Joe Biden asked Donald Trump to shut up and called him a clown during their contentious first presidential debate tonight, slapping him down as Trump repeatedly interrupted his answers.
Trump’s performance comes as his own internal polling shows him losing to Biden in about every key battleground state, including Ohio.
‘Would you shut up, man?,’ a visibly exasperated Biden said about 20 minutes into the debate after Trump interrupted him again as he tried to talk about the Supreme Court.
And, about 15 minutes later during a discussion on the COVID pandemic, he told Trump again: ‘Would you just shush for a minute?’
Trump tried to command the stage from out of the box, interrupting his rival repeatedly to make his point, counter Biden, and push himself into the conversation.
It happened so many times that moderate Chris Wallace stepped in, asking the president to let Biden finish his answer and chided
‘I’m the moderator of this debate and I would like you to let me ask my question and then you can answer,’ Wallace said told Trump.
‘Go ahead then,’ Trump said and then later adding to Wallace: ‘I guess I’m debating you, not him. No surprise.’
The 90-minute show down between the presidential contenders proved early on that it would a be a knock-out, drag-down match.
Trump wouldn’t say when he will finally make his personal taxes public as he has long promised, but claimed he paid ‘millions of dollars in taxes’.
Wallace had to bring up questions over Trump’s taxes after a New York Times released a report this week with sources claiming the president only paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he ran for president and first year he served in office.
‘I paid $38 million one year, I paid $27 million one year. I went –’ the president said, but was interrupted again by Biden.
‘Show us your tax returns,’ the former vice president insisted.
‘You’ll see it as soon as it’s finished. You’ll see it,’ Trump said.
‘Oh,’ Biden sarcastically conceded.
Biden quickly used that as a point of attack, saying Trump ‘does take advantage of the tax code’ and ‘pays less tax than a schoolteacher.’
Trump shrugged off the attack, saying that all business leaders do the same ‘unless they are stupid.’
He suggested that he was able to lessen his tax burden by using legal measures he claims were passed by the Obama administration.
‘Let me just tell you, it was the tax laws,’ Trump said, admitting: ‘I don’t want to pay tax.’
‘Before I came here I was a private developer, I was a private businesspeople,’ he continued. ‘Like every other private person, unless their stupid, they go through the laws and that’s what it is.’
Then pointing to Biden on the opposite side of the stage, Trump added, ‘He passed a tax bill that gave us all these privileges for depreciation and for a tax credits – we built a building and we get tax credits.’
Just hours before taking the stage in the battleground rust belt state Tuesday, Biden and his vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris released their tax returns.
Trump was defending his decision to end racial sensitivity training for federal workers when his Democratic rival hit him with the ‘racist’ label.
The president said the training was resulting in ‘very sick ideas’ and teaching people ‘to hate our country.’
‘If you look at the people, we were paying people hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach very bad ideas and frankly, very sick ideas. It really, they were teaching people to hate our country. And I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to allow that to happen. We have to go back to the core values of this country,’ Trump said.
‘Nobody is doing that. He’s racist,’ Biden said.
He defended the training programs.
‘The fact is there is racial insensitivity. People have to be made aware of what other people feel like. What insults them, what is it demeaning to them. It’s important to people. Now, many people don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings, but it makes a big difference,’ he said.
And then he pivoted it to emphasize his blue-collar roots and hinted Trump is a snob.
Biden said: ‘It makes a gigantic difference in the way a child is able to grow up and have a sense of self-esteem. It’s a little bit like how this guy and his friends look down on so many people and look down their nose on people like Irish Catholics like me who grew up in Scranton.
‘They looked down on people who don’t have money, they looked down on people who are of a different faith.’
Race relations, like other debate topics, resulted in a furious back-and-forth, shouting over each other conversation between the presidential contenders.
As the two men bickered on race, Biden invoked the death of George Floyd, the African American man killed by a white police officer in Minnesota and the Black Lives Matter protests that sprung up in the wake. Trump invoked his ‘law and order’ presidency.
Trump has accused Biden on multiple occasions of wanting to defund the police, which Biden has said he would not do.
During the debate, the Democratic nominee said most police officers are ‘good’ but the bad ones need to be rooted out.
