US Election 2020: Donald Trump or Joe Biden?
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Brash and pugnacious, Trump has presided over a tumultuous presidency
Businessman-turned-politician Donald Trump has promoted "America First" nationalism, withstood impeachment and a bout with COVID-19, and taken contentious stands on race and immigration during a turbulent presidency that detractors say has flouted US democratic norms.
After decades of fame first as a brash and media-savvy New York real estate developer and then as a reality TV personality, the pugnacious Trump tapped into discontent among many Americans to become a political phenomenon unique in the country's 244 years.
Seeking re-election on Tuesday against Democratic challenger Joe Biden, Trump initially encountered fierce resistance within the Republican Party but managed to remake it in his own image and won loyalty even among some Republicans who had once denounced him.
On Twitter and in raucous rallies, Trump eviscerated opposition Democrats and the news media as well as some fellow Republicans, Cabinet members and other officials he appointed.
"If I don't sound like a typical Washington politician, it's because I'm not a politician," Trump told an Oct. 26 rally in Pennsylvania.
Trump, 74, assumed the presidency in January 2017 after his surprise victory over Democrat Hillary Clinton in November 2016. He lost the nationwide popular vote by about 3 million ballots but prevailed in pivotal battleground states to amass an Electoral College majority.
His 2016 victory made him the first US president with no prior political or military experience as he pursued a right-wing populist approach. Trump's ascent was part of a populist wave extending from Britain's European Union "Brexit" to the election of Brazilian far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro. Trump denounced "globalism" and focused US foreign policy around an "America First" world view.
His presidency came at a time of deep polarization in the United States and political dysfunction in Washington.
At home, Trump curtailed legal and illegal immigration and slashed the number of people admitted as refugees and asylum seekers, secured sweeping tax cuts, moved the federal judiciary including the Supreme Court dramatically rightward and rolled back environmental regulations that he called burdensome.
Abroad, Trump helped broker deals between close US ally Israel and three Arab states, abandoned international agreements that he portrayed as unfair to the United States, alienated longtime allies and praised authoritarian foreign leaders.
He showed deference to longtime US adversary Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. US intelligence agencies concluded that Russia used a campaign of hacking and propaganda to boost Trump's 2016 candidacy and that Moscow was interfering again during the 2020 campaign to try to denigrate Biden.
Critics including senior Democrats and former members of his own administration portrayed Trump as a peril to democracy with autocratic tendencies.
"I believe that the president is literally an existential threat to America," Biden said of Trump last year in Iowa. "This is a guy who does everything to separate and frighten people. It's about fear and loathing."
"Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people - does not even pretend to try," Jim Mattis, a retired four-star Marine Corps general who served as Trump's first defense secretary, said in June. "Instead he tries to divide us."
But even through a parade of controversies, the passionate support of many Americans - especially white men, Christian conservatives, rural residents and people without a college education - seemed undimmed.
"I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves," Trump said in accepting the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. "Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it."
Democrats accused Trump of placing himself above the law and disregarding constitutional constraints on presidential powers as he ignored congressional subpoenas, complained about a "rigged" American voting system, refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he lost to Biden, and assailed figures in the FBI and US intelligence agencies.
Critics also denounced Trump for employing falsehoods; fact-checkers listed thousands of them during his presidency.
He pushed back at questions about his mental state.
"Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart," Trump wrote on Twitter in 2018, describing himself as "a very stable genius."
At rallies as a candidate and president sporting carefully coiffed golden hair, Trump soaked in the adulation of supporters, many wearing red baseball caps emblazoned with his slogan, "Make America Great Again." They cheered his taunts against Democrats, liberals and elites, and his attacks on journalists as "the enemy of the people" and "fake news."
PANDEMIC AND IMPEACHMENT
The coronavirus pandemic presented a challenge to Trump.
He cast doubt on protective masks, promoted unproven medicines and predicted the pathogen's disappearance "like a miracle" - actions that many public health experts said cost lives and contributed to an economic cataclysm. About 230,000 million Americans have died from COVID-19.
Trump, who often ignored mask-wearing and social-distancing advice, disclosed on Oct. 2 that he had tested positive for the virus and then spent three days hospitalized receiving multiple COVID-19 treatments before returning to the White House.
