2020 US elections: Trump and Biden fight over topics of debate

US President Donald Trump and his White House rival Joe Biden are fighting over plans for their latest debate.

The Republican president’s campaign accused the organizers of the showdown of aiding the Democrat by leaving foreign policy off the list this week.

Biden’s camp responded that Trump was trying to avoid questions about his response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden has a dominant national lead in opinion polls with two weeks to go.

But it has a minor advantage in the handful of key US states that will ultimately decide the outcome.

On Monday, the president’s side sent a letter to the Committee on Presidential Debates asking for the issues to be adjusted for Thursday’s final primetime duel.

Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said in the letter that the campaigns had already agreed that foreign policy would be the focus of the third debate.

The topics were announced by NBC News correspondent and moderator Kristen Welker last week: American families, race in America, climate change, national security and leadership.

During a campaign rally Monday afternoon in Prescott, Arizona, Trump described Welker as a “radical Democrat” and said “she would be no good.”

Stepien accused Biden of being “desperate to avoid conversations about his own foreign policy history” and the commission of trying to “isolate Biden from his own history.”

“The pro-Biden antics of the Commission have turned the entire debate season into a fiasco and it is no wonder why the public has lost faith in its objectivity,” he wrote.

He also accused Biden of trying to avoid questions about reports about alleged emails from his son, Hunter, and alleged conflicts of interest.

The Democratic side responded that it was actually Trump who was trying to dodge the questions.

“The campaigns and the Commission agreed months ago that the moderator of the debate would choose the topics,” said the national press secretary, TJ Ducklo.

“The Trump campaign is lying about it now because Donald Trump is afraid to face more questions about his disastrous Covid response.

“As usual, the president is more concerned with the rules of a debate than with getting a nation in crisis to get the help it needs.”

Following public criticism about the handling of the first debate, the commission adopted a new rule to mute the microphones in the final event.

The structure of the 90-minute debate will be divided into 15-minute segments. At the beginning of each new topic, both candidates will have two minutes of uninterrupted time, during which the opponent’s microphone will be off.

The rest of the time will be an open discussion, and the microphones will not be muted during this period.

In a statement announcing the decision, the debate committee said they determined that it was “appropriate to adopt measures aimed at promoting compliance with the agreed rules.”

The commission noted that “one [campaign] you may think they are going too far, and you may think they are not going far enough, “but that these actions provided the right balance in the public interest.

Trump’s campaign manager wrote on Monday that the moderator of the second debate canceled Oct. 15, Steve Scully, had been suspended after tweeting a prominent Trump critic and later lying that his account had been hacked.

Stepien also accused the moderator of the first debate, Chris Wallace of Fox News, of having acted as “a third fighter” against Trump.

The first Trump-Biden duel on Sept. 29 came down to name calling and name calling, with the president interrupting many more times than the Democrat, according to post-debate statistics from the US media.

Nearly 30 million early voters have already cast their votes, compared to just six million right now before the last presidential election in 2016.

Experts say the coronavirus pandemic has prompted many to cast their vote early to avoid crowds at polling stations on November 3, although some early voters have faced long lines.

On Monday, Republicans were defeated by the United States Supreme Court, as it refused to take a case on the postal ballot in the critical state of Pennsylvania.

Republicans had argued that only ballots received before Election Day should be counted, and they were challenging a state Supreme Court decision to allow final ballots to be counted.

Now that the highest court in the United States has refused to hear the case, ballots received within three days of November 3 will be counted, even if they are not clearly postmarked.

Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the three liberal court justices in the case.