US President Donald Trump will cast an early vote in the presidential election while he is visiting Florida this weekend, White House spokesman Judd Deere said on Thursday.

The Republican president plans to vote in West Palm Beach, Florida, where his Mar-a-Lago estate is situated, on Saturday, according to Deere.

This comes as he is preparing for the third and final presidential debate against his Democratic rival Joe Biden and also as he is trying to close a big gap in opinion polls before the Nov. 3 election.

Trump trails Biden significantly in national polls and needs to score some hits in the debate to steady his campaign that is struggling, in part because of his mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.

According to polls, there are relatively few voters who have yet to make up their minds as Americans have cast more than 47 million votes for the election.

That eclipses total early voting from the 2016 presidential election with 12 days to go, according to data compiled by the US Elections Project.

Nearly 47.095 million Americans have turned in ballots, almost eight times the number of early votes cast at around same point before the 2016 contest, and just over the 47.015 million early votes that were cast before Election Day in that year.

Source: Presstv

After the first presidential debate was panned so widely that organizers introduced a mute button, Thursday’s second and final debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden was far more civil, yet showed the same sharp divides on the key issues facing the United States.

Trump, the Republican incumbent, took a more restrained approach than he did during the chaotic first presidential debate in September, when he repeatedly interrupted Biden. He even praised the moderator, whom he’d repeatedly denigrated before the debate.

“So far, I respect very much the way you’re handling this,” Trump said to NBC’s Kristen Welker when she gave him time to respond to Biden at one point.

Still, Thursday’s clash featured plenty of personal attacks between two men who evince little respect for each other, and Trump kept fact-checkers busy by leveling unfounded corruption accusations at Biden and his family. He also brought back campaign tropes about immigrant “rapists” and “murderers”, hearkening back to the speech that kicked off his 2016 campaign and suggesting that his pitch to voters remains much the same.

The televised encounter in Nashville, Tennessee, represented one of Trump’s last remaining opportunities to reshape a campaign dominated by a pandemic that has killed more than 221,000 people in the United States. Trump has trailed Biden in opinion polls for months, though the contest is tighter in some battleground states likely to decide the election.

Here are the issues that dominated the two candidates’ final televised clash before the November 3 election.

Covid-19: ‘People are learning to die with it’

Trump’s difficulty articulating a defense of his handling of the coronavirus remains a drag on his campaign. The opening topic of the debate was entirely predictable — Trump has received variations of the same question in interviews and has rarely delivered a clear answer.

Asked to outline his plan for the future, Trump instead asserted his prior handling was without fault and yet again predicted a rosy reversal to the pandemic.

“We’re rounding the turn, we’re rounding the corner,” Trump claimed, even as cases spike again across the country. “It’s going away.”

Biden, who has sought to prosecute Trump’s handling of the virus in his closing pitch to voters, came prepared. “Anyone who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America,” he said.

Biden added: “He says we’re, you know, we’re learning to live with it. People are learning to die with it.”

Trump asserted that a vaccine would be ready by the end of the year and potentially within “weeks”, but stopped short of claiming it would be ready before the election, as he earlier had. Most experts, including administration officials, have said a vaccine is unlikely to be widely available until mid-2021.

The debate came as several US states, including the election swing state of Ohio, reported record single-day increases in Covid-19 infections on Thursday, evidence the pandemic is accelerating anew.

Trump promises to ‘terminate’ Obamacare

Trump and Biden each sought to position himself as the defender of American’s health care, keenly aware that it ranked among the top issues for voters even before the coronavirus pandemic struck the nation.

But Trump’s efforts to repeal and undermine the Obama-era Affordable Care Act proved to be a liability, as Biden hammered his efforts to strip coverage from tens of millions of Americans and his lack of a plan to cover those with preexisting conditions.

Biden, by contrast, fended off Trump’s attack that his plan to reinforce the Obama-era law with a “public option” amounted to a step toward socialized medicine by relying on his well-established public persona — and his vanquishing of Democratic primary rivals who campaigned on a Medicare-for-All program.

“He thinks he’s running against somebody else,” Biden said. “I beat all those other people.”

‘The least racist person in this room’

With centuries of institutional racism coming to a head in 2020 with the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement, it’s been a bit of disconnect to see a 74-year-old white Republican and a 77-year-old white Democrat battle for the presidency. Trump and Biden did little to dispel that disconnect.

Welker offered both multiple opportunities to talk directly to Black Americans. Both men said they understood the challenges Black citizens face, but the segment amounted mostly to them blasting each other.

Trump blamed Biden as an almost singular force behind mass incarceration, especially of “young Black men”. Trump declared himself “the least racist person in this room” and repeated his claim that “nobody has done what I’ve done” for Black Americans “with the exception of Abraham Lincoln, possible exception”.

Trump and Biden spar over racism

Biden, incredulous, called Trump a “racist” who “pours fuel on every single racist fire”.

Polls suggest many young voters of color do not support Trump but aren’t particularly enthusiastic about Biden either. It’s unlikely their final debate altered that view.

Climate change

Trump and Biden faced off on global climate change in the first extensive discussion of the issue in a presidential debate in 20 years.

Biden beseeched the world to address a warming climate, as Trump took credit for pulling the US out of a major international accord to do just that. Trump asserted he was trying to save American jobs, while taking credit for some of the cleanest air and water the nation has seen in generations — some of it a holdover of regulations passed by his predecessor.

