Just 35 days ahead of the election, President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden are headed into their first presidential debate, with the president trailing his Democratic challenger in the polls. Moreover, the president is highly likely to face criticism for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed over 200,000 lives and led nearly 30 million people to file unemployment claims across the United States.

The first presidential debate kicks off at 9 p.m. ET in Cleveland and will be hosted by Fox News host Chris Wallace. The debate will span 90 minutes and there will be no commercial breaks.

Furthermore, the debate has carefully been split into six topics including, The Trump and Biden Records, The Integrity of the Election, Race, and Violence in our Cities, The Economy, COVID-19, and The Supreme Court. Trump is under a significant amount of pressure to deliver a performance that will radically overhaul the race at a time when the burning question is whether or not he paid his federal income taxes or avoided paying them in 10 out of 15 years starting in 2000 as reported by The New York Times.

Trump's position is far more vulnerable in this first of three presidential debates as compared to his 2016 match-ups with Hillary Clinton because he had a presidential record to protect, and tried rattling the former secretary of state by interrupting frequently and by delivering one-liners, including a remark in one debate that if he had been the White House, Clinton would have been in jail.

Several voters have already given Trump poor marks for how he handled the pandemic and nationwide protests regarding racial injustice and police brutality this year. Trump's strategies to put Biden out of countenance could include baseless charges of corruption against his son Hunter, but these strategies have so far been less effective as compared to those he used on Clinton, CNN reported.

Trump may have also made the mistake of setting a low bar for the former vice president for the debate as he has repeatedly raised questions about Biden's mental acuity and called him "dumb as a rock." One of the few areas where Trump is not trailing Biden is the economy.

Biden is likely to tackle this by using the recently surfaced The New York Times bombshell report on the president's taxes, which shows he paid only $750 in federal tax in 2016 and 2017. This report will allow Biden to question Trump's claims to be a champion of the middle as well as the working classes in Midwestern swing states.