Congressional Democrats unsuccessfully tried to remove him from office over Trump's invitation of foreign interference in an American election. Trump last year asked Ukraine, a vulnerable US ally facing Russian aggression, to pursue an investigation into Biden and Biden's son Hunter into unsubstantiated corruption allegations.
Trump became only the third US president to be impeached when the Democratic-led House of Representatives voted to charge him with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over the Ukraine matter. The Republican-led Senate kept Trump in office by acquitting him at a trial in February.
Trump bristled at investigations into Russia's role in the 2016 election. A special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, Robert Mueller, documented Russian election interference to sow discord in the United States, disparage Clinton and help Trump. Mueller detailed numerous contacts between Trump campaign figures and Russians.
Trump called the investigation a "witch hunt" and declared "complete and total exoneration" in 2019 after Mueller's report did not accuse him or his campaign of a criminal conspiracy with Russia.
Mueller did not exonerate Trump of committing obstruction of justice in trying to impede the investigation, but Attorney General William Barr, a Trump appointee, subsequently cleared him.
Trump avoided condemning Moscow, publicly giving credence to Putin's denials of election interference while doubting US intelligence conclusions. Trump praised Putin for his strength, part of a pattern of complimenting authoritarian leaders including North Korea's Kim Jong Un and Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines.
RACE IN AMERICA
Racial tensions simmered during Trump's presidency.
Protests against racism and police brutality spread to many cities, sometimes accompanied by violence and looting, after incidents such as the police killing in May of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis. Trump called demonstrators "thugs," promised to maintain "law and order" and sent federal personnel onto the streets of some cities.
Critics accused Trump of pursuing policies built around "white grievance" in a nation with a growing non-white population. Even some fellow Republicans expressed unease over Trump's failure to disavow white supremacists.
Having succeeded the first Black US president, Barack Obama, Trump erased many parts of his Democratic predecessor's legacy. Trump walked away from an international treaty over Iran's nuclear program and a global accord to battle climate change, reversed environmental protections and rolled back warmer ties with Cuba.
Trump's hardline stance toward immigration was a hallmark of his presidency.
When he launched his presidential run in 2015, he promised a wall along the US-Mexican border, paid for by Mexico. Mexico refused to pay. One of the first policies he pursued as president was a travel ban on people from several Muslim-majority countries. He implemented a policy of separating some detained immigrant children from their parents.
Trump cultivated an image of a flourishing businessman and deal-maker, though he had a history of financial losses, bankruptcies and business failures. Tax documents uncovered by the New York Times in September showed Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and again in 2017 - and no income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years - mostly because he reported losing much more money than he made.
Numerous women accused Trump of sexual assault, allegations he denied. Trump bragged in a 2005 audio tape made public in 2016 that he could grab women by their genitals with impunity because he was a star. His personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to charges related to hush money paid before the 2016 election to two women - an adult film actress and a Playboy model - who said they had sexual encounters years earlier with Trump. Trump denied the relationships.
A longtime fixture in US politics, Biden seeks to win elusive prize
Joe Biden, a fixture in US politics for a half century as a senator and vice president, is seeking to complete a long climb to the political mountaintop that includes two previous failed presidential bids by defeating President Donald Trump on Tuesday.
If Biden beats the Republican president, a fellow septuagenarian, the 77-year-old Democrat from Delaware would become the oldest person ever elected to the White House.
Biden has sought to portray his political experience as a benefit, casting himself as a tested leader up to the tasks of healing a nation battered by the coronavirus pandemic and providing steadiness after the turbulence of Trump's presidency.
Accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in August, Biden stressed compassion and decency, seeking to draw a contrast with the pugnacious Trump.
"I'll be an ally of the light," Biden said, "not the darkness."
Trump has derided him as "Sleepy Joe" and said his mental capacity was "shot" as the president's allies sought to portray Biden as senile.
If elected, Biden would be 78 years old upon inauguration on Jan. 20. Trump, 74, was the oldest person to assume the presidency when he was sworn in at age 70 in 2017.
Biden unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and 2008 before finally securing his party's blessing this year with strong support among Black voters.
