‘Will you shut up, man?’: Chaos, rage between Trump and Biden as Wallace loses control of first presidential debate

Joe Biden told President Trump to shut his yap after the combative commander-in-chief kept interrupting him during an ugly Tuesday night debate that was devoid of policy discussions and almost entirely dominated by nasty personal attacks.

Meeting Biden on the debate stage for the first time after months of rancorous campaigning, Trump off the bat sought to fluster the Democratic nominee by hurling schoolyard insults and snide remarks whenever moderator Chris Wallace tried to ask him a question.

At first, Biden chuckled and tried to shrug off Trump’s shenanigans.

But after Trump wouldn’t even let him get a word in about the forthcoming Senate battle over the vacancy on the Supreme Court, Biden wouldn’t take it anymore.

“Will you shut up, man,” Biden fumed on stage in Cleveland.

Wallace quickly tried to move on, but Biden wasn’t done.

“That was really a productive segment, wasn’t it?” Biden told Trump, sarcasm in his voice.

“Keep yappin', man," the former vice president added, imitating Trump’s blabbering mouth with a hand gesture.

Trump fired back: “There’s nothing smart about you, Joe. Forty-seven years, you’ve done nothing.”

The rhetorical mud-wrestling and Trump’s repeated attempts to distort current events left little room for coherent debating on the coronavirus pandemic, mass unemployment, the tumbling U.S. economy, widespread unrest over police shootings of Black Americans, the Supreme Court vacancy and the myriad other crises facing the country.

At one point, Trump demurred when Wallace asked point-blank if he would condemn far-right supporters of his who have been involved in violent acts.

“I would say, almost everything I see is from the left-wing,” Trump said.

Wallace pressed him on the fact that far-right groups like the so-called “Proud Boys” regularly commit violent acts.

But, instead of distancing himself from the group, Trump simply told its members to lay low for now.

“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” he said. “This is not a right-wing problem. This is left-wing.”

Trump’s refusal to disavow far-right groups flies in the face of intelligence assessments from his own FBI director, who testified before Congress earlier this month that white supremacist violence remains the worst domestic extremist threat in the U.S.

Biden seized on that detail.

"This is a president who has used everything as a dog whistle to try to generate racist hatred, racist division,” Biden said.

Moving on, Trump kept pushing his false claim that expanded mail-in voting will lead to November’s election getting “rigged” for the Democrats.

“This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen,” Trump said.

Trump’s interruptions got so bad during the debate that Wallace had to reprimand him several times.

“Mr. President, let him answer! Mr. President, please stop!” Wallace shouted after Trump wouldn’t let Biden set straight a since-long debunked right-wing conspiracy theory involving his son, Hunter Biden, and a Ukrainian energy company.

Biden, shaking his head, said, “It’s hard to get any word in with this clown.”

“The fact is that everything he’s said so far is simply a lie,” Biden continued. “I’m not here to call out his lies. Everybody knows he’s a liar.”

But Trump wouldn’t give up.

“He didn’t have a job until you became vice president,” Trump said of Hunter Biden, refusing to let go of the unhinged conspiracy theory about Ukrainian corruption that got him impeached last year.

The president even dredged up the fact that Hunter Biden at one point in his life struggled with cocaine addiction.

Joe Biden protested by pointing out that Trump’s claims about Ukraine have been thoroughly debunked and offered a touching tribute for his son.

“My son had a drug problem but he’s overcome it, and I’m proud of him," said Biden, whose other son, Beau, died from brain cancer in 2015.

Despite the focus on personal jabs, reminders of the pandemic that has upended American life was present in the debate hall.

Only about 80 audience members were allowed inside, and every other chair was cordoned off with signs saying, “Thank you for not sitting here in observance of social distancing.”

Biden’s wife and other associates of the ex-vice president in the audience all wore face masks during the chaotic debate. But Trump’s family members, including First Lady Melania, kept their faces uncovered.

Back on stage, Trump made fun of Biden for wearing a mask in public, even though the president’s public health experts urge all Americans to cover their faces since it helps slow the spread of the virus.

“Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen,” Trump said.

Once the slugfest finally turned to some substance of relevance for American voters, Trump tried to ignore reality.

He claimed his administration has done an extraordinary job responding to the pandemic, even though more than 205,000 Americans have died and millions of jobs have been lost due to widespread economic devastation.

“You never could have done the job we did. You don’t have it in your blood, you never could’ve done that job,” Trump told Biden.

Biden, whose resume includes eight years as vice president and decades as a senator, stated simply: “I know how to do the job.”

When the topic turned to health care, Trump struggled to define his ideas for replacing the Affordable Care Act and claimed falsely that he has a plan for it.

“Obamacare is no good. We made it better," Trump said.

Trump has failed to make good on his 2016 campaign promise to repeal Obamacare, which remains law. He also has not released any plan for replacing the health care law.

Still, Trump said he hopes Amy Coney Barrett, his conservative nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, will deal a final blow to Obamacare when the Supreme Court considers a case on the matter in November -- even though that would likely leave millions of Americans without health care as the pandemic continues to rage.

“We won the election. Elections have consequences. We have the Senate. We have the White House and we have a phenomenal nominee, respected by all,” Trump said.

A recent New York Times report that revealed Trump only paid $750 in federal income tax in his first year in office -- likely thanks to legally dubious accounting tricks -- was briefly touched upon.

“I paid millions of dollars in taxes, millions,” Trump claimed.

Biden chimed in: “Show us your taxes, then.”

Trump, who’s the only president in modern memory to refuse to release his tax returns, claimed the American people will see his tax returns “as soon as they’re finished,” a reference to them being under audit by the Internal Revenue Service. Despite Trump’s repeated insistence to the contrary, an IRS audit does not preclude him from releasing his tax returns for public scrutiny.

The wild debate marked a climax of tensions that’s been brewing between Biden and Trump for years.

It’s unclear how the rowdy debate performance will impact voters, though Biden stepped on stage with his front-runner status intact, holding a 6.1% edge over Trump in the RealClearPolitics national polling average.

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