The Complete Debate Guide for the President – The New York Times

• Watch the President’s debate live and follow along with our real-time analysis.

• President Trump and Joseph R. The first discussion between Biden Jr. will begin at 9 a.m. Tuesday night and will last 90 minutes without commercial interruptions.

• With the analysis and fact-checking of our reporters, the Times will stream the event live. Discussions will also be held on channels including ABC, CBS, CNN, C-Span, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC.

• Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace will moderate the discussion. He played a role in the 2016 discussions between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton.

• The moderator chooses the topics of discussion. For Tuesday night, Mr. Wallace chose Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden’s records, the Supreme Court, the coronavirus epidemic, the economy in cities, race and violence, and the integrity of elections. There will be 15 minutes to discuss each topic.

For Trump and Biden, the debate comes with a variety of incentives.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden will run with a very different set of political incentives during the first presidential debate phase of the 2020 general election.

For Mr. Trump, there is a very welcome opportunity to shake up a race in which he is currently behind. For Mr. Biden, the debate is a dangerous but necessary step, a close confrontation with an unconventional rival, who can speak and say almost anything.

After months of complaining about Mr. Biden’s “basement” strategy, the debate is the biggest opportunity to cancel the election as a choice between Mr. Trump’s two competitive visions. The Biden campaign primarily races as a referendum on Mr. Trump’s failures to respond to the coronavirus epidemic.

Two things about the stakes of discussion can come true simultaneously.

First, the race for the presidency has been a steady one so far, with little disturbance in Mr Biden’s consistent voting lead – no epidemics, no unemployment registration, no mass protests over policing and racism, and no unexpected Supreme Court vacancy. The 90-minute discussion will be hard pressed to move the needle beyond those factors.

Second, the debate also presents one of Mr. Trump’s best opportunities to tap into the current dynamics, his first opportunity to speak directly to an audience of millions of Americans, including Mr. Biden.

How fast does it go from the railway?

Mr. Trump has always been a showman, and discussions as a politician have been some of his big milestones. He jerks, interrupts and hits in an unusually personal way and he usually draws a sharp gravity towards whatever glory he wants.

He has yet to attack Mr Biden. It is also possible that he will go after moderator Sri Sri Wallace, whose president has repeatedly made inappropriate comparisons with his father, former TV correspondent Mike Wallace.

What past campaigns have shown is that the tone is often set in the first part of the first discussion – and the tone of the news coverage.

Mr. Biden is very clear that he believes Mrs. Clinton went ahead four years ago by arguing about character in a discussion with Mr. Trump. “She did exactly what every other candidate might do,” Mr. Biden said in January. The resulting discussion was an ugly gorgeous look and he said, “It all went down the gutter.”

Mr. Biden wants to avoid that – and Mr. Trump’s explicit provocations have been stress-tested by advisers for not responding if they are not focused on his own message.

“I hope I don’t take the bait to fight,” Mr. Biden said this month.

A wild card is how Mr. Trump’s tactics and opponents will work – and how the president, who feeds a crowd response, will react in a debate hall without a huge audience.

Biden could benefit from lower expectations.

For months, Mr. Trump and his surrogates detained Mr. Biden unconsciously and late, verbally stumbling or appearing lost. He has been part of a campaign to incite – and sometimes loudly – that Mr Biden’s psychiatry has diminished for him to serve as president.

This is not usually the case with how the expectations-setting works.

Mr. Trump has lowered the bar so far – even asking Mr. Biden to take some kind of drug test – that his supporters expect blows on Tuesday. But Mr. Biden, even if he does well on stage at some point, eventually won his party’s nomination after navigating 11 preliminary discussions.

Mr. Biden was memorably knocked on the door by a rival who would become a running ally of California Senator Kamala Harris when he attacked her in protest of being put on a bus decades ago.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly benefited from the gap in his coverage in news coverage: whenever he bombs himself – albeit momentarily – some praise comes in a new tone.

“Any time he speaks a full and quiet line, people come up to him to call him president,” said a frustrated Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who helped run Pete Battingg’s debate preparations during the 2020 primary.

Could Trump come under Biden’s skin?

Will Mr. Trump succeed in losing Mr. Biden’s anger? Or will Mr. Biden avoid falling into this trap?

Democratic and Republican strategists who have been opposed to Mr. Biden in debates have long called it a weakness, yet there is further evidence of this on the campaign trail that occasionally moves the voter forward at the debate stage.

When provoked, Mr. Biden risks rumbling and getting angry and losing his thinking, and he risks becoming sensitive.

