Vice President Mike Pence defended President Trump’s decision to suspend travel from China in an attempt to stop the spread of the coronavirus at the vice-presidential debate on Wednesday, October 2, 2020. “That decision alone from President Trump bought us valuable time,” he said.
The debate, in Salt Lake City, begins at 9 p.m. New York time. The small partitions -- each one will extend just above the two politicians’ heads, according to pictures of the stage -- were a matter of controversy before the debate.
Harris’s team, concerned about Pence’s exposure to Trump while he was infected, asked the Commission on Presidential Debates for the additional safety measure. But Pence’s team pushed back.
Trump’s illness has changed the character of the race, with the president effectively sidelined in the closing weeks of the campaign as he fights the very disease whose spread has imperiled his presidency. Recent public opinion polls show him falling even further behind his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, both nationally and in battleground states -- with no sign of a sympathy vote for his illness.
The partitions will be a visual aid for one of Harris’s key lines of attack: that the Trump administration has mishandled the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, which killed more than 210,000 Americans before sickening the president and more than a dozen of his associates this month.
Pence chaired the White House coronavirus task force that engineered the government’s response to the pandemic.
Pence will likely lean into the Trump campaign’s effort to portray Biden and Harris as Trojan horses for the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party and warn of a turn toward socialism. He is also expected to make the case that Trump is a better steward of the economy, the one issue where -- at least until recently -- the president still narrowly polled ahead of Biden.
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