Trump, Biden set to face off on TV

President Donald Trump will feature in a televised town hall on NBC News today, the network said, setting up a direct scheduling clash with rival Joe Biden who had already planned his own version.

The two were originally meant to have been meeting for their second debate this evening. Instead, they will be simultaneously, but separately, talking to voters in TV studios -- NBC for Trump and ABC for Biden.

Trump will be in Miami, the network said, while Biden, who had already booked his appearance last week, will be in Philadelphia.

Their scheduled debate had also been designed as a town hall where the two candidates would have fielded questions from voters, but this was upended after Trump contracted the coronavirus.

Debate organizers said they wanted to switch the format to a virtual appearance, for safety reasons, and Trump refused, forcing cancellation of the event.

NBC News said yesterday it had received a statement from the clinical director at the National Institutes of Health and lead infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci that they had "a high degree of confidence" that Trump is now "not shedding infectious virus."

Trump and the NBC host will be socially distanced at the outdoor venue and the audience will wear safety masks, NBC said.

Biden has been frequently testing for coronavirus and reporting negative results since Trump's illness.

BATTLEGROUND STATES

Trump told a Pennsylvania crowd Tuesday that he's fighting "Marxists" and "lunatics" while Biden accused him in Florida, another key electoral state, of having treated Americans as "expendable" during the Covid-19 pandemic.

With only 21 days until the November 3 election and badly down in the polls, Trump fired every lurid exaggeration about the Democrats and insult about Biden's mental state that he has in his arsenal.

He said Biden was "choking like a dog" during their televised debate, called him mentally "shot," and claimed the Democratic frontrunner was the pawn of communists.

"He is handing control to the socialists and Marxists and left-wing extremists," Trump told the large, raucous crowd in Johnstown. "He can't stand up to the lunatics running his party."

Going even further on his long-running narrative that 77-year-old Biden is too frail for the presidency, Trump, 74, tweeted a crudely faked picture purporting to show Biden in a wheelchair, surrounded by elderly wheelchair-bound people in a room.

"Biden for president," the caption said, with "p" struck out to change the word to "resident."

The mocking presentation of the infirm elderly was somewhat surprising given the president's apparently growing problems in retaining the loyalty of seniors, an important electoral force.

'CRUSH THE VIRUS'

In Johnstown, Trump reprised the outsider image that he developed for his surprise 2016 victory, telling the crowd that he was combating a "selfish and corrupt political class" back in Washington.

But even as he delighted the crowd with his greatest rhetorical hits, Trump once more showed that despite his poor poll showing he has no intention of trying to reach across to Democrats in a deeply divided nation.

"This will end up being a large-scale version of Venezuela if they get in," he said, painting a nightmarish anti-immigrant vision of a country where Democrats give free hospital care to "illegal aliens" while "decimating Medicare and destroying your Social Security."

Hours earlier, Biden was in Florida holding one of the much smaller events typical of his low-key campaign, zooming in on Trump's handling of the pandemic.

Biden courted the elderly, telling an event at a retirement center in Pembroke Pines, north of Miami, that Trump has "never been focused on you."

"His handling of this pandemic has been erratic, just like his presidency has been," he said.

Biden recalled that Trump once remarked that the virus -- which has taken a particularly brutal toll among the elderly -- "infects virtually nobody."

"You are expendable, you are forgettable, you are virtually nobody. That's how he sees this," said Biden, who, unlike Trump, wore a face mask throughout his remarks.

Trump was also in Florida on Monday night for his first rally since recovering from his bout with Covid-19. This week he will be heading out to Iowa and North Carolina, then back to Florida and Georgia.

Iowa and Georgia were two states which Trump won handily in 2016 but polls show tight races in both three weeks ahead of the November 3 election.