He brings to his political career a mix of blue-collar credentials, foreign policy experience and a compelling life story marked by family tragedy - the loss of his first wife and a daughter in a car crash, and a son to cancer.
Biden arrived in Washington as a young upstart. He was elected in 1972 at age 29 to the US Senate from Delaware and remained there for 36 years before serving from 2009 to 2017 as vice president under Barack Obama, the country's first Black president.
Trump has sought to turn Biden's experience into a liability, denouncing him as a career politician. Trump has said Biden would become a puppet of the Democratic Party's "radical left."
The coronavirus pandemic has been front and center in the presidential race. Biden accuses Trump of surrendering in the face of the public health crisis, saying the president panicked and tried to wish away the virus rather than do the hard work needed to get it under control, leaving the economy in shambles and millions of people jobless.
Trump, who was hospitalized for three days after contracting COVID-19, has mocked Biden for regularly wearing a face mask to guard against the pathogen's spread.
'THE SOUL OF THIS NATION'
After serving as vice president, Biden opted not to run for president in 2016, only to watch Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton. When Biden announced his 2020 candidacy in April 2019, he took aim at Trump.
"We are in the battle for the soul of this nation," Biden said, adding that if re-elected Trump would "forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation - who we are - and I cannot stand by and watch that happen."
Biden selected Senator Kamala Harris - whose father is an immigrant from Jamaica and whose mother is an immigrant from India - as his running mate, making her the first Black woman and first person of Asian descent on a major-party US ticket. At 56, Harris is a generation younger than Biden.
An effort by Trump to dig up dirt on Biden resulted in the president's impeachment in the Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives in December 2019. The two articles of impeachment - abuse of power and obstruction of Congress - stemmed from Trump's request that Ukraine investigate Biden and his son Hunter on unsubstantiated corruption allegations.
In February, the Senate, controlled by Trump's fellow Republicans, acquitted him of the charges after refusing to call any witnesses.
US intelligence agencies and the FBI director this year concluded that Russia, after interfering in the 2016 election to harm Trump's opponent Clinton, was engaging in a campaign to denigrate Biden and boost Trump's re-election chances while promoting discord in the United States.
Biden's previous two presidential runs did not go well. He dropped out of the 1988 race after allegations that he had plagiarized some speech lines from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. In 2008, Biden won little support and withdrew, only to be selected later as Obama's running mate.
The folksy Biden, known for blunt talk and occasional verbal gaffes, has often referenced his working-class roots to connect with ordinary Americans. Biden also was the first Roman Catholic US vice president.
Under Obama, Biden served as a troubleshooter on matters of war and foreign affairs and on domestic issues such as gun control and fiscal policy.
Obama did not always heed Biden's advice. Obama gave the go-ahead for the 2011 raid in Pakistan that killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden despite Biden's warning that it was too risky.
Biden speaks openly about his family's tragedies including the 1972 car crash that killed his first wife, Neilia, and their 13-month-old daughter, Naomi, weeks after his election to the Senate.
He almost abandoned his political career to care for his two young sons who survived the accident but stayed on, commuting by train from Delaware to Washington to avoid uprooting them.
In 2015, his son Joseph "Beau" Biden III, an Iraq war veteran who had served as Delaware's attorney general, died from brain cancer at age 46. Biden's son Hunter struggled with drug issues as an adult.
Biden himself had a health scare in 1988 when he suffered two brain aneurysms.
BLUE-COLLAR BACKGROUND
Biden was born in the blue-collar city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the eldest of four siblings. His family later moved to Delaware. Biden overcame stuttering as a boy by reciting passages of poetry to a mirror.
He was practically a political novice - having served two years on a county board in Delaware - when in 1972 he became the fifth-youngest elected senator in US history.
Despite years of partisan hostilities in Washington, Biden remained a believer in bipartisanship. During his time in the Senate, Biden was known for his close working relationships with some of his Republican colleagues. In addition, a number of disaffected Republicans, including former government officials and former lawmakers, alarmed at Trump's presidency have endorsed Biden.
Biden also advocated for America's role as a leader on the world stage at a time when Trump was abandoning international agreements and alienating longtime foreign allies.
