Advertisement

Presidential debates: Will the second debate go ahead and when is the next one?

President and Mr Biden trade blows during first debate (Getty Images)
President and Mr Biden trade blows during first debate (Getty Images)

For now, it seems likely we will see Donald Trump and Joe Biden fight at least one more debate – but when and in what format is still unclear.

Now cancelled, the next contest had been pencilled in to take place on 15 October at Florida's Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami.

But in a bombshell announcement a week earlier, Mr Trump – who is now returning to the campaign trail after his bout with the coronavirus – declared that he would not be taking part after organisers announced that the encounter would be held online.

During a phone-in with Fox Business, Mr Trump said: "I'm not going to do a virtual debate. No, I'm not going to waste my time on a virtual debate ... [Sitting] behind a computer is not what debating is all about."

The Commission on Presidential Debates made the decision to take the debate online after the president announced the coronavirus infection from which he is still recovering.

"They're trying to protect Biden," he argued, dismissing an NBC town hall where Mr Biden answered voters questions as "meant for a child".

Team Trump later declared that the president would hold a campaign rally instead of competing in the debate. Mr Biden, meanwhile, said he plans to hold a televised town hall event on the same night, his campaign declaring that it will be broadcast on ABC and moderated by George Stephanopoulos.

The Trump campaign said it agreed to an already-scheduled debate on 22 October provided it be held in person, and called for another on 29 October. The Biden campaign refused that later date, saying it was too close to election day.

But then came another announcement from the Trump campaign: the president does, in fact, want a rematch with Mr Biden before then.

Citing advice from Mr Trump’s doctor that the president no longer needed treatment for Covid-19, campaign manager Bill Stepien declared that “there is therefore no medical reason why the Commission on Presidential Debates should shift the debate to a virtual setting, postpone it, or otherwise alter it in any way” – and accused the commission of “protecting” Mr Biden from an in-person encounter on 15 October.

And even after the commission cancelled the debate altogether citing Mr Trump’s health problems, the president’s team have continued to suggest it go ahead in person. “They've said he's no longer a risk for transmission so it would be nice if the commission would get the debate back on the schedule," said White House spokesperson Brian Morgenstern.

At this stage, then, the fate of the upcoming debate or debates seems to rest on whether the organisers and Mr Biden bend to the president's will and agree to hold an event in the flesh. Mike Pence and Kamala Harris’s relatively calm encounter saw them seated behind plexiglass as a precaution, but whether the president would accede to something similar is yet to be seen.

At their first debate, Mr Biden and Mr Trump went toe-to-toe on the coronavirus pandemic, race relations, the president's recently revealed tax records and the economy, in what has been described as the most chaotic and bad-tempered debate in living memory.

Mr Trump repeatedly interrupted Mr Biden, making it difficult for the Democrat to get a word in during the fiery exchanges, leading some commentators to suggest there was no real winner in the contest – though despite what Mr Trump has since claimed, the on-the-night polls showed he had fallen well short.

With Associated Press

Read more

The VP debate showed us who Mike Pence and Kamala Harris really are

We can do the second presidential debate without Trump

SNL fans want Jeff Goldblum to play fly that landed on Mike Pence