‘The vast majority of police officers are good, they risk their lives every day to take care of us, but there are some bad apples and when they occur, when they find them they have to be sorted out,’ Biden said.
‘Cops aren’t happy to see what happened to George Floyd. These cops aren’t happy to see what happened to Breonna Taylor. Most don’t like it, but we have to have a system where people are held accountable. And by the way, violence and response is never appropriate. Never appropriate. Peaceful protest is. Violence is never appropriate,’ he said of protests.
Trump hit back: ‘What is peaceful protest? When they run through the middle of the town and burn down stores and kill people all over the place? That is not peaceful protest.’
The president also has complained Biden hasn’t said he’s for ‘law and order,’ a phrase Trump has used to define his presidency.
‘They don’t want to talk about law and order. Are you in favor of law and order?,’ he asked Biden.
‘I’m in favor of law,’ Biden said.
But he attacked Trump’s approach of handling racial unrest across America.
‘The point is that is why he keeps trying to rile everything up. He doesn’t want to calm things down. Instead of going in and talking to people and saying let’s get everybody together, figure out how to deal with this, what does he do? He just throws gasoline on the fire constantly. Every single solitary time,’ he said.
Moderator Chris Wallace if he would condemn white supremacists and militia groups
‘I would say almost everything I see is from the left wing, not from the right wing,’ Trump said.
‘What are you saying?,’ Wallace asked.
‘I’m willing to do anything, I want to see peace,’ Trump said.
‘Then do it, sir,’ Wallace challenged.
‘What do you want to call them? Give me a name, give me a name,’ Trump said.
‘White supremacist and white ring militias,’ Wallace said.
But Trump turned to attack Antifa, an unorganized group opposed to extreme right-wing political groups like fascists.
‘Stand back and stand by, but I tell you what, somebody has got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right wing problem, this is a left-wing problem,’ he said.
Trump and Biden fought over the coronavirus crisis by accusing each other of killing more people had the other been in office.
‘He panicked or he just looked at the stock market, one of the two, because guess what, a lot of people died and a lot more are going to die unless he gets a lot smarter, a lot quicker,’ Biden said onstage.
At another point Trump shouted it would have been Biden who’d have killed more – calling his response to swine flu pandemic in 2009 a ‘disaster.’
Biden, who was serving as vice president at the time, hit back that 14,000 died not 200,000. ‘We didn’t shut down the economy. This is his economy that he shut down,’ Biden added.
‘If we would’ve listened to you, the country would’ve been left wide open, millions of people would’ve died. Not 200,000. And one person is too much. It’s China’s fault. It should’ve never happened,’ the president said.
Biden shot back that the president ‘waited and waited’ to act when the virus reached America’s shores and ‘still doesn’t have a plan.’
Biden told Trump to ‘get out of your bunker and get out of the sand trap’ and go in his golf cart to the Oval Office to come up with a bipartisan plan to save people.
‘You’re the worst president America has ever had,’ Biden said.
Trump snarled a response, declaring that ‘I’ll tell you Joe, you could never have done the job that we did. You don’t have it in your blood.’
‘I know how to do the job,’ was the solemn response from Biden, who served eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president.
Biden whacked Trump for coddling China in the early weeks of the pandemic, saying that the president didn’t push hard enough to letter American health experts in.
‘He did not even ask Xi to do that. He told us what a great job Xi was doing, he told us we owe him a debt of gratitude for being so transparent with us,’ Biden said.
The ex-veep mocked Trump for saying the coronavirus would disappear ‘like a miracle.’
‘And maybe you can inject some bleach in your arm and that would take care of it,’ Biden also offered.
‘That was said sarcastically,’ Trump shot back.
While discussing the importance of masks to protect against the virus, Trump defended himself for not wearing one all the time, before poking fun at Biden for wearing ‘the biggest mask he’s ever seen’.
Biden also pointed out Trump retorted ‘it is what it is’, as more than 200,000 Americans have died from the deadly virus.
Biden has evoked his son Beau Biden to criticize Trump for reportedly calling members of the American military who lost their lives “losers” and “suckers.”
Raising his voice, Biden described his son as a hero.
Beau Biden died of cancer in 2015.
