Former Vice President Joe Biden and Donald Trump will meet in their first debate Tuesday night, at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Trump will go low, as an announced strategy and also an inevitability. Biden will not attempt to fact-check Trump in real time, and will attempt not to “get baited into a brawl with this guy, because that’s the only place he’s comfortable,” as he said at a fundraiser.
Moderator Chris Wallace, of Fox News, is also not expected to fact-check in real time. He has designated six 15-minute segments, on the Trump and Biden records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race and violence in cities, and the integrity of the election. The revelation of Trump’s $750 income tax bill came late in the game but hopefully Wallace will have found a way to get a question or two on that.
Trump has done little debate preparation, both because of his legendary lack of focus or willingness to learn things and because why does he need to prepare to lie when he does that all the time? Biden has been preparing, but again, how do you prepare to have someone shout lies about you, your family, and the state of the nation for an hour and a half?
After months of portraying Biden as incoherent and in cognitive decline, Trump realized that he had set the bar so low that basic competence from Biden would come off as a huge win, and has more recently been screaming that Biden needs to be drug tested. But the “Biden can’t function” message had months to sink in and may have set expectations for many in the audience. Biden, of course, has fought to overcome a stutter and does sometimes have awkward moments when he redirects a sentence for that reason, but he has been an effective if not wizardly debater in his 2008 and 2012 vice presidential debates and in the lone one-on-one debate of the 2020 primaries, against Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The debate will run from 9 to 10:30 PM ET, without commercials, and will be aired on most major networks. There will be a live audience of less than 100 people, all of whom will have been tested for COVID-19.
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