WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he wants the next debate against his Democratic challenger Joe Biden to go ahead despite his bout of coronavirus.
“I am looking forward to the debate on the evening of Thursday, October 15th in Miami. It will be great!” Trump tweeted.
The debate, which will be in a town hall format with audience members putting questions to the candidates, has been thrown into doubt after Trump’s hospitalisation last Friday with the coronavirus.
He was discharged on Monday and declared himself on Tuesday via Twitter to be “feeling great!”
If Trump’s health does hold up and the debate goes ahead it will mark one of the last set-piece events before the November 3 election where Trump has a chance to try and turn around his seeming slide to defeat.
Polls consistently show him behind Biden and their first debate on September 29, which immediately descended into an ugly shouting match, shows no sign of having improved Trump’s standing with voters.
A third and final debate is scheduled for October 22 in Nashville.
On Wednesday, Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence hold their sole debate in Utah.
Pence has tested negative for coronavirus, but given Trump’s illness and a widespread outbreak in the White House, they will be separated by a plexiglass barrier.
Meanwhile, the Republican has returned to the White House boasting he vanquished the disease that upended the country this year — and, by extension, that he is still capable of vanquishing his grim odds on election day November 3.
“Maybe I’m immune,” he mused on the grand South Portico balcony late Monday after demonstratively taking off the mask which he’d worn back from hospital.
He spent three nights at the Walter Reed military hospital for emergency treatment and is still being administered an aggressive cocktail of therapeutic drugs, as well being under constant monitoring in case of relapse. His doctor says he may not be “entirely out of the woods.”
Yet the way Trump, 74, tells it, COVID-19 was simply no match for him.
“Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it. You’re going to beat it,” he urged Americans in his homecoming speech.
Tuesday on Twitter he returned to one of his oldest lines of argument used to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic, saying it was comparable to the ordinary flu and “we have learned to live with it.”
For a president whose brand centres on self-confidence, the entire hospital discharge is clearly stage-managed to convince voters that he has the near-superhuman strength to overcome not only COVID-19 but Biden’s steadily solidifying lead in the polls.
The latest CNN poll published on Tuesday gave Biden a national advantage of 57 per cent to 41 per cent among likely voters.
Fifty-two per cent of those polled said they have a positive impression of Biden while only 39 per cent said they have a positive view of Trump, a historically unpopular leader. Among women, the numbers were cataclysmic for the Republican: 32 per cent support to Biden’s 66 per cent.
Biden, 77, was due to give a speech on the “battle for the soul of the nation” in Gettysburg, the Pennsylvania battlefield where the Civil War turned decisively in favour of Abraham Lincoln’s north in 1863.
His running mate Kamala Harris, meanwhile, was set to debate Vice President Mike Pence in Utah on Wednesday, with a plexiglass barrier for coronavirus prevention between the two. — AFP
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