Biden, Trump snipe from road and rails after debate chaos
PITTSBURGH (AP) — President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden kept up their debate-stage sniping from the road and the rails on Wednesday, fighting for working-class voters in the Midwest while both parties — and the debate commission, too — sought to deal with the most chaotic presidential faceoff in memory.
The debate raised fresh questions about Trump’s continued reluctance to condemn white supremacy, his questioning the legitimacy of the election and his unwillingness to respect debate ground rules his campaign had agreed to. Some Democrats called on Biden to skip the next two debates.
Biden’s campaign confirmed he would participate in the subsequent meetings, as did Trump’s. But the Commission on Presidential Debates promised “additional structure … to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues.”
Less than 12 hours after the wild debate concluded, Biden called Trump’s behavior in the prime-time confrontation a “a national embarrassment.” The Democratic challenger launched his most aggressive day on the campaign trail all year, with eight stops planned for a train tour that began mid-morning in Cleveland and ended 10 hours later in western Pennsylvania. Trump proclaimed his debate performance a smashing success during a Wednesday evening rally in Duluth, Minnesota.
“Last night I did what the corrupt media has refused to do,” Trump said. “I held Joe Biden accountable for his 47 years of failure.”
Biden balanced criticism of Trump with a call for national unity.
“If elected, I’m not going to be a Democratic president. I’m going to be an American president,” Biden said at the Cleveland train station. As his tour moved into Pittsburgh, he accused Trump of never accepting responsibility for his mistakes and promised, “I’ll always tell you the truth. And when I’m wrong, I’ll say so.”
While some Republicans feared that Trump’s debate performance was too aggressive, he gave himself high marks as he left Washington. He had spent much of the day assailing Biden and debate moderator Chris Wallace on social media.
“If you ever became president you have to deal with some of the toughest people in the world,” Trump said at his Duluth rally. “And Chris Wallace is very very easy by comparison.”
The first of
three scheduled debates between Trump and Biden deteriorated into bitter
taunts and chaos Tuesday night as the Republican president repeatedly
interrupted his Democratic rival with angry jabs that overshadowed any substantive discussion of the crises threatening the nation.
Trump
and Biden frequently talked over each other, with Trump interrupting,
nearly shouting, so often that Biden eventually snapped at him, “Will
you shut up, man?”
Trump refused anew to say whether he would accept the results of the election,
calling on his supporters to scrutinize voting procedures at the polls —
something that critics warned could easily cross into voter
intimidation.
Trump also refused at the debate to condemn white supremacists who have supported him, telling one such group known as the Proud Boys
to “stand back and stand by.” Asked directly on Wednesday if he
welcomed white supremacist support, he first said only that he favored
law enforcement but when the questioner persisted, he said he had always
denounced “any form of any of that.”
On Capitol Hill, Republicans showed signs of debate hangover, with few willing to defend Trump’s performance.
Utah Sen. Mitt Romney called the debate “an embarrassment” and said Trump “of course” should have condemned white supremacists.
“I
think he misspoke,” said South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, the only Black
Republican senator. “I think he should correct it. If he doesn’t correct
it, I guess he didn’t misspeak.”
Trump did not say he misspoke when asked on Wednesday but claimed he did not know who the Proud Boys were.
“They have to stand down — everybody. Whatever group you’re talking about, let law enforcement do the work,” he said.
The
president’s brash debate posture may have appealed to his most
passionate supporters, but it was unclear whether the embattled
incumbent helped expand his coalition or won over any persuadable
voters, particularly white educated women and independents who have been
turned off in part by the same tone and tenor the president displayed
on the debate stage.
With just five weeks until Election Day and
voting already underway in several key states, Biden holds a lead in
national polls and in many battlegrounds. Polling has been remarkably
stable for months, despite the historic crises that have battered the
country this year, including the coronavirus pandemic that has killed
more than 200,000 Americans and a reckoning over race and police.
While
Biden distanced himself from some of the priorities of his party’s left
wing — and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — on Tuesday night, there was no
sign that he had turned off his party’s grassroots activists.
Sanders
said Wednesday on ABC’s “The View” that it was “terribly important”
that Biden be elected, and campaign digital director Rob Flaherty said
Biden had raised $3.8 million at the debate’s end in his best hour of
online fundraising
Increasingly, the candidates have trained
their attention on working-class voters in the Midwest, a group that
helped give Trump his victory four years ago and will again play a
critical role this fall.
Biden and his wife, Jill, traveled
through Ohio and Pennsylvania aboard a nine-car train bearing a campaign
logo, a throwback to Biden’s days as a senator when he commuted most
days via Amtrak from his family’s home in Delaware to Capitol Hill.
He
drew several hundred masked supporters to one afternoon stop in
Greensburg, Pennsylvania, his largest crowd since suspending traditional
events back in March, according to his campaign.
Biden wrapped
up his train trip with a nighttime drive-in rally in Johnstown,
Pennsylvania’s poorest town. The campaign blocked off the surrounding
street and erected a stage and giant screen. About 50 cars were arrayed
around the area, with most attendees standing near their vehicles or
sitting on the hoods and roofs. They stood close together in small
groups, but nearly everyone wore masks.
Biden called Trump a
“self-entitled, self-serving president who thinks everything is about
him. He thinks if he just yells louder and louder, throws out lie after
lie, he’ll get his way.”
Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat, said
Trump’s behavior in the debate was exactly why suburban voters across
the Midwest and beyond have turned against him.
“I feel like he took an ax to one of the great American rituals we have in this country,” Ryan said.
Trump,
meanwhile, attended an afternoon fundraiser in Shorewood, Minnesota, a
suburb to the west of Minneapolis, before appearing at an evening
campaign rally in Duluth on the shores of Lake Superior.
While
Trump carried Ohio and Pennsylvania four years ago, he narrowly lost
Minnesota, one of the few states he hopes to flip from blue to red this
fall. That likely depends on finding more votes in rural, conservative
areas and limiting his losses in the state’s urban and suburban areas.
To
that end, the White House announced shortly before Trump’s rally in
Duluth Wednesday evening that the president had signed an executive
order declaring a national emergency in the mining industry, a move that
could resonate with voters in northeast Minnesota’s Iron Range.
The
order notes U.S. manufacturing’s “undue reliance” on China for critical
minerals and calls for the Interior Department to use the Defense
Production Act to fund mineral processing in order to protect U.S.
national security.
“If Joe gets in, they’ll shut down the Iron Range forever,” Trump told rallygoers in Duluth. “I will always protect the state of Minnesota.”
Peoples reported from New York and Freking from Duluth, Minn. Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro, Brian Slodysko, Laurie Kellman, Darlene Superville and Alexandra Jaffe in Washington contributed to this report.