Power Up: Trump and Biden just made their 2020 closing arguments. It may not move the needle.

This is an even tougher challenge as a record number of Americans already made up their minds and cast their vote before Thursday’s final debate in Nashville. By last night, the U.S. hit 100 percent of the total 2016 early vote count with 47.1 million people already voting. 

“Supporters of both candidates were cheered by what they saw during the 90 minutes at Belmont University in Nashville. But if, at worst, the debate was judged a draw, that alone would be less than the president needed politically,” Dan Balz writes. 

The newest attack line – which Biden parried: The president, as previously telegraphed, spent much of his airtime propagating unsubstantiated allegations about Biden’s son Hunter, and accused the Biden family without evidence of enriching themselves by accepting money from foreign countries like Ukraine and China. 

Biden denied Trump’s accusations, saying he has “not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life” and said it could be proved because he released 22 years of his tax returns. Biden used the opportunity to pivot to the topic of the president’s own refusal to release his tax returns. “What are you hiding?” Biden asked Trump. “Release your tax returns,” he added, “or stop talking about corruption.”

• Canned heat: After some back and forth over Trump’s attacks on the Biden family, the former vice president looked at the camera and delivered this message: “There’s a reason why he’s bringing up all this malarkey,” Biden said. “It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family, and your family’s hurting badly. If you’re a middle-class family, you’re getting hurt badly right now. You’re sitting at the kitchen table this morning deciding, Well, we can’t get new tires, they’re bald, because we have to wait another month or so. Or are we going to be able to pay the mortgage? Who’s going to tell her she can’t go back to community college? They’re the decisions you’re making.”
• Trump then mocked Biden for employing “a typical political statement.” “That’s why I got elected,” he said. “‘Let’s get off the subject of China; let’s talk around sitting around the table.’ Come on, Joe, you can do better.”

This was a common theme of the night as Trump tried to paint himself as the outsider and Biden as a politician entrenched in the ways of Washington: That’s a harder challenge since Trump has now been in office for the past four years. Trump hit Biden for putting “tens of thousands of Black men, mostly, in jail” through his involvement in crafting the 1994 crime bill. 

• Biden took the wind out of this somewhat by saying it a ”mistake” that he’s been trying to change since then. “That’s why I’ve been arguing that, in fact, we should not send anyone to jail for a pure drug offense,” Biden said. “They should be going into treatment across the board. That’s what we should be spending money on.”
• “See, it’s all talk, no action with these politicians,” Trump snapped. “Why didn’t he get it done? [You say] ‘that’s what I’m going to do when I become president’ – you were vice president along with Obama as your President, your leader for eight years. Why didn’t you get it done? You had eight years to get it done.” 

Trump did not use the time to offer any new details about a long-promised health care proposal, which could remain a vulnerability as the lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act brought by conservative states and supported by the Trump administration will get a hearing at the Supreme Court one week after the election. “What I would like to do is a much better healthcare – much better,” Trump said, “We’ll always protect people with preexisting. So I’d like to terminate Obamacare, come up with a brand new beautiful healthcare.” But he gave no details about how he would do this. 

Biden outlined his own plan to add a public option to the Affordable Care Act which he notably referred to as “Bidencare.” Biden noted that most of Biden’s former Democratic opponents in the primary supported “Medicare for All,” but he does not. “He’s a very confused guy,” Biden said of Trump. “He thinks he’s running against somebody else. He’s running against Joe Biden. I beat all those other people because I disagreed with them.”

• That did not stop Trump from falsely claiming that Biden does support “socialized medicine.” Trump also incorrectly claimed that 180 million people would lose their healthcare under Biden’s plan: “Trump has made this claim repeatedly, and NBC News has fact checked it repeatedly. This claim is false. It conflates Biden’s plan with those of other Democrats pushing ‘Medicare for All,'” NBC News’s Aaron Edelman and Ben Kamisar report.

There was one exchange between the candidates over race that may only add to Trump’s challenges winning over Black voters: After Trump was asked to explain why he called “Black Lives Matter” a symbol of hate, the president “claimed that all he knew about the movement early on was that protesters chanted ‘pigs in a blanket’ and ‘fry them like bacon,’ which was an isolated incident and condemned by BLM leaders,” Colby Itkowitz reports. “Pressed on what he would say to Americans concerned about his rhetoric, the president said, ‘I don’t, I mean, I don’t know what to say.’” 

