WASHINGTON: Republican U.S. President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, clashed in a contentious, chaotic presidential election debate, trying for 90 minutes to convince American voters that the other one was unfit to lead the United States for the next four years, VOA has reported.

They argued over the world-leading coronavirus death toll of 205,000 in the U.S., the integrity and honesty of the November 3 vote, Trump’s nomination of conservative jurist Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, fractured racial relations in the U.S., environmental policies and more, the report said.

Trump disputed a New York Times report this week that he only paid $750 in federal income taxes in both 2016, when he first ran for the presidency, and in 2017, his first year in office. Trump said he paid “millions of dollars,” but Biden claimed Trump “pays less tax than the average schoolteacher.”

Mostly they insulted each other with cutting barbs, name-calling and personal attacks, according to the VOA.

“He’s the worst president America has ever had,” Biden contended as he and Trump stood at podiums on a debate stage at a university in the Midwestern city of Cleveland, Ohio.

Trump, seeking a second four-year term after his upset 2016 victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton, retorted to Biden, “I’ve done more things in 47 months [as president] than you’ve done in 47 years” as a U.S. senator and vice president under former President Barack Obama.

Trump argued that if Biden takes over as president next January, “you will have a depression like no one has ever seen” because of the Democrat’s plan to raise taxes on corporate earnings from 21% to 28% and on individuals who make more than $400,000 a year.

(VOA)