The final 2020 presidential debate

This piece was originally published August 27, and has been lightly updated.

During the final presidential debate, both candidates were asked how they would combat climate change and support job growth. President Donald Trump offered few specifics, merely saying that that, “We have the Trillion Trees program. We have so many different programs. I do love the environment.”

The second and final 2020 presidential debate between Joe Biden and President Donald Trump was certainly a lot more civil that the first. But a CNN fact-check after the debate found there was still a lot of untruths — particularly from the president.

“President Trump was better behaved tonight, but he lied more,” CNN fact checker Daniel Dale told anchor Wolf Blitzer, later noting that Trump’s first sentence was inaccurate. “This was just a bombardment of dishonesty that we’ve heard before at his campaign rallies, about subjects big and small.”

President Donald Trump has a bone to pick with windmills — he says it’s because they kill a lot of birds. But if it’s the bird population he’s really worried about, his true enemy is cats, which are the true enemies of the birds.

During the climate change section of Thursday’s final presidential debate between President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, the issue of clean energy came up and, eventually, the discussion turned to wind. Biden touted electric, solar, and wind energy as fast-growing industries and pushed back against the president’s past claims that noise from windmills causes cancer (there’s no evidence for this). And then we were off to the races re: windmills.

The final presidential debate is in the books, and the first polls are in — and they suggest Donald Trump didn’t get the shakeup he desperately needed.

Now, as usual, I will remind you to take these polls with some grains of salt. They are limited to people who actually watched the debate rather than the broader electorate, and they don’t take into account the spin wars and media narratives that will help shape voters’ understanding of what happened.

By Vox’s count, there were 96 interruptions and interjections in Thursday’s final presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee.

President Donald Trump was responsible for 65 percent of the interruptions — substantive moments where he spoke over another person, stopping the conversational flow — and former Vice President Joe Biden was responsible for 67 percent of the shorter interjections, chiming in with comments like “not true” or “oh, come on.” (More on how we counted below).

The final debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, held on Thursday evening, was the first one of the entire campaign that actually felt like a debate.

The first debate was a chaotic disaster due to Trump’s constant interruptions; the second one didn’t happen because Trump refused to agree to debate virtually while he had Covid-19 (the candidates held dueling town halls instead). This time around, better moderation and the handy use of a mute button allowed both candidates to express their thoughts — leading to a mix of actual substantive policy exchanges and less-than-coherent mudslinging about families and personal finance.

Fox News’s initial reaction to the final debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden was surprise: Surprise at how well moderator Kristen Welker did, and surprise at how well the candidates matched up.

Chris Wallace, the anchor of Fox News Sunday who moderated the infamous interruption-filled first debate, immediately said how “jealous” he was with how tamely tonight’s events proceeded.

Though he lied a lot, President Donald Trump generally came across better during Thursday’s second and final presidential debate with Joe Biden than he did during the first, when his constant interruptions and unhinged behavior rendered it unwatchable (and ultimately hurt him in the polls). But one moment revealed the inhumanity at the core of his politics.

On the topic of immigration, Trump defended his administration’s strict immigrant detention policies by claiming that only people with “the lowest IQ” follow the law by showing up for court proceedings.

During Thursday night’s presidential debate, President Donald Trump was asked to answer for the 545 migrant children who may never see their parents again after his administration separated them from their families at the US-Mexico border.

But the president instead took the opportunity to air his xenophobic views of immigrants, falsely claiming that the affected children were brought to the US by smugglers known as “coyotes,” cartels, gangs and “lots of bad people.” He also argued that the Obama administration built the cages that his administration later used to take the children into immigration custody, and claimed that the children were treated well while in those facilities.

Donald Trump would like you to believe that he has done more for the Black community in America than anyone except for Abraham Lincoln — but, to clarify, he is not actually Abraham Lincoln.

During the final presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday, the president apparently got tripped up by a joke made by his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden. In a section discussing race in America and how Black families have to give “the talk” to their children about interactions with the police, President Trump started off with what is often his typical defense. He pointed to Biden’s role in the 1994 crime bill, touted his own record on race, and claimed he’s the biggest gift to Black people in America since Lincoln.

During the presidential debate Thursday, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden argued that their opponent accepted money from foreign sources. But only one candidate is actually known to have done that: Donald Trump.

While president, Trump has continued to own his business, and through his hotels, clubs, and golf courses he’s accepted millions of dollars in payment from foreign entities. Indeed, Trump made more than $200 million in income from his foreign business interests since 2016, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Natural gas fracking has been getting a lot of air time on the campaign trail in recent weeks.

In the final presidential debate, President Donald Trump once again claimed that former Vice President Joe Biden would ban fracking. “I have never said I oppose fracking,” Biden replied. “What I will do with fracking over time is make sure we can capture the emissions from fracking, capture the emissions from gas.”

Three weeks, a White House coronavirus outbreak, and a set of dueling town halls later, President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden are headed back to the debate stage for their second and final debate of the 2020 presidential election.

The debate will take place on Thursday, October 22, at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, starting at 9 pm ET, and will run for 90 minutes. (That’s 8-9:30 pm CT, 7-8:30 pm MT, and 6-7:30 pm PT). Kristen Welker, a journalist at NBC News, will moderate.

Typically, debates present an opportunity for political candidates who are losing their races to make up ground on the frontrunner. President Donald Trump, however, is not your typical come-from-behind candidate.

That’s why in the lead-up to Thursday’s second and final debate between Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Trump has preemptively attacked moderator Kristen Welker of NBC almost every day. That’s why his campaign has made such a big fuss over the debate topics and the addition of a mute button aimed at making the debate more watchable than the first one was thanks to Trump’s antics. And that’s why they’ve seemed to be spinning a bad showing before the debate has even happened.

Ahead of Thursday’s final presidential debate, President Donald Trump is pushing for foreign policy to dominate his conversation with Democratic candidate Joe Biden. The reason — beyond not having to answer for his disastrous handling of the coronavirus, the economy, race relations, and climate change — is that it’s arguably the one area where Trump can make the strongest case for his four years in office.

Among the successes Trump can point to are that he oversaw the military defeat of ISIS; ordered the assassinations of top Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; and brokered historic normalization of relations deals between Israel and two Arab nations just two years after moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.