Trump also claimed that he was “the least racist person in this room,” and said he’s done more for any president since possibly Abraham Lincoln for African Americans. 

• “Trump is never one to be modest, but this kind of bragging is simply ridiculous,” our fact-checking colleagues Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly write. “Trump appears to base this assertion on pre-coronavirus employment figures and some relatively minor actions taken during his administration… Trump has taken few actions specifically on behalf of African Americans.”
• ?: Biden shot back by mocking the president’s exaggerated claim: “Abraham Lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history…He pours fuel on every single racist fire.”

When asked to speak directly to Black and Brown Americans who worry about racial discrimination including by police, Trump briefly said “yes I do” understand why these parents fear for their children – before pivoting to attack Biden and tout his own work on criminal justice and prison sentencing reform. 

Biden’s answer dove deeper: “I never had to tell my daughter, if she’s pulled over for a traffic stop, make sure she puts both hands on top of the wheel and don’t reach for the glove box because someone may shoot you. But a black parent, no matter how wealthy or how poor they are, has to teach their child, when you’re walking down the street, don’t have a hoodie on when you go across the street. Making sure that you in fact, if you get pulled over, [say] ‘Yes, sir; no, sir,’ and have hands on top of the wheel.” 

• “Because you are in fact the victim whether you’re a person making $300,000 – a child of a $300,000 a year person or someone who’s on food stamps. The fact of the matter is, there is institutional racism in America,” he continued.

Oil in the water: Biden had his own moment that could prove a vulnerability on the campaign trail as Trump and conservatives immediately jumped on his statement that he would “transition” away from oil in favor of renewable energy. “I would transition away from the oil industry, yes,” Biden said in final moments of the debate. “The oil industry pollutes, significantly. It has to be replaced by renewable energy over time.” 

The president called it a “big statement” and claimed that Biden was going to “destroy the oil industry… Will you remember that Texas? Pennsylvania? Oklahoma? Ohio?” 

• Biden’s plan calls for a big transition over the coming decades: “The Biden campaign’s climate plan calls for the U.S. to have net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. And he repeated his pledge to end federal subsidies for the oil and gas industry. However, Biden’s plan does not call for a ban on climate-damaging fossil fuels, focusing instead on technologies that can capture pollution from oil and other sources,” according to the Associated Press’s Kathleen Ronayne and Ellen Knickmeyer. 
• After the debate, Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager, also emphasized Biden’s reference to subsidies, according to the New York Times’s Glenn Thrush and Katie Glueck. “He was very clear in his answer, he was saying that he was going to eliminate oil subsidies,” she said in a call with reporters.
• “I think, you know, writ large, the idea of transitioning off of oil is nothing new,” she added, invoking George W. Bush’s remarks on the subject in 2006.

Some vulnerable Democrats distanced themselves from the remark. Rep. Kendra Horn (D-Okla.):

This was a big moment for the environment and climate change in a presidential debate. “Recalling his own childhood in Delaware growing up near oil and gas refineries, Biden argued that the government needed to do more to curb pollution from fossil fuels. ‘The fact is, those front-line communities, it doesn’t matter what you’re paying them, it’s how you keep them safe,’ he said,” Brady Dennis, Juliet Eilperin and Steven Mufson report.

• ? Trump argued people of color shouldn’t be worried about pollution as a result of living closer to fossil fuel production: “The families that we’re talking about are employed heavily and they’re making a lot of money, more money than they’ve ever made,” he said in response to a question from Welker.

Trump tried to dodge his record on child separations under his zero-tolerance immigration policy: Moderator Kristen Welker asked Trump how he would ensure that more than 500 kids whose parents the United States still can’t locate after they were separated at the border would be able to see each other once again. “The question prompted one of the most heated exchanges between Trump and his opponent, Biden — and spurred a blizzard of at-times contradictory excuses and redirections from the president,” Philip Bump writes. 

