It shouldn’t be hard to condemn white supremacists. For Trump, though, it appears to be bad politics.
Asked to reject people so motivated by racism that they form groups devoted to it, Trump failed to do so. He seemed like he might do it.
“Stand back and stand by,” he said after asking whom he was supposed to condemn. But instead of attacking white supremacists, he launched a rhetorical assault on “antifa.” Antifa is not a white supremacist group.
It’s hard to figure why Trump would go to such lengths to avoid criticizing white supremacists — other than a need for their votes.
But the moment recalls Trump’s refusal to denounce KKK leader David Duke during the 2016 campaign and his determination that there were “very fine people” on both sides of a white supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
Fact check: Did Biden call Black Americans ‘superpredators?’
“Look at the crime bill, 1994, where you called them ‘superpredators,’ African Americans are ‘superpredators,” Trump said. “And they’ve never forgotten that.”
This is mostly false. It was Hillary Clinton, then the first lady, who used the term “superpredator” to advocate for the 1994 crime bill that Biden co-wrote more than 30 years ago. Biden did warn of “predators” in a floor speech in support of his bill, however.
Fact check: Biden says Trump ‘paid a total of $750 in taxes’
Biden, during a prolonged exchange over the amount of federal taxes Trump has paid, said, “This guy paid a total of $750 in taxes.”
Trump retorted by saying, “I’ve paid millions of dollars in taxes, millions of dollars of income tax.”
Biden’s claim accurately reflects new reporting by The New York Times for the years 2016 and 2017.
Trump’s federal income tax bill was just $750 dollars the year he won the presidency, The New York Times reported after obtaining and reviewing more than two decades of the president’s tax information. During his first year in office, his bill remained $750. The information does not include his returns from 2018 and 2019.
According to The Times, Trump had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years prior to 2016, because he reported losing much more money than he made during that time. NBC News has not seen or verified any of the documents reported by The Times.
Fact check: Does Trump support cutting police funding?
“His budget calls for a $400 million cut in local law enforcement assistance,” Biden said Tuesday night, reiterating his own opposition to defunding the police.
This is mostly true, though Biden actually undercounts the proposed cuts. While Trump has opposed calls from some Democrats to reduce police funding in response to the death of George Floyd and other Black Americans over the summer, the Trump administration’s budget proposal does indeed call for big cuts for several police programs. In the Justice Department’s budget plan for fiscal year 2021, the Trump administration requested $1.51 billion for over 50 programs funding state and local law enforcement. That number cuts about $515 million from previous fiscal years, in part by slashing budgets for a number of Obama-era programs, including initiatives that provided body cameras for police officers.
Trump portrays Biden as both too tough and too weak on crime
During an exchange on racism in America, Trump essentially argued that Biden was too tough on crime and is too weak on crime.
First, Trump condemned Biden for authoring the 1994 crime bill while, in almost the same breath, saying Biden wouldn’t even say the words “law enforcement.”
Biden later said he stands for law and order if it is applied equally regardless of race or creed.
Trump balks at denouncing white supremacy
In another heated exchange, Trump declined to denounce the far-right and white supremacists and told the Proud Boys — a violent, far-right group — to “stand back and stand by.”
Trump instead tries to pivot to antifa being a more serious problem. Biden points out that the FBI has said that the far-right is the biggest threat to the U.S. in terms of domestic violence.
His own FBI director said earlier this month that antifa is an ideology, not a group.
Trump and Biden struggle to stay on topic … with 15 minutes left
We’re still updating live here.
Fact check: Trump says he took advantage of a tax code Biden could have fixed
During an acrimonious exchange, the president defended himself for his reportedly low tax bill by suggesting that if Biden wanted Trump to have not taken advantage of the tax code, then he should have taken action to fix it during his tenure in the U.S. Senate.
“The tax code that put him in a position that he pays less tax than a school teacher is because of — he says he’s smart because he can take advantage of the tax code. And he does take advantage of the tax code,” Biden said.
Trump replied, “But why didn’t you do it over the last 25 years? Why didn’t you do it over the last 25 years?”
In reality, despite being in Senate for 36 years, Biden was never technically in a position to re-write the federal tax code.
While in the Senate from 1973 to 2009, Biden was chair of the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees and had no direct hand in writing tax laws. That’s the job of the Senate Finance Committee.
Trump, on the other hand, takes advantage of several loopholes to avoid paying taxes, including some for which he personally lobbied.
Among them is a law passed in 1986 to limit investors not actively involved in a business from taking deductions and attributing losses against their income. An “at-risk” rule was also added to prevent a taxpayer from deducting losses greater than their investment. But Congress largely exempted real estate developers, like Trump.
At the same time his Atlantic City investments were suffering, Trump appeared before Congress in 1991 to advocate for “tax shelters” that would “incentivize” “investment in real estate” to help boost the economy during the recession.
Biden calls Trump racist
“He’s the racist,” Biden said in a back and forth over Trump’s decision earlier this year to expand a ban on racial sensitivity training to federal contractors.
Trump said he banned the training “because it’s racist” and taught anti-American sentiments, making an explicit appeal to the white identity politics that have become a hallmark of his political career.
Fact check: Trump’s attacks on Hunter Biden for foreign business dealings
Trump and his allies have attacked the former vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, for his foreign business dealings.
On Tuesday, Trump echoed one of the biggest claims from the recent Senate GOP Homeland Security Committee’s “conflicts of interest investigation” into Hunter Biden — Trump claimed on the debate stage that “the mayor of Moscow’s wife gave your son $3.5 million. What did he do to deserve it?”
The report, authored by Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, claimed that Elena Baturina, the former wife of the late former mayor of Moscow, wired $3.5 million to a firm associated with Hunter Biden.
Hunter Biden’s legal team told NBC News that Biden had “no interest” in that firm that received the money, so “the claim he was paid $3.5 million was false.”
And on the debate stage, the former vice president said the claim had been “totally discredited.”
The Senate GOP-led “conflicts of interest” report largely resurfaced outstanding allegations, specifically as to Hunter Biden’s role on the board of a Ukrainian energy company as well as what the committee called “questionable financial transactions between Hunter Biden and his associates and foreign individuals.”
Largely focusing on those optics, the report doesn’t say that Hunter Biden’s work changed U.S. policy. Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates slammed the report as an “attack founded on a long-disproven hardcore right-wing conspiracy theory” that Johnson “has now explicitly stated he is attempting to exploit to bail out Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.”
Read the GOP’s summary of the report here and the Biden campaign’s criticism of the probe here.
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