Debate Teacher Reacts: Donald Trump vs. Joe Biden

How many of you at home are worried and rolling around in bed tonight wondering what in God's name you're going to do if you get sick?

Did he just say those of you that are rolling around in bed at night?

Bernie Sanders wants it. The Democrats want it. You're going to have socialized medicine just like you want it with fracking. By the way, so far, I respect very much the.

Way you're handling this. It's like the lounge singer that starts to play that favorite song of yours, but then halfway through the song, he stops and he starts talking to the audience about random things.

By the end of it, you're like, what happened to the song? Welcome back to another Debate Teacher Reacts. My name is Nate Zala. I'm the president of a Christian apologetics ministry called The Clear Lens, where our focus is to transform your Christian faith into effective communication.

Based on your requests, tonight, I'll be stepping away from apologetics debates, and I'll be looking at Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. Like you, I've tracked the debates. I tracked the first debate where it basically devolved into an interruption fest, and then President Trump got sick, and then he got better.

Now, when everything is on the line, we are in the final debate, and the question is, who was the better debater? Was it Donald Trump or was it Joe Biden? On this episode, I'll be looking at the main highlights from the debate according to CNBC.

Let's get.

Right into it. We're about to go into a dark winter, a dark winter, and he has no clear plan, and there's no prospect that there's going to be a vaccine available for the majority of the American people before the middle of next year.

President Trump, your reaction? He says you have.

No plan. I don't think we're going to have a dark winter at all. We're opening up our country. We've learned and studied and understand the disease, which we didn't at the beginning. When I closed and banned China from coming in, heavily infected, and then ultimately Europe, but China was in January.

Months later, he was saying I was xenophobic. I did it too soon. Now he's saying, oh, I should have. I should have, you know, moved quicker, but he didn't move quicker. He was months behind me, many months behind me, and frankly, he ran the H1N1 swine flu, and it was a total disaster, far less lethal, but it was a total disaster.

Had that had this kind of numbers, 700 ,000 people would be dead right now, but it was a far less lethal disease. Look, his own person who ran that for him, who, as you know, was his chief of staff, said it was catastrophic.

It was horrible. We didn't know what we were doing. Now he comes up and he tells us how to do this. Also, everything that he said about the way every single move that he said we should make, that's what we've done.

We've done all of it, but he was way behind us.

So, the way to answer this question in a debate is to say, okay, he says I have no plan. Here is my plan. Step one, step two, step three, four, five, six, you know, whatever it is, and here is how we've accomplished those plans in the last seven months or however long COVID has been going on.

That's the clearest best way to answer the claim that there is no plan, and then you let your opponent struggle, you know, with either trying to poke holes in the efficacy or the legitimacy of the plan that you've laid out, or you let them default back to their talking point to the claim, which is that there is no plan, and see how far that gets them with the audience and with the judge.

That's the way to do it. To make new claims about your opponent is to not answer your opponent, and that does damage in a debate. The closest thing that Trump probably did to push back on Biden here is when he said everything he says, my administration has already done.

My response is he is xenophobic, but not because he shut down access from China, and he did it late after 40 countries had already done that. In addition to that, what he did, he made sure that we had 44 people that were in there, in China, trying to get to Wuhan to determine what exactly the source was.

What did the president say in January? He said, no, he said this is, he's being transparent. The president of China is being transparent. We owe him a debt of gratitude. We owe him a debt of gratitude.

And then what happened was we started talking about using the Defense Act to make sure we go out and get whatever is needed out there to protect people. And again, I go back to this. He had nothing. He did virtually nothing.

And then he gets out of the hospital and he talks about where this is. Oh, don't worry. It's all going to be over soon. Come on. There's not another serious scientist in the world who thinks it's going to be over soon.

This is a missed opportunity.

On both Trump and Biden's part. Biden should have said he still didn't give us his plan. And so therefore he has not refuted my claim. Instead, he follows Trump down this rabbit hole, xenophobia, praising the Chinese leader.

And then Biden says a couple of things that have like zero context. What is the thing about 44 people? I don't know. And the Defense Act, you have to remember the audience and the potential judge are probably not policy wonks.

