Donald Trump faces Democratic challenger Joe Biden on Thursday.
President Donald Trump takes on Democratic challenger Joe Biden on Thursday in what promises to be a deadly final debate within two weeks of their tumultuous fight for the White House.
The couple’s latest televised confrontation turned into a gruesome showdown marred by interruptions and name calling, prompting organizers to introduce the mute this time around to try and keep things civil.
Debate in the southern city of Nashville is setting fire to the start of the final sprint until the Nov. 3 election in a deeply polarized and tense United States, fearing the results could spark legal battles and more protests.
Trump has stepped up his attacks on Biden, which national polls show leading the race, as he fights to retain the White House after four tumultuous years.
To reduce the interruptions that marked the last debate, during the two minutes, the candidates must answer the questions of the moderator, only their microphone will be live.
“I think the silence is very unfair and I think it is very bad,” Trump said this week, calling debate moderator Kristen Welker a “radical Democrat.”
Biden, 77, had no public events on his schedule Wednesday for the third day in a row as Trump, 74, attended multiple rallies per day.
Barack Obama hesitated over his former vice president on Wednesday, urging Democrats not to be rocked by Biden’s complacency in the polls.
He issued a stark reminder from 2016, when polls showed Hillary Clinton as the frontrunner – only to have her and her supporters shocked by a Trump victory on election day.
– ‘Not this time’ –
“We can’t be complacent. I don’t care about the polls,” the former two-term president said at a rally in Philadelphia, Pa., One of the few battlefield states supposed to decide on the election.
“There was a whole bunch of polls last time around. It didn’t work. Because a whole bunch of people stayed at home. And got lazy and complacent. Not this time. Not in this election. “
He told his supporters the stakes were too high to have Trump four more years at the head of the country, seeking to pit his successor – a real estate mogul and ex-reality TV star – with Biden.
“And the rest of us had to live with the consequences of his inability to take the job seriously.”
The coronavirus has killed more than 220,000 people in the United States and seriously injured the world‘s largest economy, sparking sharp criticism over the president’s handling of the crisis.
While Obama was in Pennsylvania, Trump traveled to North Carolina, another of the battlefield states, as he seeks to regain the enthusiasm of four years ago.
Trump’s message consisted of telling Americans the coronavirus outbreak is all but over and attacking the business relationship of Biden’s son, Hunter, when his father was vice president.
A Quinnipiac University poll of likely voters released Wednesday gave Biden a 51-43 lead in Pennsylvania, which Trump won by a narrow margin in 2016.
Trump is following Biden in national polls, and another Quinnipiac poll has caused potential turmoil in his re-election hopes.
The poll put Democratic and Republican presidential candidates in a 47-47 stalemate in Texas, a state Trump won by nine points four years ago and has not voted for a Democrat since Jimmy Carter in 1976 .
More than 40 million Americans have already voted, according to the University of Florida’s US Elections Project, nearly 30% of the total turnout in 2016.