Trump first insisted that the “children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people” including in cartels to get into the country. “This is a standard bit of rhetoric for Trump but one, as Biden was quick to note, that is untrue,” Philip writes. “There are sporadic examples of people arriving at the border with children who aren’t their own, though those are usually more distant family members (aunts and uncles, for example) or family friends. Nearly all of the kids at issue were, instead, traveling with their parents, which was entirely the point of the policy.” 

Then the president sought to pin blame on the Obama administration: “Let me just tell you,” Trump replied. “They [the Obama administration] built cages.” “It’s true that, in 2014, a surge in children arriving at the border prompted the Obama-Biden administration to build systems to house them while they were processed,” Philip notes. “That surge, in fact, spurred a massive backlash on the right, providing political energy that Trump leveraged the next year in announcing his presidential bid. But Trump’s conflation of ‘building the cages’ with ‘using them to house kids taken from their parents’ is obviously ludicrous, like excusing kidnapping a dozen people in your basement by arguing that you didn’t build your house.” 

• Reality check: Our colleague Nick Miroff wrote a long series of tweets saying what really happened during the 2014 surge of children arriving at the border. It’s worth a read.

Biden briefly threw Obama under the bus: Discussing the Obama administration’s failure to pass comprehensive immigration reform – it was blocked by the Republican-controlled House after passing a Democratic-controlled Senate – Biden said they moved too slowly on the issue.

Criticism on Obama’s immigration record is nothing new: President Obama was famously tagged as the “deporter-in-chief” a label he bristled over. After the legislation did not pass, Obama created the DACA program to protect Dreamers.

• Biden stressed his term would be different: “I’ll be President of the United States, not Vice President of the United States. And the fact is I’ve made it very clear within 100 days I’m going to send to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people, and all of those so-called Dreamers, those DACA kids, they’re going to be immediately certified again to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship.

Trump also “said the only undocumented immigrants who show up for court hearings are those ‘with the lowest IQ,’” NBC’s Dartunorro Clark reports. He was referring to the practice of catch and release, which allows migrants to stay in the country while they wait for hearings on their immigration cases. Reality check: 

Closing arguments: The final statements of the debate were perhaps a microcosm of each candidate’s overall campaigns. Welker asked each what they would say to Americans who didn’t vote for them in their inaugural address. 

“The responses encapsulated perhaps the most crucial difference between the two presidential campaigns, one that has only become more apparent as the race has transpired: Mr. Trump’s re-election bid has largely revolved around attacking Democrats and Mr. Biden; Mr. Biden, on the other hand, has repeatedly articulated — at least in broad strokes — how the country would be different under his leadership,” the New York Times’s Reid Epstein and Sydney Ember report. 

• Trump’s last words: “Trump, who has done little to articulate a second-term agenda during any of his interviews over the past several months, used his answer to defend his record on the coronavirus crisis and attack [Biden].” 
• “I am cutting taxes, and he wants to raise everybody’s taxes, and he wants to put new regulations on everything,” Trump said. “He will kill it. If he gets in, you will have a depression the likes of which you have never seen. Your 401(k)s will go to hell and it will be a very, very sad day for this country.”
• Biden meanwhile, reminded voters that “character is on the ballot” and “offered a more traditional closing statement,” per the Times: “He recited an uplifting vision for what the United States would look like under a Biden administration and delineated clear goals for what he would do as president.” 
• “I am an American president,” Biden said he would say. “I represent all of you, whether you voted for me or against me. And I’m going to make sure that you’re represented. I’m going to give you hope… Decency, honor, respect, treating people with dignity, making that sure that everyone has an even chance. And I’m going to make sure you get that. You have not been getting it the last four years.”

JUST THE FACTS: “Trump yet again broke the fact-check meter at the second presidential debate, while Biden made relatively few gaffes,” our fact checking colleagues report.

Here more highlights from the 25 claims they checked: Almost all of them were made by Trump. 

