Fresh off the campaign trail and negotiating Middle East peace agreements Thursday night, President Trump thoroughly exposed former Vice President Joe Biden’s political double-speak during the final debate between the candidates in Nashville. Despite calling a lid on the entire week to allegedly prepare, Biden was far outmatched.
With just 13 days to go until November 3, a calmer, tempered and in control President Trump masterfully took on Biden by forcing him into a number of unpopular policy corners.
Right out of the gate, both candidates were asked by the moderator to lay out their plans to combat Wuhan coronavirus. President Trump, a self-described cheerleader for America, provided optimism, hope and a way forward to combat the disease while reopening the economy. He also detailed the severe and horrific consequences of lockdowns, a reality severely underreported by the media.
“We're opening up our country. We've learned and studied and understand the disease, which we didn't know at the beginning,” Trump said. “I say we're learning to live with it. We have no choice. 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.”
“We have to recover. We can't close up our nation, we have to open our schools, and we can't close up our nation, or you're not going to have a nation,” he continued. "We have a vaccine that's coming, it's ready. It's going to be announced within weeks, and it's going to be delivered. We have Operation Warp Speed, which is the military is going to distribute the vaccine."
Biden offered fear, a bureaucratic nightmare of government mandates and vowed to shut down the country again.
“We're about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter,” Biden said, shaking a mask in his hand. “Do not open bars and do not open gymnasiums. Do not open until you get this under control, under more control. But when you do open, give the people the capacity to be able to open and have the capacity to do it safely.”
Americans want a balanced approach to handling the pandemic, not another shut down.
On healthcare, Trump pushed Biden to repeat President Obama’s lie about “liking your health insurance and keeping it,” while failing to dodge landmines on socialized medicine demands from the far Left.
But the biggest moment that will impact remaining voters in crucial swing states came near the end of the night on energy policy. With limited time and a small slice of voters left to convince, Biden buried himself by admitting he wants to “phase out” the entire fossil fuel industry.
“We need other industries to transition to get to, ultimately, a complete zero emissions by 2025. What I will do with fracking over time is make sure that we can capture the emissions from the fracking. Capture the emissions from gas. We can do that and we can do that by investing money into, it's a transition to that,” Biden said.
He made it worse by daring President Trump to post video of him saying he wants to ban fracking. President Trump obliged and tweeted it to 87 million followers.
In recent weeks, Biden has been losing significant ground in Pennsylvania and last night, he just vowed to eliminate the jobs of thousands of Americans who live there.
And finally, President Trump drove home the overarching point of the night: Joe Biden is a corrupt, do-nothing politician, but he is an outsider who has and will continue to get things done for the American people.
“You were vice president. You keep talking about all these things you're going to do and you're going to do this. But you were there just a short time ago and you guys did nothing,” Trump said. “You know, Joe, I ran because of you. I ran because of Barack Obama, because you did a poor job. If I said you did a good job, I would have never run. I would've never run. I ran because of you. I'm looking at you now; you're a politician. I ran because of you.”
