WATCH: Presidential Debate
(CNN)President Donald Trump heads into Tuesday’s first presidential debate trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in the polls and on defense about his handling of a pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans and led some 30 million people to file unemployment claims.
The first debate in Cleveland will be hosted by Fox News host Chris Wallace starting at 9 p.m. ET and will span 90 minutes with no commercial breaks. The debate has been divided into six topics: “The Trump and Biden Records,” “The Supreme Court,” “Covid-19,” “The Economy,” “Race and Violence in our Cities” and “The Integrity of the Election,” according to the Commission on Presidential Debates.
Trump must deliver a performance that will dramatically alter the race at a time when voters are looking for him to explain the stunning new reporting from The New York Times that he paid no federal income taxes in 10 out of 15 years starting in 2000.
The President enters this first of three presidential debates in a far more vulnerable position than in his 2016 match-ups with Hillary Clinton, when he had no presidential record to defend and attempted to rattle the former secretary of state with frequent interruptions and by reeling off one-liners, including the quip in one debate that if he had been in the White House “you’d be in jail.” Many voters have already made up their minds about Trump, giving him poor marks for his handling of both the pandemic and the tension over race relations and police violence this year.
