BIDEN: This HEROES Act has been sitting there. And look at what's happening. When I was in charge of the recovery act with $800 billion, I was able to get $145 billion to local and communities that have to balance their budgets. [If they cannot], then they have to fire firefighters, teachers, first responders, law enforcement officers, so they could keep their cities and counties running. They have not done a thing for them. And Mitch McConnell said, "Let them go bankrupt. Let them go bankrupt."
BIDEN: Abraham Lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents we've had in modern history, he pours fuel on every single racist fire. Started off his campaign coming down the escalator saying he's getting rid of those Mexican rapists, he's banned Muslims because they're Muslims. About the Proud Boys, he said, "I tell them to stand down and stand ready." Come on, this guy has a dog whistle about as big as a foghorn.
BIDEN: This is a guy who said, "The problem with the crime bill, there's not enough people in jail." This is a guy who in the Central Park Five, five innocent black kids, he continued to push for the death penalty. He commuted 20 people's sentences. We commuted over 1,000 sentences. The federal prison system was reduced by 38,000 people under our administration. I'm offering $20 billion to states to change their laws to eliminate minimum mandatories and set up drug courts. No one should be going to jail because they have a drug problem.
BIDEN: By the way, all you teachers out there, "not that many of you are going to die, so don't worry about it. So don't worry about it." Come on!
TRUMP: We are energy independent for first time. We don't need all of these countries that we had to fight war over because we needed their energy. We are energy independent. I know more about wind than you do. It's extremely expensive. Kills all the birds. It's very intermittent. It's got a lot of problems and they happen to make the windmills in both Germany and China and the fumes coming up, if you're a believer in carbon emission, the fumes coming up to make these massive windmills is more than anything that we're talking about with natural gas, which is very clear.
BIDEN: Find me a scientist who says that.
BIDEN: I never said I oppose fracking. What I will do with fracking over time is make sure that we can capture the emissions from the fracking. We can do that by investing money in doing it, but it's a transition. I said, no fracking and/or oil on federal land.
TRUMP: Would he close down the oil industry?
BIDEN: Well if you let me finish the statement, because it has to be replaced by renewable energy over time, over time, and I'd stopped giving to the oil industry, I'd stop giving them federal subsidies. You won't get federal subsidies to the gas, oh, excuse me to solar and wind.
BIDEN: Climate change is an existential threat to humanity. I was able to get environmental organizations--as well as people worried about jobs--to support my climate plan. Because it will create millions of new good paying jobs, we're going to take 4 million buildings and 2 million homes and retrofit them so they don't leak as much energy, saving hundreds of millions of barrels of oil in the process and creating significant number of jobs.
BIDEN: What has he done? He's legitimized North Korea. He's talked about his good buddy, who's a thug. He talks about how we're better off. The Korean Peninsula should be a nuclear free zone.
TRUMP: They left me a mess. North Korea was a mess, and it was a very dangerous period in my first three months before we worked things out a little bit. . They left us a mess, and Obama would be, I think, the first to say it, was the single biggest problem he thought that our country.
TRUMP: First of all, China is paying. They're paying billions and billions of dollars. I just gave $28 billion to our farmers.
BIDEN: Taxpayer's money. Didn't come from China.
TRUMP: No, no. You know who the taxpayer is? It's called China. China pays $28 billion, and you know what they did to pay it, Joe? They devalued their currency and they also paid up, and you know got the money? Our farmers, our great farmers, because they were targeted. You never charged them anything. Also, I charged them 25% on dumped steel, because they were killing our steel industry. We were not going to have a steel industry. And now we have a steel industry.
BIDEN: There's a reason why he's bringing up all this malarkey. He doesn't want to talk about the substantive issues. [Based on] the decisions you're making, middle-class families like I grew up in Scranton, they're in trouble.
BIDEN: If we just wore these masks, we can save a 100,000 lives. The president has no comprehensive plan. I will make sure we have a plan.
Q: [to TRUMP]: You said a vaccine will be coming within weeks. Is that a guarantee?
TRUMP: No, it's not a guarantee, but it will be by the end of the year.
Q: Your own officials say, "It could take well into 2021 at the earliest for enough Americans to get vaccinated." Is your timeline realistic?
TRUMP: No, I think my timeline is going to be more accurate. I don't know that they're counting on the military the way I do, but we have our generals lined up [for distribution] logistics. As soon as we have the vaccine and we expect to have a 100 million vials.
BIDEN: This is the same fellow who told you, "Don't worry, we're going to end this by the summer." We're about to go into a dark winter, and he has no clear plan.
TRUMP: 99.9% of young people recover. We have to recover. We can't close up our nation. We have to open our schools and we can't close up our nation, or you're not going to have a nation.
BIDEN: He says that we're learning to live with it. People are learning to die with it. And you say, "I take no responsibility."
