Trump and Biden meet tonight in Cleveland for their first of three debates -- a socially distanced affair in which the candidates won't shake hands. Fox News host Chris Wallace is the moderator.
The audience, at about 70, will be limited compared with previous debates, and everyone attending the event at Case Western Reserve University will undergo testing for Covid-19 and follow other health safety protocols.
The debate is set for 9 p.m. Eastern time, and will last 90 minutes without any commercial breaks. The topics for the debate are "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.
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Each segment will last about 15 minutes, and the candidates will have two minutes to respond after the moderator opens each segment with a question. Wallace will then use the rest of the time in the segment to facilitate further discussion on the topic, according to the commission.
Here are five things to watch in the debate:
$750 in taxes
On the eve of the debate, Biden got a sizable cudgel to use against Trump.
The New York Times reported on Sunday night that Trump hadpaid no income taxes in 10 of the 15 years beginning in 2000. And in both the year he won the presidency and his first year in the White House, Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes, an impossibly low rate.
Biden's campaign quickly jumped on the news, producing a digital ad highlighting how teachers, firefighters and nurses all pay, on average, significantly more in federal income taxes than Trump. And top Democratic operatives believe Biden will use the revelation to attack the President during the debate.
The story is a gift for Biden, whose campaign has been running on populist rhetoric that casts Trump as out of touch with average Americans. The strategy is highlighted by Biden's recent attempts to frame the campaign as "Scranton vs. Park Avenue," touting himself as the candidate in touch with working Americans because he was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and attended state schools and Trump as out of touch because he is most associated with wealthy midtown Manhattan.
Trump has dismissed the focus on his taxes by both denying The New York Times report, despite the newspaper having the tax returns, and arguing that most people don't care about the issue. That tactic will be challenged on Tuesday.
Biden's low bar
Trump and his campaign spent months and millions of advertising dollars casting Biden as senile -- seizing on every verbal stumble, often with misleading or out-of-context videos -- in an effort to plant doubt in voters' minds that the 77-year-old former vice president is up for the job, while falsely suggesting that Biden was trying to duck the debates.
The reality, though, is that Biden is a capable debater who held his own in Democratic primary battles as well as the vice presidential debates of 2008 and 2012.