Trump responded by pivoting to a familiar attack, on Biden’s other son, Hunter.
The president said, “I don’t know Beau. I know Hunter,” and accused Hunter Biden of having collected millions of dollars from oversees interests, including China, while working as a consultant during his father’s tenure as vice president. It echoed attacks the president made earlier in the debate in Cleveland, but have little basis in fact.
Trump also opened a new line of attack when he said Hunter Biden was dishonorably discharged from the military for cocaine use. Biden responded that his son wasn’t dishonorably discharged.
He addressed viewers directly and said that, like a lot of Americans, Hunter had a drug problem but was “working on it” and had “fixed it.”
Biden added “I’m proud of my son.”
Earlier in the night, Trump hook a shot at Hunter, saying: ‘And no wonder your son goes in and he takes out billions of dollars to manage. He makes millions of dollars.’
It was a reference to business Hunter Biden did with his firm Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC.
Trump brought up a Senate Republican report that claimed Hunter got $3.5 million from the wealthy wife of the former Mayor of Moscow. Hunter Biden’s lawyer has denied the characterization.
‘What did he do to deserve it?’ Trump asked.
‘My son did nothing wrong in Burisa,’ said Biden – after Trump expanded his attack to Hunter Biden’s lucrative seat on the board of a Ukrainian energy firm.
It resulted in still more angry cross talk.
‘He doesn’t want to let me answer because he knows I have the truth,’ Biden said.
‘It’s hard to get any word in with this clown – excuse me, this person,’ Biden said after delivering the insult.
‘His family we could talk about all night,’ Biden said, but it was difficult to see how he followed through as Trump talked over him.
Then, Biden faced the camera and delivered one of several lines he appeared to have prepared to deliver. ‘This is not about my family or his family. It’s about your family,’ he told viewers.
‘He doesn’t want to talk about what you need … The American people. That’s what we’re talking about here.’
Trump defended his effort to swiftly fill a U.S. Supreme Court seat, saying ‘elections have consequences’ and he had the right despite Democratic objections.
‘I will tell you very simply we won the election, elections have consequences. We have the Senate and we have the White House and we have a phenomenal nominee respected by all,’ Trump said in defense of his nominee, conservative Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
‘… I think that she (Barrett) will be outstanding. She will be as good as anybody who has ever served on that court. We won the election and therefore we had the right to choose her.’
Biden, talking over frequent interruptions from Trump, said the seat of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be filled after the Nov. 3 election, when it was clear who the president would be.
‘We should wait, we should wait and see what the outcome of this election is,’ Biden said, adding a more conservative Supreme Court would endanger the Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare.
Pressed to reveal his health plan, Trump spoke about a Supreme Court ruling that struck down Obamacare’s mandate that people buy insurance: ‘Excuse me – I got rid of the individual mandate,’ Trump said.
Wallace told him it was not a plan.
‘That is absolutely a big thing,’ Trump responded.
When Trump and Biden kept going at it, Wallace implored: ‘Mr. President I’m the moderator of this debate and I would like you to let me ask my question.’
Biden was determined not to be caught with only a knife in a gunfight.
‘You picked the wrong guy at the wrong night at the wrong time,’ he told Trump.
Trump accused him of risking left wing wrath by distancing himself from Sanders.
‘You just lost the left,’ Trump told him.
The angry attacks carried over into the coronavirus.
‘And by the way maybe inject some bleach into your arm, that’ll take care of it,’ Biden said, mocking Trump’s comments about injecting disinfectant to cure the virus.
Trump said is was said ‘sarcastically’ – a claim he did not make at the time.
The two men bickered about their intelligence. Trump has called himself a ‘very stable genius’ and bragged about how well he’s done on a cognitive test, challenging Biden to take one.
And when Biden said he need to get ‘a lot smarter’ or more people would die from COVID, Trump was quick to pounce.
‘Did you use the word ‘Smart?’ He said he went to Delaware State,’ he snapped of Biden. Trump went to the University of Pennsylvania. ‘He graduated the lowest or almost the lowest in your class. Don’t ever use the word ‘Smart’ with me.’
Biden hit back.
‘Oh, give me a break,’ he said.
Trump replied: ‘There’s nothing smart about you. 47 years, you’ve done nothing.’