They don't have every single piece of information that you have as a debater. And so it's on you to explain things in a way that a non-specialist would understand. You have to provide context and you have to lay a framework to give you the advantage in the debate.

A framework is where you narrate the debate in a particular manner to the judge and to the audience. You identify out loud certain key issues in the debate so the judge knows how to determine a winner.

And if you do it well, the judge will adopt your framework and then think the way that you want them to think. I would say Trump is a better storyteller than Biden, but neither of these guys are providing a great.

Framework. He was there for 47 years. He didn't do it. He was now there as vice president for eight years, and it's not like it was 25 years ago. It was three and three quarters. It was just a little while ago, right?

Less than four years ago. He didn't do anything. He didn't do it. He wants socialized medicine, and it's not that he wants it. His vice president, I mean, she is more liberal than Bernie Sanders and wants it even more.

Bernie Sanders wants it. The Democrats want it. You're going to have socialized medicine, just like you went with fracking. We're not going to have fracking. We're going to stop fracking. We're going to stop fracking.

Then he goes to Pennsylvania after he gets a nomination, where he got very lucky to get it. And he goes to Pennsylvania and he says, oh, we're going to have fracking. And you never asked that question.

And by the way, so far, I respect very much the way you're handling this, I have to say. But somebody should ask the question. He goes for a year.

There will be no fracking. We do have a number. We have a number of topics. No, no, but that's a big question. We're going to get to a number of topics.

It's the same thing with socialized medicine. I have to respond.

Somewhere in there, there's a claim that Trump wants everybody to track, and it's probably that, you know, Joe Biden wants socialized medicine. Now, normally in a debate, you make the claim and then you support it with some good evidence.

The greatest scenario is that you cite evidence that is reputable to support your claim. Here, Trump makes the claim, but then he goes on to talk about Kamala and Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Party and then fracking.

Uh, that is not the best way to go about it. And then he starts talking to the moderator about her performance in this debate. I mean, I'm from Vegas, you know, it's like that lounge singer who starts to play your favorite song that you want to hear.

But then halfway through, he stops to talk to the audience about just random things and then wanders off. You know, by the end of it, you're like, what happened to my song?

Vice President, your response, please.

My response is people deserve to have affordable health care, period, period, period, period. And the Biden care proposal will in fact provide for that affordable health care, lower premiums. What we're going to do is going to cost some money.

It's going to cost over $750 billion over 10 years to do it. And they're going to have lower premiums. You can buy into the better plans, the cheaper plans, lower your premiums, deal with unexpected billing and have your drug prices dropped significantly.

He keeps talking about it. He hasn't done a thing for anybody on health care.

That is not an awful response. Biden has already denied that his plan is socialized medicine, whether you agree with that or not. And so strategically speaking, when he falls back on his talking points, he's going to provide affordable health care.

It's going to cost some money. He's addressing the claim that Trump made about his plan being socialist, but he's doing it by describing his plan. That's kind of the long way, the roundabout, implicit way to sort of address this challenge.

Now, the ideal answer should have been Biden says, you know what? My plan is not socialized medicine. And then he defines socialized medicine, gives a definition of it, and then talks about how his plan does not fit into that definition and even throw in some evidence and citations to support himself.

Instead, he again, he just falls back on his talking points about his plan, but also doesn't really explain how exactly his plan is not socialized medicine either. So I don't know. This one's a squeaker.

I'd say.

Slight advantage to Biden on this one. There has been nobody tougher on Russia than Donald Trump. And I'll tell you, they were so bad. They took over the submarine port. You remember that very well. During your term, during you and Barack Obama, they took over a big part of what should have been Ukraine.

You handed it to him, but you were getting a lot of money from Russia. They were paying you a lot of money and they probably still are. But now with what came out today, it's even worse. All of the emails, the emails, the horrible emails of the kind of money that you were raking in you and your family.

And Joe, you were vice president when some of this was happening and it should have never happened. And I think you owe an explanation to the American people. Why is it somebody just had a news conference a little while ago who was essentially supposed to work with you and your family.

But what he said was damning. And regardless of me, I think you have to clean it up and talk to the American people. Maybe you can do it right now.