One of Biden's accomplishments as a senator was helping to secure passage in 1994 of a law called the Violence Against Women Act to protect victims of domestic crimes.
While in the Senate, Biden built up a specialty in foreign affairs and at one time headed the Foreign Relations Committee. He voted in favor of authorizing the 2003 Iraq invasion before becoming a critic of Republican President George W. Bush's handling of the war.
Biden was criticized as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991 for his handling of sexual harassment accusations against Republican President George H.W. Bush's conservative Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas by former aide Anita Hill. Liberals criticized him for doing too little to defend Hill's allegations, which Thomas had denied.
The committee held explosive televised hearings prior to Thomas's eventual Senate confirmation. Thomas accused Biden's committee of conducting "a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas."
In May of this year, Biden denied a former Senate aide's accusation that he had sexually assaulted her in 1993, calling the claim "not true" and saying "unequivocally it never, never happened." The allegation was made by a California woman named Tara Reade who worked as a staff assistant in Biden's Senate office for about 10 months.
Reade was one of eight women who in 2019 came forward to say Biden had hugged, kissed or touched them in ways that made them uncomfortable, though none accused him of sexual assault. Reade publicly accused him of the assault months later.
Long in Trump's shadow, Vice President Mike Pence set to emerge
Vice President Mike Pence, a Christian conservative and one of the few constants in Donald Trump's tumultuous White House, has kept his boss's confidence by being careful never to step out of the president's shadow.
Whether Trump wins or loses the election on Tuesday, that strategy and status are likely to change. Pence, 61, will be catapulted into a group of front-runners for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination as soon as the 2020 results are known.
He will do so with the record of a No. 2 who was content to play a largely behind-the-scenes White House role, eschewing Trump's propensity for drama and endearing himself to the former reality-television-star-turned-commander-in-chief.
A former governor and US congressman, Pence has been central to some of the Trump administration's main legislative victories, including tax cuts passed in 2017.
He also oversaw the US response to the coronavirus pandemic as head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, but that brief - despite being hailed as a success by the administration - has not gone well.
About 230,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the United States, the highest death toll for a single country in the world, and the administration has been widely criticized for undermining health experts' calls for widespread use of masks and social distancing.
Pence has been a key defender of Trump throughout the tumult of the pandemic and often battling factions in the White House, maintaining his own influence by developing a close relationship with the former New York businessman.
Pence's chief of staff, Marc Short, who came down with the coronavirus himself, said Pence speaks to Trump multiple times a day from morning to night.
Reducing taxes and regulation, advancing anti-abortion policies, and transforming the judiciary with conservative judges and Supreme Court justices are among the policy changes of which Pence is most proud.
As for the pandemic: "I think that he looked at what people had forecast was possible, lives saved, building up of PPE ... development of a vaccine and thinks it's a pretty significant accomplishment," Short said.
But during their Oct. 7 vice presidential debate, Pence's Democratic rival Kamala Harris assailed the administration's record on the virus, saying: "The American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country."
Pence is always careful to praise Trump and hew to his positions, even in closed-door meetings when the president is absent. He often says the job is "the greatest privilege of my life."
Critics say he effectively validates Trump's often erratic behaviour by quietly accepting the president's combative style.
DARLING OF CONSERVATIVES
Trump picked Pence as his 2016 running mate from a list of finalists that also included former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
If Pence runs for president in 2024, he could face other Trump acolytes such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley in the race for the Republican nomination.
What he will not be able to do, and perhaps not want to do, is separate himself from Trump's agenda.
His style, however, is much different from that of his boss. He is calm rather than volcanic, and deeply religious.
"I'm a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order," Pence has said.
Pence has been married to his former schoolteacher wife Karen since 1985. They are both born-again evangelical Christians and have three adult children.
The Indiana native is a darling of conservative Republicans for his opposition to abortion rights and passionate support for the deregulation of business. He has been pivotal to securing Trump support among those voters.
Pence long advocated for Jerusalem to be recognized as Israel's capital, which Trump announced over the objections of Arab nations and many Western allies, in another win for evangelicals.
Pence was instrumental in placing several abortion opponents in key positions at the Department of Health and Human Services, which has made several decisions advancing conservative social policies, including broadening exemptions for employers who cite religious or moral reasons for refusing to cover birth control, a rule that upheld by the Supreme Court in July.