• Trump, to defend his handling of the pandemic, kicked off the night with a claim that 2.2 million people were “expected to die” from the coronavirus. “Trump loves to use this statistic. But it’s incredibly misleading,” they write. “Trump is citing a possible death figure that was a worst-case scenario produced by Imperial College London, which assumed that 81 percent of the population became infected ­— 268 million people — and that 0.9 percent of them would die. It did so by also assuming people took no actions against the coronavirus — nobody avoided crowded elevators, wore masks, washed their hands more often, or bought gloves or hand sanitizer — which the study acknowledged was unrealistic: ‘It is highly likely that there would be significant spontaneous change in population behavior even in the absence of government‐mandated interventions.’”
• And Trump falsely accused Biden of calling Black people “super predators.” “Trump keeps mixing up his opponents. Hillary Clinton used the term ‘super predator,’” per our colleagues.  
• China is not paying for trade relief: Trump continues to mislead about who bares the cost of “tariffs — essentially a tax — are generally paid by importers, such as U.S. companies, who in turn pass on most or all of the costs to consumers or producers, who may use Chinese materials in their products,” our colleagues write. The federal government has paid farmers $28 billion for lost business to China, but Beijing is not footing this bill, the taxpayers are. 
• And, yes, Biden is from Scranton, Penn.: Trump made a bizarre suggestion that Biden is barely connected to city he so often mentions. Biden was born in Scranton in 1942 and lived there until he was 10.  And former vice president has family roots in the area dating back to 1851.
• Biden’s claim that Trump caused the deficit with China to go up is wrong: “The goods-and-services trade deficit with China increased in the beginning of Trump’s presidency, but it has fallen during his trade war and the slowing worldwide economy, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The trade deficit grew from $337 billion in 2017 to $380 billion in 2018, but it fell to $308 billion in 2019. In the first six months of 2020, the trade deficit was $130 billion, compared with $164 billion in 2019.” 

CNN’s fact checker in chief:

WELKER CRUSHES IT: “In a high-stakes debut overseeing a presidential debate — taking charge of a candidate matchup that proved a bucking bronco for the previous moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News — Welker, an NBC anchor and correspondent, managed to restore order to a quadrennial institution that some believed could not be tamed,” the Times’s Michael M. Grynbaum reports.

A reminder that her turn as moderator was historic:

Meanwhile, Wallace was lamented what might have been:

FOX NEWS TRANSLATOR: “During the final presidential debate, Trump made reference to ‘the laptop from hell,’ ‘AOC plus three’ and ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ — yes, said three times in a row. The material was very familiar to — and maybe only familiar to — regular viewers of Fox News opinion hosts such as Sean Hannity,” Elahe Izadi and Jeremy Barr report.

• Key quote: “I feel like he almost was speaking the language of Fox prime time,” Chuck Todd, host of “Meet The Press,” said on NBC after the debate. “If you watch a lot of Fox prime time, you understand what he’s saying. If you don’t you have no idea.”

REPUBLICANS GRUMBLE AMID STIMULUS TALKS: “Senate Republicans are growing increasingly frustrated with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as he makes what they see as unacceptable compromises in his quest for a stimulus deal with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi,” Erica Werner and Jeff Stein report.

• What’s on the table: “Mnuchin has committed to a top-line figure of around $1.9 trillion, much too high for many Senate Republicans to swallow. That includes at least $300 billion for state and local aid, also a non-starter for many in the GOP. The treasury secretary is also giving ground on multiple specific policy issues, such as reducing payments that Republicans wanted to go to farmers so that some of the money would go for food boxes instead.”
• Key quote: “He negotiates harder with his own side than he does with her. Folks over here are sick of it,” a Senate GOP aide told our colleagues of Mnuchin.

BARRETT MOVES CLOSER TO CONFIRMATION: “The vote was 12 to 0, with no Democrats present to officially register their objections,” Seung Min Kim and Paulina Firozi report of the Senate Judiciary Committee vote that Democrats boycotted.

• What’s next: “Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is expected to take procedural steps [today] to bring her confirmation to the floor, with Barrett being confirmed by Monday evening … But before then, Democrats are expected to throw up more procedural roadblocks — as they have been doing all week — and launch numerous floor speeches to frame what they say is the imminent threat Barrett poses to the future of abortion rights, gay rights and the fate of the Affordable Care Act.” 

SOMETHING SHAKEN, WHEN LIFE IS TOO STIRRING: President Gerald Ford and James Bond shared a love for the martini. Ford even toasted one after an assassination attempt. Our resident White House drink specials expert Mary Beth Albright will show you how make it just like he did.