Trump and Biden face off in chaotic first debate

U.S. President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, battled fiercely on Tuesday in a chaotic first debate that was marked by constant interruptions and personal insults.

Biden questioned Trump's leadership on the coronavirus, which has killed more than 200,000 Americans, claiming he had failed to protect the American people.

"This is the same man who told you by Easter this would be gone away. By the warm weather, it'd be gone, miraculously, like a miracle. And by the way, maybe you can inject some bleach into your arm."

But Trump doubled down and defended his handling of the crisis, claiming that a vaccine was just weeks away.

"We got the gowns, we got the masks, we made the ventilators. You wouldn't have made ventilators. And now we're weeks away from a vaccine."

Trump was also given the opportunity to condemn white supremacists and militia groups, but deflected and attacked left-wing activists instead.

"I would say almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not from the right-wing."

That came as multiple senior federal officials, including the FBI this month, have warned that white supremacist groups pose a rising threat of violence.

And just hours before the debate, Biden released his tax returns from last year and called on Trump to do the same, after the New York Times reported that the president paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017.

Offering no evidence, Trump instead claimed: "I paid millions of dollars in taxes, millions of dollars of income tax."

Closing the debate, both candidates were asked if they would accept the outcome of the election.

Trump, who has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses, repeated his unfounded allegations that mail-in voting would lead to fraud, which experts say is rare.

He said he expected the Supreme Court might have to decide the election and "look at the ballots" -- a contentious proposition given his push to fill a vacant seat on the bench as swiftly as possible.

"If I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can't go along with that."

Biden has held a consistent lead over Trump in national opinion polls ahead of the November 3 election, but surveys in battleground states show a closer contest.