He also led the charge for reinstating a policy that requires foreign non-governmental organizations that receive US funding to vow not to discuss or perform abortions.
He is often to the right of mainstream America on social issues such as gay rights. In 2015, as Indiana governor, he was forced to revise a state "religious liberty" law he had signed that opponents said allowed discrimination against gay people.
Harris would break barriers as a high-profile vice president
Kamala Harris will make history if she becomes the next vice president of the United States in the election on Tuesday, and she will immediately be in a strong position to run for the top job four years from now.
If Joe Biden and his running mate Harris win the election, she would be the first woman, the first Black American and the first Asian American to hold the country's second-highest office.
Given his age, the 77-year-old Biden is not expected to seek a second term so Harris, 56, would be an obvious candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2024.
A US senator from California, Harris has a track record of shattering glass ceilings. She served as San Francisco's first female district attorney and was California's first woman of colour to be elected attorney general.
Her background in criminal justice could help a Biden administration tackle the issues of racial equality and policing after the country was swept by protests this year.
Harris, whose mother and father emigrated from India and Jamaica, respectively, had her sights set on becoming the first woman US president when she competed against Biden and others for their party's 2020 nomination.
She dropped out of the race last December after a campaign hurt by her wavering views on healthcare and indecision about embracing her past as a prosecutor.
Biden looked beyond some of the harsh words Harris had for him in that campaign to name her his running mate in August. She has proven to be a valuable and polished stand-in, appealing especially to women, progressives and voters of colour who are critical to the party's election hopes.
Harris, who developed a deep fundraising network during her Senate and White House bids, has been instrumental to Biden's raking in record sums of money in the closing months of the campaign. Her selection sparked a burst of excitement in the Democratic base and among the party's donors.
"Harris always made the most sense as a running mate for Biden because she had the ability to help him unify the Democratic coalition across racial and generational lines and was able to spike base enthusiasm," said Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist who worked for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.
A TEAM PLAYER
Accusations from progressives that Harris did not do enough to investigate police shootings and wrongful conviction cases when she was California's attorney general helped doom her own presidential run but have surfaced little during her time as Biden's running mate.
President Donald Trump and his Republican re-election campaign have sought to paint Harris instead as a tool of the Democratic left who would wield power and influence behind the scenes in a Biden presidency.
She has seemingly put to rest concerns among some in the Biden camp prior to her selection that she would be too personally ambitious to make a trustworthy partner.
Harris has shown herself to be a team player, taking on a lower-profile role and holding virtual and in-person political events that sometimes drew little news coverage, while often speaking in terms of what Biden would do for the country if elected and making an impassioned case against Trump.
"Joe and I were raised in a very similar way," Harris said of Biden at her October debate against Vice President Mike Pence. "We were raised with values that are about hard work, about the value and the dignity of public service and about the importance of fighting for the dignity of all people."
DOUBLE DUTY
Harris has juggled her running mate duties with her day job in the Senate. Befitting her background as a prosecutor, she was a deft cross-examiner of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett at Barrett's Senate confirmation hearing in October, weaving Biden's campaign message on healthcare and climate change into her line of questioning.
As the Senate's only Black woman, Harris emerged this year as a leading voice on racial justice and police reform after Minneapolis police killed African-American man George Floyd in May. She marched with protesters on the streets of Washington and won over some liberal sceptics.
Should Biden assume the presidency, Harris is expected to be a top adviser on criminal justice and judicial nominations, among other matters.
Asked on "60 Minutes" last month why, given Biden's age, he believed Harris would be ready to step into the presidency if something happened to him, the presidential candidate rapidly fired off five reasons.
"Number one, her values. Number two, she is smart as a devil, and number three, she has a backbone like a ramrod. Number four, she is really principled. And number five, she has had significant experience in the largest state in the Union in running the justice department that's only second in size to the United States Justice Department. And obviously, I hope that never becomes a question," he said.
Harris is married to attorney Douglas Emhoff, who has been a fixture on the campaign trail. His two children from a previous marriage refer to their stepmother as "Momala."