“If Trump gets under his skin and Biden starts preaching it – ‘Let me tell you this,'” said Mark Valace, who helped prepare Sarah Palin for the vice president’s discussion with Mr. Biden. It just doesn’t sit close to time. “

Mr. Trump has spoken to aides about attacking Mr. Biden’s family, particularly his son Hunter Biden, and raising allegations of unspecified sexual misconduct against Mr. Biden by former Senate aide Tara Rede.

For those wondering how far Mr. Trump can get on this road, it’s worth considering when he discusses Mrs. Clinton. Suppressed on her own allegations of sexual misconduct – only after the “Hollywood Case H.Lewood” recording was released did she catch women making vulgar remarks about mobs – she only pointed to Mrs Clinton’s husband.

“There has never been a time in the history of politics in this nation that has been so humiliating for women,” she said.

Empathy distance

More than 200,000 people in the United States have died from the coronavirus epidemic, the pain that Mr. Biden has endured in his life – and his ability to bring sympathy to Americans now facing grief – is seen by campaign officials as a hallmark of this unusual year. Helps the former vice president. (For those who don’t know, his first wife and infant daughter died in a car accident about 50 years ago. His two sons survived but one of them, Bau, died of cancer in 2015.)

How Mr. Biden shows that sympathy – the kind of voice he heard during the Democratic convention that Republicans tried to testify on Mr. Trump’s hidden soft side next week – would be a way he would try not only to join the Democrats but also to support the decisive swing. Voters.

Mr. Biden’s sympathy can be critically important, said Republican Polster and Focus-Group guru Frank Lu Luntez, calling him “a person who empathizes with everyone.”

“The only analogy I can think of is that Biden will bury a squirrel that struck a high school,” Luntz said. “

He knows himself. Mr Luntez said he ran with Mr Biden in Iowa in January, shortly after Polster suffered a stroke, on which Mr Biden was briefed. “He gave me a hug and he wouldn’t let me go,” Mr. Lanteze said, “and it was really nice.”

Truth, untruth and fact-checking

In 2016, Mr. Trump was relentless on discussions of his attacks and claims, many of which were false or at least inaccurate. Mrs. Clinton attempted to respond by requesting viewers to view the fact-checking facility on her website. It proved ineffective.

So if Mr. Biden – or Mr. Wallace of Fox News – tells Mr. Trump the wrong things, how long will it take to correct them?

Mr Wallace said before the debate that a successful night would make it “as invisible as possible” to viewers, barely previewing the president’s aggressive plan to investigate the facts. “If I did my job right, people would say at the end of the night, ‘That was a big discussion – who was the mediator?'” Mr. Wallace told Fox News.

If Mr. Biden tries to push back whenever he thinks Mr. Trump says something is wrong or distorted, he will probably spend the whole night playing on the presidential field. If he ignores her, he will probably face a morning chorus વિ with critics wondering why he let the president go with him.

His advisers said before the discussion that Mr. Bid planned to avoid allocating his time to Mr. Trump to investigate the facts, but that some key issues – such as supporting the Trump administration’s claim to overturn the entire Affordable Care Act – were likely to show a factual attitude.

Mr. Biden has been adept at choosing the moments of his discussion for many years – and using smiles and laughter to deny the allegations. She worked with Sarah Palin in the 2008 Vice Presidential debate and to some extent with Senator Bernie Sanders in the final, two-person democracy debate this year. Whether he works with a candidate like Mr. Trump is a completely different question.

Does it matter if there are fireworks?

Many voters say the discussions make no difference. In a recent Monmouth University poll, only one percent of voters said the vote 87 percent said their choice was not likely to be affected. Of course, voters also say that negative ads don’t work, and yet campaigns broadcast them because history shows they do.

The Democratic strategist working for Mr. Batigig, Ms. For the past four years, Smith has compared Mr. Trump to debating a “machine gun to a chimpanzee”: they are both dangerous and “completely unpredictable,” he said. He noted that Mr. Trump was widely believed to have lost the 2016 debate – and that he had won the presidency anyway.

He said that for the 2020 primaries, “I don’t think anyone even thought that Jid Dan is a big winner in any of those primary debates.” “It doesn’t matter.”

Despite the incredible upheaval in the nation, the fall debate season comes after months of stagnation in the 2020 race.

“Despite the global epidemic, despite the economic disaster, this earthquake has not changed anything despite civil rights protests,” Smith said. “If people lose their jobs, lose the ability to go out, can’t send their children to school, then what is an hour-long television discussion to them on political issues?”

Katie Gluiki contributed to the report.