Some of this is actually a reference to evidence that is in the headlines. These are things that are happening outside the debate structure. And this this is what debate opponents are supposed to do. They're supposed to bring in and cite evidence.

The problem is they're supposed to cite evidence. And what Trump is doing is he's vaguely referencing these things. You really have to know what he's talking about in order to get the point that he's trying to make.

You know, somebody made a press conference who used to work with you like you could. It's just there's so many ways to do this better. But this is what we got. But so he's laid the claims. Biden is corrupt.

Let's find out.

I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life. We learned that this president.

Paid 50 times. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is where Biden needs to debunk the claims that Donald Trump has just made about him. Take each of those claims one at a time. What was it? The director of national intelligence did say that Russia is trying to hurt Trump.

OK, Biden needs to say something about that. There have been emails that have come out to appear to reveal corruption on Joe Biden's side. Biden needs to say something about that to simply say it didn't happen.

I didn't take a penny. That's not a refutation. That is just another claim.

Tax in China has a secret bank account with China, does business in China, and in fact, is talking about me taking money. I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever, ever. Number one.

Number two, this is a president. I have released all of my tax returns. Twenty two years. Go look at them. Twenty two years of my tax return. You have not released a single solitary year of your tax return.

What are you hiding? Why are you unwilling? The foreign countries are paying you a lot. Russia's paying you a lot. China's paying a lot on your hotels and all your businesses all around the country, all around the world.

And China's building a new road to a new golf course you have overseas. So what's going on here? Why don't release your tax return or stop talking about corruption? President Trump,.

You're OK. That's starting to get there. But how does how does releasing your tax return sufficiently undercut what Trump said? Think about that. Biden does not explain, you know, and when and so you can say I release my tax returns.

That's the beginning of a great point that you could potentially be making. But to stop short, you have not explained how releasing your tax returns is actually a sufficient rejoinder. And when you leave claims out there that like, again, what Trump has laid out there in terms of claims of corruption, when you leave them out there, you don't address those specific claims, how those claims are false.

You ultimately concede those points in a debate. It's not good enough to just say it's not true. You have to come back with some good, hard evidence to support yourself, especially when your opponent has referenced evidence in his claims against you, even if it's kind of a vague.

Reference. First of all, I called my accountants, underwrote it. I'm going to release them as soon as we can. I want to do it. And it'll show how successful, how great this company is. But much more importantly than that, people were saying seven hundred and fifty dollars.

I asked them a week ago, I said, what did I pay? They said, sir, you prepaid tens of millions of dollars. I prepaid my tax tens over the last number of years, tens of millions of dollars. I prepaid. Because at some point they think it's an estimate.

They think I may have to pay tax. So I already prepaid it. Nobody told me that. Nobody told you that. Excuse me. And it wasn't written whenever they write this. They keep talking about seven hundred and fifty dollars, which I think is a filing fee.

But let me just tell you, I prepaid millions and millions of dollars in taxes. Number one. Number two, I don't make money from China. You do. I don't make money from Ukraine. You do. I don't make money from Russia.

You made three and a half million dollars, Joe. And your son gave you they even have a statement that we have to give 10 percent to the big man. You're the big man, I think. I don't know. Maybe you're not, but you're the big man.

I think your son said we have to give 10 percent to the big man.

Joe, what's that all about? It's terrible. Again, another missed opportunity by Trump. All Trump had to say was Biden hasn't explained how anything I said about his corruption is false. But Trump takes the bait and follows Biden down the rabbit hole about tax returns.

And he damages himself because saying I want to release them, but my accountants told me not to is not the best response that you could give in this venue. This exchange was a series of mistakes on both sides.

But Biden lost this particular point because he refused to deal with any of the claims of corruption against him. Based on the highlights, I would say that Trump got the upper hand on Biden, particularly in that one area of the question of corruption.

Biden refused to defend himself when it came to those claims of corruption. He made a mistake there. He really should have defended himself. Now, maybe Biden fared better in the fuller debate. I've left the full debate in the description below.

Go ahead and click that link and you tell me, who do you think won the debate? Was it Donald Trump or was it Joe Biden? Let me know in the comments below. I'd love to get your thoughts. Thanks very much for watching this particular episode, and we'll do it again real soon.