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CLEVELAND – Joe Biden and Donald Trump exchanged heated remarks Tuesday, attacking each other’s competence and credibility, in a passionate first presidential debate 35 days before the most tense US election in recent memory.
There was no handshake when the two men took the stage and while this was due to COVID-19 restrictions, the absence of the traditional greeting symbolized the bitterness engulfing the country in the final countdown to November 3.
Just minutes later, the debate turned into an all-out and personal fight as they scrambled to resolve issues from a Supreme Court vacancy to the coronavirus pandemic to the US health care system.
READ: Trump and Biden head to first debate with the presidency at stake
“Everything he has said so far is simply a lie. I am not here to shout his lies. Everyone knows he is a liar,” said former Vice President Biden.
Biden, who adopted an energetic and aggressive tone despite Trump’s taunting that he had little energy, then said to the President of the United States, “You want to shut up, man?”
“This clown is hard to talk to,” Biden snapped at one point.
READ: Trump paid only $ 750 in federal income taxes in 2016: NYT
Biden, who leads the polls, sought to link Trump directly to the COVID-19 pandemic that has claimed more than 200,000 lives in the United States, more than in any other country.
“How many of you woke up this morning and had an empty chair at the kitchen table because someone died of COVID?” Biden said.
Mocking Trump, 74, for one of his most notorious statements from the White House podium, Biden said: “Maybe you could inject bleach into your arm and that would fix it.”
– ‘Nothing smart about you’ –
Trump responded that his comment about the bleach had been a joke and quickly tried to hit Biden.
He attacked both his record as Barack Obama’s vice president and even questioned the 77-year-old’s educational record.
“Never use the word smart on me. Never use that word on me. There’s nothing smart about you, Joe,” Trump said.
READ: Trump refuses to promise transfer of power if he loses the US vote.
Trump at one point denounced that the “radical left” has Biden “wrapped around the finger.”
He also attacked Biden’s insistence on wearing a mask to prevent COVID, a decision in line with the advice of medical experts.
“You have to understand, I have a mask right here. I wear a mask when I think I need it,” Trump said.
READ: Stock markets struggle as the Biden-Trump debate focuses on
“I don’t wear a mask like him, every time you see him, he has a mask.”
Before they appeared in the first of three 90-minute television clashes, the spikes were flying.
Biden, who sought to eat away at Trump’s crucial support among working-class voters, capitalized on explosive revelations that billionaire Trump managed to avoid paying almost any federal income tax for years.
