After shifting rules and a scheduling fiasco, Vice President Biden appeared on ABC for a town hall style event in Pennsylvania on Oct.15 in which he answered questions from voters and solidified his policy platform. Meanwhile, in Miami, Trump appeared at a similar Town Hall event with NBC, setting up a ratings war between the two candidates.
TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie moderated NBC’s event and wasted little time in pressing the president on the circumstances of his COVID-19 diagnosis, attempting to pin down the date of the president’s last negative test to provide a clearer picture of the president’s testing regimen.
The president managed to dodge these questions, first implying that he tests almost everyday, then claiming he doesn’t test daily, before claiming his doctors would have the exact answer on whether or not he took a test the day of the Presidential debate. Guthrie pressed the President on whether his views on mask-wearing had changed since his diagnosis.
“As far as the mask is concerned, I’m good with masks, I’m okay with masks, I tell other people to wear a mask,” he said, “but just the other day they came out with a statement that 85% of the people who wear masks catch it.”
Guthrie would contest this figure when the President repeated it later in the event. Vice president Biden advocated for a mask mandate, but acknowledged the difficulties that would come in enforcing such a policy. Still, he said, the word of the
President matters.
“You can go to every governor and get them all in a room, all 50 as president and say, ‘ask people to wear the mask’ … and if they don’t… I go to every mayor, I go to every councilman, I go to every local official and say, ‘mandate the mask,’’’ he said.
The President again blamed China but praised his administration’s effort to tamp down on the virus, citing estimates Guthrie asserted were based on early projections of an entirely uncontrolled spread.
“We’re at 210,000 people. One person is too much, it should’ve never happened because of China. It happened because of China. We were expected to lose… 2,200,000 people,” Trump said.
Biden laid out his plans to restructure the American economy around renewable energy, a move he says will create an influx of jobs and help revive the economy.
“We’re going to invest a great deal of the money into infrastructure and into a green infrastructure. We’re going to put 500,000 charging stations on new highways we’re building and old highways we’re building. We’re going to own the electric market,” he said. “I will create 18.6 million new jobs – good paying jobs, number one – number two, the GDP will grow by a trillion dollars more than it would under Trump, and create seven million more jobs than under Trump.”
The president was given the opportunity by one of his supporters to explain his thinking behind his many corporate tax cuts.
“Our corporate taxes were the highest in the world and now they’re among the lower taxes…and what that means is jobs,” Trump said.
Guthrie pushed Trump on the question of his own tax records, recently released and reported on by the New York Times. He attempted to minimize the significance of the debt, while for the first time seemingly confirming its existence, despite denying the allegations previously.
“I have a very very small percentage of debt compared – in fact some of it I did as favors to institutions that wanted to loan me money – $400 million compared to the assets that I have… It’s a tiny percentage of my net worth.”
When a young man asked Biden how he would work on behalf of the Black community, and in particular, young and disillusioned Black voters, he underscored the power of the vote in marginalized communities.
“As my buddy John Lewis said, it’s a sacred opportunity, the right to vote, it can make a difference. If young Black men and women vote you can determine the outcome of this election. Not a joke, you can do that.”
While he maintained his stance against defunding the police, Biden spoke extensively about reforms his administration would seek in policing, including an influx of psychologists and social workers in police departments, moving the prosecution of offending officers to outside their communities, the decriminalization of marijuana, and the establishment of a national study bringing Black and Brown voices together, along with cops and social workers, to come up with methods of police reform.
“We have to change the system…from punishment to rehabilitation,” he said.
The president again denounced white supremacy, before shifting the focus to threats from the left.
“I denounce white supremacy, and frankly, you want to know something, I denounce ANTIFA and I denounce these people on the left who are burning down these cities run by Democrats who don’t know what they’re doing,” he said.
The mother of a transgender young woman cited the President’s anti-trans* policies, including the ban on trans* individuals in the military, and asked Biden how his administration would protect the
rights of transgender and LGBTQ individuals.
“I will flat out just change the law. Eliminate those executive orders, number 1.” He said. “There should be zero discrimination.”
At the core of the Vice President’s candidacy is a call for unity in the “fight for the soul of this nation,” as he frames it. He expressed his view of the United States as a vast and diverse nation.
“We are a country that is a country of slaves who came here 400 years ago, indigenous people, and everyone else is an immigrant,” he said.
The ABC moderator, George Stephanopolous, asked the Vice President what it would say about the state of our democracy, and indeed the soul of our nation, were he to lose to President Trump.
“It could say that I’m a lousy candidate, that I didn’t do a good enough job,” the vice president said. “I hope that it doesn’t say that we are as racially, ethnically, and religiously at odds with each other as it appears the president wants us to be.”
Vice President Biden’s ABC town hall event garnered 14.1 million viewers, while the President’s town hall reached 13.5 million viewers across NBC, MSNBC and CNBC.
Graphic by Lizzy Talbert
