Nashville, Tennessee – US President Donald Trump and Democratic candidate former Vice President Joe Biden faced off in the final televised presidential debate on Thursday night, just two weeks before Americans take to the polls on Nov. 3. The debate, held at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, was moderated by NBC News anchor Kristen Welker.
The two clashed on the issue of the coronavirus pandemic and Trump accused Biden of poorly handling a previous national health crisis, during the Obama administration, the H1N1 swine flu, saying: "Now he comes up and he tells us how to do this." Biden for his part accused Trump of neglecting the corona crisis and pinning hopes on the development of vaccines.
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Trump attacked Biden, "We can't lock ourselves up in a basement like Joe does. He has the ability to lock himself up. I don't know. He's obviously made a lot of money someplace, but he has this thing about living in a basement. People can't do that. By the way, I as the president couldn't do that. I'd love to put myself in the basement or in a beautiful room in the White House and go away for a year and a half until it disappears. I can't do that."
The former vice president claimed Trump "was told this was a serious virus that spread in the air, and it was much worse, much worse, than the flu. He went on record and said to one of your colleagues, recorded, that in fact, he knew how dangerous it was but he didn't want to tell us. He didn't want to tell us because he didn't want us to panic … Americans don't panic. He panicked."
The two contestants also locked horns on the matter of campaign funding. "You shouldn't be bringing up Wall Street, because you're the one that takes the money from Wall Street, not me. I could blow away your records like you wouldn't believe. We don't need money. We have plenty of money," the president told Biden.
'The Russians gave him millions'
The Democratic candidate was forced to answer questions about his son's involvement with Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Biden denied the accusations and threw them back at Trump. "The guy who got in trouble in Ukraine was this guy [Trump] trying to bribe the Ukrainian government to say something negative about me," Biden said.
Trump then made a surprising revelation, saying Biden received $3.5 million from the Russian government and noted that the former vice president has good relations with the wife of the mayor of Moscow.
"He [Biden] is the vice president of the United States and his son, his brother, and his other brother are getting rich. They're like a vacuum cleaner. They're sucking up money" in foreign countries," Trump assailed.
The president also defended his immigration policy, saying: "We now have as strong a border as we've ever had. We're over 400 miles of a brand new wall. You see the numbers. And we let people in, but they have to come in legally." Trump also noted, contrary to the accusations against him, that it was the Obama administration that built the large chain-link cages in border detention centers, where adults and children are often held after crossing the border illegally.
In response, Biden said he would pass legislation to change the status of 11 million illegal immigrants.
"Within a 100 days [of being elected], I'm going to send to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people," Biden said.
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