The second and final debate between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden will take place Thursday (Oct. 22) at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. It will begin at 9 p.m. EDT and is scheduled for 90 uninterrupted minutes, just like the first debate.
The debate will air live here on AJC.com, as well as on major and cable networks including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, C-SPAN, MSNBC and CNN. C-SPAN already has a YouTube link live for its stream of the debate, scheduled to start an hour before the debate itself.
NBC’s Kristen Welker will moderate.
The Commission on Presidential Debates announced late Monday that Trump and Biden will have their microphones turned off during parts of the final presidential debate on Thursday.
Each candidate will have an uninterrupted two minutes to speak at the beginning of each of the six 15-minute segments of the debate. Both candidates' mics will then be turned on for “a period of open discussion” in the segment’s remaining time, the commission said.
The Trump and Biden campaigns agreed to the rule change.
Thursday night’s debate would have been the third between the two men. Trump and Biden were scheduled to debate Oct. 15, but Trump rejected a last-minute change from the commission that would have made the debate virtual, instead of an in-person, town hall format. The nonpartisan commission cited a need “to protect the health and safety of all involved with the second presidential debate” in the wake of Trump’s recent bout with the coronavirus. It would have been held at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami and moderated by Steve Scully of C-SPAN.
The commission said both campaigns “this week again reaffirmed their agreement to the two-minute, uninterrupted rule,” adding that the measures weren’t a change of the rules but were intended to make sure the existing rules were enforced.
“We realize, after discussions with both campaigns, that neither campaign may be totally satisfied with the measures announced today,” the commission said. “We are comfortable that these actions strike the right balance and that they are in the interest of the American people, for whom these debates are held.”
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