(NEXSTAR) – President Donald Trump again struggled to find the words to denounce white supremacy in a brief exchange during Tuesday night’s debate in Cleveland.
Mr. Trump famously said there were “very fine people on both sides” after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 that saw open anti-Semitism on the streets and a violent vehicle attack on pedestrian counter protesters that left one person dead.
During a 15 minute segment on race relations during the first presidential debate Tuesday, Wallace tackled the topic of racism asking Trump, “Are you willing tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down?”
Trump responded “sure” before asking which groups Wallace wanted him to condemn.
When the Proud Boys were mentioned, Trump avoided directly answering the question instead saying, “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right wing problem. This is a left wing problem.”
Trump also pitched himself as the ideal candidate for Black voters mocking Biden by saying, “This man, this man is a savior of African Americans? This man has done virtually nothing.”
The president mentioned a crime bill passed in 1994 that Biden helped write and get passed that, among other things, increased the penalties for certain drug offenses.
Trump said “I’m letting people out of jail now,” and without further supporting evidence that Biden had treated the Black community “about as bad as anybody in this country.”
Trump and Biden arrived in Cleveland hoping the debate would energize their bases of support, even as they competed for the slim slice of undecided voters who could decide the election. It has been generations since two men asked to lead a nation facing such tumult, with Americans both fearful and impatient about the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 of their fellow citizens and cost millions of jobs.
The vitriol exploded into the open when Biden attacked Trump’s handling of the pandemic, saying that the president “waited and waited” to act when the virus reached America’s shores and “still doesn’t have a plan.” Biden told Trump to “get out of your bunker and get out of the sand trap” and go in his golf cart to the Oval Office to come up with a bipartisan plan to save people.
Trump snarled a response, declaring that “I’ll tell you Joe, you could never have done the job that we did. You don’t have it in your blood.”
“I know how to do the job,” was the solemn response from Biden, who served eight years as Barack Obama’s vice president.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
2020 ELECTION COVERAGE
LATEST UPDATES
- President Donald Trump granted a full pardon to former White House aide Steve Bannon as part of a wave of pardons and commutations he issued during his final hours in office.
- Calls are getting louder for the 25th Amendment to be invoked in order to remove President Donald Trump from office. This comes after his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol Wednesday.
- Three Republican Virginia delegates signed a letter asking Vice President Mike Pence to nullify the commonwealth's certified election results.
- All eyes are on Washington as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives will come together Wednesday to certify the 2020 Presidential Election results.
- Wednesday's congressional joint session to count electoral votes has taken on added importance this year as congressional Republicans allied with President Donald Trump are pledging to try and undo Democrat Joe Biden’s victory and subvert the will of the American people.
- President Donald Trump put forth a dizzying array of fuzzy accounting and outright false claims in an extraordinary phone call to Georgia's secretary of state seeking a reversal of his election defeat, fabricating a slew of votes that he said should've been counted in his favor.
- WASHINGTON (AP) — Wednesday's congressional joint session to count electoral votes has taken on added importance this year as congressional Republicans allied with President Donald Trump are pledging to try and undo Democrat Joe Biden’s victory and subvert the will of the American people. The Republicans — a dozen senators and many more House members […]
- Vice President Mike Pence filed Thursday to dismiss Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert’s lawsuit against him. Pence’s legal team stated that the vice president is not the proper defendant in the case.