WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger, former U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, will debate each other for the first time on Tuesday night.

The debate will take place at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, with limited audience, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It will be moderated by Chris Wallace, veteran journalist and anchor of Fox News on Sunday.

The three men will not shake hands. Once on stage, they will not wear masks.

Wallace has selected topics for both presidential candidates: their records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race and violence in U.S. cities, and the integrity of the November election.

"The topics make sense because they are the big issues of the campaign. The difficulty will be for the moderator getting the candidates to focus on substantive matters as opposed to personal attacks," Darrell West, vice president and director of Governance Studies at Washington, D.C.-based think tank Brookings Institution, told Xinhua.

"The United States has a very high degree of political polarization," West said. "The two parties do not trust one another and have very different visions for the future."

There will be no opening statements from the candidates at the debate, and Trump will receive the first question from Wallace.

The format calls for six 15-minute segments dedicated to the topics "in order to encourage deep discussion of the leading issues facing the country," according to the Commission on Presidential Debates.

"My job is to be as invisible as possible," Wallace said during a Fox News segment on Sunday. "I try to get them to engage, to focus on the key issues, to give people at home a sense of why I want to vote for one versus the other. But if I've done my job right, at the end of the night people will say, 'That was a great debate. Who was the moderator?'"

Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday that he is "looking very forward to the debate."

During a White House press conference on Sunday, the president said former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, two of his confidants, are helping him for the debate, claiming that he is taking questions every day from reporters.

Biden has reportedly been doing debate preparation both in person at his home in Wilmington, Delaware and virtually, in huddles with top campaign officials and long-time advisers.

Christopher Galdieri, a political science professor at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, said that he expects Biden to continue to emphasize the "Scranton vs. Park Avenue" message, which points to his Pennsylvania boyhood home and Trump's adult life in Manhattan, New York City, so as to appeal to working-class voters.

The former vice president, according to Galdieri, will also likely go after Trump's handling of the pandemic and his latest Supreme Court nominee, who supporters of Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, have argued could provide a key vote to repeal the comprehensive health care reform law enacted by then-President Barack Obama in 2010.

"Trump's focus will be attacking Biden and trying to disqualify him as a candidate," the expert said, predicting that the efforts will concentrate on assailing business activities of Biden's son and the Obama administration while trying to tie the Democrat to street violence in some U.S. cities in these months.

The second 2020 presidential debate will be held on Oct. 15 at Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami, Florida, Trump's home state and a battleground for this year's presidential election.

That debate will take the form of a town meeting, in which questions will be posed by citizens from the South Florida area. The candidates will have two minutes to respond to each question and there will be an additional minute for the moderator to facilitate further discussion.

Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, will host the third Trump-Biden debate on Oct. 22, whose format will be identical to the first encounter.

There will also be a vice presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Biden's running mate, U.S. Senator from California Kamala Harris, at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah on Oct. 7.

Election Day falls on Nov. 3 this year, while early voting, either in-person or by mail, has started in some states. According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Biden leads Trump by 6.8 percentage points nationally and 3.7 points in top battleground states, as of Monday. Enditem

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