CLEVELAND — Two topics were inescapable at the first debate between President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden: death and taxes.
And there was much to learn, if you could get past the mutual bickering and Trump’s relentless interruptions, at times halting his chatter as Biden paused, then resuming as soon as Biden tried to continue.
“It’s hard to get any word in with this clown,” Biden said midway through Tuesday’s 90-minute debate, a sneering, snarling clash between rivals who made no effort to conceal their contempt for each other.
“People understand. It’s 47 years, you’ve done nothing,” Trump said again and again, complaining that the public would understand just how great his presidency has been if not for “the fake news. … They give me bad press, because that’s the way it is,”
More than 206,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 since March, when the president was still insisting the outbreak was under control.
That crisis was at top of the agenda as the rivals met in Cleveland on Tuesday night, along with late-breaking revelations that Trump paid no federal income tax in most of the last 20 years and reported staggering losses from ventures that supposedly made him a billionaire. Trump did not dispute that he paid just $750 in federal income tax each of his first two years as president.
“Show us your tax returns,” Biden said.
“You’ll see it as soon as it’s finished,” said Trump, the first president in decades to not disclose his tax returns. “One year. I paid $27 million.”
Biden highlighted the contrast by releasing his own 2019 tax return hours before the clash in Cleveland, showing that he paid nearly $300,000 on income of just under $1 million.
Although they called each other “Joe” and “Donald,” it took little time for bickering to set in.
“I’m not here to call out his lies. Everybody knows he’s a liar,” Biden said early in the evening. Later, he said: “He’s Putin’s puppy.”
Trump aggressively interrupted, over and over, obviously trying to halt Biden’s rehearsed attack lines and derail his train of thought.
“Will you shut up, man. This is so unpresidential,” Biden finally blurted out 15 minutes into the debate.
“It’s a huge deal,” Julián Castro, housing secretary during the Obama administration and a former San Antonio mayor who faced Biden in this year’s Democratic primaries, said before the debate, referring to the Trump tax revelations.
Calling Trump’s tiny tax bills “outrageous,” he noted that teachers, nurses, police officers and restaurant workers struggling to survive the pandemic-induced recession “are paying more in taxes than our president, who says that he’s a multibillionaire. And now we know why he was hiding his taxes.”
Trump arrived in Cleveland trailing Biden in national polls but with fresh excitement among his base after Saturday’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, and the possibility of tilting the court rightward for a generation after the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Part of that fight is over fairness — should Trump get to fill the seat so close the election — but there are huge issues at stake, including abortion, religious freedom and gun rights, that motivate Republicans.
“The election has already started. Tens of thousands of people have already voted,” Biden said.
“People already had their say,” Trump responded. “I’m not elected for three years. I’m elected for four years.”
Biden also wasted no time reminding voters about those stakes.
“Why is it on the ballot? It’s not on the ballot,” Trump insisted, trying to delink the confirmation fight from his reelection, at least for the television audience, even though the court nomination has animated many of his supporters.
The president went out of his way to hit Biden on health care, asserting that his plan to expand Obamacare would kick 180 million people off private health insurance.
“That’s simply not true,” Biden responded.
“Your party wants to go socialist. … And they’re going to dominate you, Joe, you know that,” Trump asserted, weaving in two of his favorite lines of attack — that Democrats would put the country on a path to Cuba-style socialism and that Biden is a “puppet” of the left.
Moments later, Biden hit back. “He’s been promising a health care plan since he got elected. … He doesn’t have a plan,” Biden said. “This man doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Trump’s incessant interruptions earned repeated warnings and pleas from the Chris Wallace of Fox News, who reminded the president numerous times that he was the moderator. Wallace offered to trade places at one point of exasperation and moments later reminded the president that his own aides had agreed to allow two-minute uninterrupted comments from each candidate.
PANDEMIC IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Biden repeatedly cited the death toll from the pandemic, which obviously annoyed Trump. He needled Trump for his overly rosy assurances last spring that the outbreak would fade when summer heat set in, would magically disappear, and that “maybe you could inject some bleach in your arm, that’ll take care of it.”
“That was said sarcastically,” Trump interjected, reiterating the spin he and White House aides offered at the time, though footage of him turning to Dr. Deborah Birx in the briefing room and suggesting internal use of bleach sounded earnest.