Trump also sought to blame other countries for their role in climate change, referring to “filthy” pollution in China, India and Russia. (China overtook the US as the world’s largest overall CO2 emitter in 2005, but US emissions per capita are still vastly higher.)

Biden, tapping into an issue of particular importance to his base, called for massive investment to create new environmentally friendly industries. “Our health and our jobs are at stake,” he said.

Biden also spoke of a transition from the oil industry, which Trump seized upon, asking voters in Texas and Pennsylvania if they were listening.

Foreign policy meets personal attacks

Biden also finally got a chance to talk a little foreign policy. But most discussion of other countries came as the two candidates attacked each other with allegations of foreign entanglements.

Trump repeatedly leveled unsupported allegations against Biden and his son Hunter in an attempt to cast his rival and his family as corrupt.

“I don’t make money from China, you do. I don’t make money from Ukraine, you do,” Trump said.

Trump offered no hard proof for his assertions, as has often been the case during his presidency. Biden meanwhile highlighted a recent New York Times report that the president has a Chinese bank account as well as the Times’ earlier reporting showing that Trump paid only $750 in taxes in 2016 and 2017.

When given the opportunity, the former vice president also hammered Trump’s cozy relationship with North Korea’s authoritarian leader Kim Jong Un. “His buddy, who’s a thug,” Biden said, arguing that Trump’s summit with Kim “legitimized” a US adversary and potential nuclear threat.

Trump defended his “different kind of relationship … a very good relationship” with Kim, prompting Biden to retort that nations “had a good relationship with Hitler before he, in fact, invaded the rest of Europe”.

Snap polls show Biden as debate winner

Despite the swipes, the moderator appeared relieved at the end the debate and thanked both candidates for a “robust, fantastic” discussion. Many on social media touted Welker as the debate’s winner, cheering her ability to keep the discussion on track.

Source: France 24

The final debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden will feature a mute button to allow each candidate to speak uninterrupted, organisers said on Monday, looking to avoid the disruptions that marred the first matchup.

The Trump campaign voiced objections to the change – made after the president repeatedly talked over both Biden and the moderator at last month’s debate in violation of its agreed-upon rules – but said the Republican would still take part in the Thursday night event, one of his last chances to reach a large prime-time audience before voting ends on Nov. 3.

The Presidential Commission on Debates said each candidate’s microphone at the debate in Nashville, Tennessee, would be silenced to allow the other to make two minutes of opening remarks at the beginning of each 15-minute segment of the debate. Both microphones will be turned on to allow a back-and-forth after that time.

“President Trump is committed to debating Joe Biden regardless of last-minute rule changes from the biased commission in their latest attempt to provide advantage to their favored candidate,” campaign manager Bill Stepien said.

The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

More than 30 million Americans have already cast their ballots, limiting Trump’s chances of reframing a contest that national and state opinion polls show him trailing.

Trump repeatedly interrupted Biden during a chaotic and ill-tempered debate on Sept. 29, at one point provoking Biden to snap: “Will you shut up, man?”

‘They cut you off’

Trump backed out of a second scheduled debate set for last Thursday over a disagreement about the virtual format following his Covid-19 infection. At that time, he raised concerns about having his microphone muted.

“You sit behind a computer and do a debate – it’s ridiculous, and then they cut you off whenever they want,” Trump said in an Oct. 8 interview on Fox Business.

Earlier on Monday, Trump’s campaign said it was unhappy with the announced set of topics for Thursday’s debate, arguing that it should focus more on foreign policy and asserting that the nonpartisan group was tilted toward Biden.

Biden’s campaign said both sides previously agreed to let moderators choose the subjects. It said Trump wanted to avoid discussing his stewardship of the coronavirus pandemic, which surveys show is the top issue for voters.

“As usual, the president is more concerned with the rules of a debate than he is getting a nation in crisis the help it needs,” Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo said.

The number of Americans who voted early reached 30.2 million on Monday, according to the University of Florida’s United States Elections Project. That number represents more than one-fifth of all the votes cast in the 2016 election.

Early voting is likely to ramp up this week as more states open up voting centers for those who want to avoid possible coronavirus exposure at crowded Election Day polling sites.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)

President Donald Trump likes to make fun of his rival Joe Biden’s verbal lapses but on Saturday he made his own goof as he took a pot shot at French President Emmanuel Macron and effectively demoted him.

Trump’s error downgrading Macron to prime minister came as he spoke at a campaign rally in Michigan, one of a flurry of stops he is making in the final three weeks of the presidential race as he trails Democrat Biden in the polls.

Trump had been speaking about the old NAFTA trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, which he called a bad deal for America and insisted on renegotiating, when he turned his attention to Macron and the Paris climate change accord.

Trump, who questions the science behind global warming, pulled the US out of that landmark global accord in 2017, saying it was costing American jobs.

“And you know what else I stopped? The Paris environmental accord,” Trump said.

“And I like Prime Minister Macron a lot. But I said ‘how’s it going over there? How is the accord doing?’ They’re not doing too good,” Trump said.

“I saved you trillions of dollars, nobody else would have done it. I said it was a disaster, they basically wanted to take our wealth.”

Trump used to enjoy a sort of bromance relationship with Macron but their ties have cooled over the years and featured a so-called handshake war — in which Macron mimicked the US president’s penchant for shaking hard and not letting go.

At a bilateral meeting in 2019 in France, Macron gripped Trump’s hand so long and firmly he left a white thumbprint on it.

Source: AFP