TRUMP: I take full responsibility. It's not my fault that it came here. It's China's fault. They kept it from going into the rest of China for the most part, but they didn't keep it from coming out to the world, including Europe and ourselves. But when I closed, he said, "This is a terrible thing, you're xenophobic." I think [Biden] called me racist even, because I was closing it to China. Now he says I should have closed it earlier.
Q: What do you say to Americans who are fearful that the cost of shutdowns?
BIDEN: What I would say is, I'm going to shut down the virus, not the country.
TRUMP: 2.2 million people were expected to die. We closed up the greatest economy in the world in order to fight this horrible disease that came from China. The mortality rate is down 85%. There was a spike in Florida and it's now gone. There was a very big spike in Arizona. It's now gone. We have a vaccine that's coming. We have Operation Warp Speed, which is the military is going to distribute the vaccine. I had it and I got better.
BIDEN: He did virtually nothing. And then he gets out of the hospital and he talks about, "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.
TRUMP: I didn't say "over soon." I say we're learning to live with it. We have no choice. We can't lock ourselves up in a basement like Joe does. As the president couldn't do that and go away for a year and a half until it disappears. I can't do that.
BIDEN: If you're going to open a business, have social distancing. If you have a restaurant, you need to have plexiglass dividers. You need to take testing rapidly. You need to be able to trace. You need to be able to provide all the resources that are needed to do this. That is going to make sure that we're going to open safely.
TRUMP: We have to open our country. We can't keep this country closed. This is a massive country with a massive economy. People are losing their jobs. They're committing suicide. There's depression, alcohol, drugs at a level that nobody's ever seen before. He'll close down the country if one person in our bureaucracy says we should close it down.
BIDEN: Not one single person with private insurance would lose their insurance under my plan, nor did they under ObamaCare. They did not lose their insurance unless they chose they wanted to go to something else.
TRUMP: I terminated the individual mandate. That is the worst part of ObamaCare. The individual mandate where you have to pay a fortune for the privilege of not having to pay for bad health insurance. Now, it's in court, because ObamaCare is no good. Then I made a decision, run it as well as you can. They ran it. Premiums are down. Here's the problem. No matter how well you run it, it's no good. What we'd like to do is terminate it.
TRUMP: Children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels. We now have as strong a border as we've ever had. And we let people in, but they have to come in legally.
Q: But how will you reunite these kids with their families, Mr. President?
TRUMP: They used to say I built the cages, and then it was determined they were built in 2014. That was [Biden]. They built cages.
Q: Do you have a plan to reunite the kids with their families?
TRUMP: Yes. We're working on it. We're trying very hard. But a lot of these kids come out without the parents. They are so well taken care of. They're in facilities that were so clean.
Q: But some of them haven't been reunited with their families.
TRUMP: But just ask one question. Who built the cages?
TRUMP: I was a businessman doing business. The bank account you're referring to, which is, everybody knows about it, it's listed, the bank account was in 2013. That's what it was. It was opened. It was closed in 2015. I was thinking about doing a deal in China, like millions of other people, I was thinking about it & I decided I'm not going to do it, didn't like it, I decided not to do it, had an account open & I closed it.
BIDEN: I'd make China play by the international rules, not like he has done. When I met with Xi and when I was still vice-president, he said we're setting up air identification zones in the South China Sea. You can't fly through them. I said we're going to fly through them. We just flew B-52, B-1 bombers through it. We're not going to pay attention. They have to play by the rules.
BIDEN: Every single person, when he was going through his impeachment, said I did my job impeccably, not one single solitary thing was out of line. The guy who got in trouble in Ukraine was this guy trying to bribe the Ukrainian government to say something negative about me, which they would not do and did not do because it never ever, ever happened.
TRUMP: I was put through a phony witch hunt for three years. It started before I got elected. They spied on my campaign. Let me just say this, Mueller and 18 angry Democrats and FBI agents all over the place spent $48 million. They went through everything I had, including my tax returns, and they found absolutely no collusion and nothing wrong.
TRUMP: We have to make our country successful, as it was prior to the plague. Now we're rebuilding it and we're doing record numbers, 11.4 million jobs in a short period of time. We had the best Black unemployment numbers in the history of our country. Hispanic, women, Asian, people with diplomas, with no diplomas, MIT graduates; number one in the class, everybody had the best numbers. And you know what? The other side wanted to get together. They wanted to unify. Success is going to bring us together. I'm cutting taxes, and he wants to raise everybody's taxes and he wants to put new regulations on everything. He will kill it. If he gets in, you will have a Depression.
BIDEN: I represent all of you, whether you voted for me or against me. We're going to choose science over fiction. We're going to choose hope over fear. What is on the ballot is the character of this country. Decency, honor, respect.
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The above quotations are from Third presidential debate at Belmont University, October 22, 2020 hosted by the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates. Click here for main summary page. Click here for a profile of Donald Trump. Click here for Donald Trump on all issues.
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