Trump hit back by claiming that “you would have lost far more people,” and accusing Biden and supporters in the scientific and pharmaceutical establishment of dragging their feet on a vaccine that could save lives and allow the economy to bounce back, in order to hamper his reelection.
“People like this would rather make it political than save lives,” Trump claimed.
Biden had come prepared to get under Trump’s skin, questioning the president’s intelligence on top of his judgment on COVID-19. “He panicked, or he just looked at the stock market,” Biden said. “A lot more people are going to die unless he gets a lot smarter.”
Trump ignored the allegations about the pandemic, launching instead into an attack on Biden’s educational background. “Smart. … Don’t ever use that word with me,” he said.
Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Clinic had stepped in on short notice to host the debate after the University of Notre Dame pulled out because of the pandemic.
Medical protocols were strict because of the proximity to the sprawling hospital. Journalists were allowed access the press workspace only after testing negative for the coronavirus. And attendance was capped at roughly 100, a fraction of the media horde that usually descends on these quadrennial events.
EARPIECES AND EXPECTATIONS
Trump spent the summer accusing Biden of dementia, denigrating his mental acuity so loudly and often that Trump allies had begun warning that he’d gone too far — setting expectations so low that pundits were sure to name Biden the victor.
Trump also has speculated, without any evidence, that his rival takes a performance-enhancing drug before debates, and has repeatedly challenged Biden to take a drug test.
Having set the bar low on Biden, the Trump campaign mounted a last-ditch effort ahead to redirect the narrative, citing the dozens of debates Biden competed in during runs for president and vice president, plus countless others as a senator.
But they undermined that gambit by simultaneously accusing Biden on Tuesday of trying to sneak in an earpiece, accusing him of refusing to allow a pre-debate inspection — and raising the question of why, exactly, a debate virtuoso would need such a crutch.
The conservative media echo chamber ensured that #bidensearpiece began to trend on Twitter, even as the former vice president’s aides called the allegation “ridiculous.”
The Biden campaign hit back with its own allegation: that Trump aides tried to force Wallace to refrain from mentioning the death toll from the pandemic, which now tops 206,000 — the the highest in the world.
The Trump side disputed that but in any case it was moot, because Biden brought it up so often.
For Biden, one of the tactical challenges was deciding when to challenge factually deficient claims by a president with an unmatched capacity for hyperbole and misstatement. He evidently decided that calling him a liar to his face was the way to go.
This was a far feistier Biden than the one who showed up at the Democratic primary debates.
“There were no sizzling lines” then, recalled Beto O’Rourke, the former El Paso congressman and former presidential candidate. But Biden has shown “his ability to connect with us and to heal a very divided country…. You really got a sense of the man’s character and his capacity for empathy and compassion and kindness.”
HUGE AUDIENCE
Trump is as polarizing as any president in modern history, which has made revving up his base the priority over trying to expand his coalition.
Much of Biden’s support stems from being the alternative to Trump, which allowed him to hunker down in Delaware for most of the spring and summer. It also allowed to him to deemphasize his own agenda in favor of sniping at Trump’s missteps and projecting a calmer, more mature image.
Such playbooks get put to the test over the course of 90 minutes on live TV. And the Trump side was determined to smoke out Biden on policies that conservatives would find alarming.
The audience Tuesday was expected to be huge, perhaps even topping Trump’s record-setting face-off against Hillary Clinton at Hofstra University. That debate, their first of three, set a record with 84 million viewers, blazing past the previous leader in the Nielsen ratings: the sole 1980 debate between Ronald Reagan and President Jimmy Carter, which had 80.6 million viewers.
Trump headed to Cleveland determined to scuff up Biden by talking about his son Hunter Biden’s allegedly corrupt involvement with the Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. He waited 45 minutes to bring it up.
“It is not true,” Biden said. “He doesn’t want to let me answer because he knows I have the truth.”
Everyone, he said, has discredited Trump’s allegations about his son.
“We want to talk about family and ethics, his family we could talk about all night,” Biden said.
Democrats were eager to keep the spotlight on Trump’s taxes — an issue that undermines his boasts about his business acumen and also his claims to the affection of working-class voters in the battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
“It’s amazing to me that someone who says that he’s a billionaire thought that it was OK to cheat the government the way he was, and to live the lavish lifestyle that he was living on the backs of police officers and firefighters and flight attendants … that make up our workforce in America,” said Rep. Marc Veasey, a Fort Worth Democrat and early Biden supporter.
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