curb Event Center, site of a 2008 town hall presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain.
Just 200 guests were allowed into the 5,500-seat arena Thursday night, and they were required to wear medical-grade masks.
Each seat came with a printed program and a pack of anti-bacterial wipes sponsored by C-Span. Attendees were tested earlier in the day for COVID-19. Trump took his test aboard Air Force One en route.
The lecterns were set 12 feet, 8 inches apart, each more than 16 feet from moderator Kristen Welker of NBC's desk.
With the candidates' cooperation, mostly, she managed to keep the conversation moving without it becoming a train wreck of the Cleveland sort.
At one point Welker asked about the recent revelation that more than 500 immigrant children separated from parents under Trump's zero-tolerance policy in 2017 still haven't been reunited with their families because the government can't locate the parents.
"We're trying very hard," Trump said, trying to turn the tables on Biden by insisting that the cages in which some migrants were held were built during the Obama administration. "Who built the cages?"
As for the children, he said, "They are so well taken care of," and in any case many of them were being smuggled into the country by criminal cartels.
Not so, said Biden.
"Their parents were with them. ... It makes us a laughing stock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation," he said. "Parents, their kids were ripped from their arms ... And now those kids are alone, nowhere to go. It's criminal."
