Trump wants to be more level-headed in the final television match of the 2020 election campaign and let Biden finish speaking, if he doesn’t suddenly change his mind.

US President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden in their first television debate in Cleveland.

Keystone

On Friday night at 3 a.m. Swiss time, Donald Trump and Joe Biden meet for the second and probably last time for a television debate. The duel will take place on the grounds of Belmont University in Nashville (Tennessee) and should last 90 minutes without commercial breaks. Here are five things that will play a role.

The moderator

The debate will be moderated by Kristen Welker, 44. Welker, who was selected by the “Commission on Presidential Debates,” the organizer of television debates during the hot campaign phase, has been working in the White House as a journalist for the “NBC” television station for almost ten years. In recent years, her parents have donated money to Democratic politicians.

Reason enough for the American president to question his impartiality. “She is a Democrat, I know her well,” Trump said this week, because he has a feeling that undecided voters are influenced by such claims. Trump also accuses Welker of having arbitrarily changed the topics of the debate. Actually, a foreign policy discussion was planned; Welker announced, however, that he would also ask questions on topics such as the crown crisis, racism in the United States and climate change.

President

In the first television debate, Trump rebelled against his opponent and the moderator. In the end, he was supposedly very happy with his performance, before those around him pointed out that he had been a bit too aggressive. (Polls showed that Trump was not making a good impression on the American audience.)

Now the president has decided to listen more closely to his advisers. “Some say I should let him talk because he often loses the thread,” Trump said this week of his opponent Biden. It is far from clear whether he will adhere to this well-intentioned advice. “Sometimes you have a strategy, but suddenly you have to change it,” Trump said.

The Challenger

Biden should be prepared for the fact that he will be more in the spotlight in the second debate. In the first televised duel, many Americans were especially curious to see how the 77-year-old man stopped the president’s constant attacks. But now the Democrat is under pressure to answer some open-ended questions that he has avoided during the election campaign.

You are likely to be asked whether you are in favor of an expansion of the Supreme Court in Washington in response to the appointment of Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It seems that Biden has already studied an answer. This week he told the television program “60 Minutes” that he would be elected president and then set up a commission of experts to think about the growing politicization of the courts.

The absent son

Trump will do everything possible to address the career of Hunter, Biden’s 50-year-old son. Conservative media have long accused the former vice president’s offspring of having made a lot of money as a consultant in the wake of their father by appearing to Ukrainian or Chinese business partners as a liaison to Joe Biden.

Recently there have been indications, at least in the eyes of Trump’s allies, that Father Biden wanted to benefit financially from this arrangement. (However, a corresponding email comes from 2017, when Joe Biden was no longer active as vice president.) Hunter Biden was also part of a money laundering scandal in which the FBI is investigating, reported the Internet portal of the news station “Fox News Channel.”

So far, Biden has sharply and emotionally rejected these accusations, also because Hunter has long struggled with a drug addiction. The Democrat will do the same on Thursday, saying that the alleged scandal was carried out by foreign powers; But Biden must be careful not to lose his mind. At stake is his image of a sensible father who reconciles and does not divide.

The moment of debate

At least 45 million Americans voted ten days before November 3, the actual date of the presidential election. Converted, this corresponds to perhaps a third of all votes cast. So even if Trump or Biden made a serious mistake in the last television debate, the impact was limited.

A look at opinion polls shows that President Trump’s approval ratings have fallen in recent days, even though (or maybe because?) He campaigns every day. So he failed to convince more than 42 to 44 percent of Americans that he is doing a good job. It’s hard to imagine that this is enough to get you reelected.