I don’t know how many times I saw this clip on the teevee news yesterday.

Headline at CNN: US reports second-highest day of coronavirus cases since the pandemic began. The highest day was Friday.

I’ve seen an extended version of this clip; from here Trump goes on to complain that there are only so many cases because we test too much. His comments about immunity reveal he has no grasp whatsoever about the issue and hasn’t been paying attention to the scienctists, who have said all along that people appear to have only short-term immunity, if any, after an infection. After all this time, after everything that’s happened, he still doesn’t understand the pandemic and clearly doesn’t care enough to try to understand it.

See David Atkins, A Trump Win Would Condemn Hundreds of Thousands to Die Needlessly from COVID.

Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell is pushing the Senate to confirm nutjob Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court tomorrow. The local news here is full of interviews of small business owners who aren’t sure how they’re going to go on much longer with the virus restrictions. A lot of virus restrictions were lifted for a time but are being put back because the cases and posivity rates are going up. There is absolutely no excuse for the government not providing some kind of support to keep people afloat for a few more months, but Mitch can’t be bothered. The priority is to get a sixth hard-right reactionary on the Supreme Court to foul up government policy for the next forty years. Maybe they’ll find some creative way to restrict voting to white men only, 15th and 19th amendments be damned.

It says something that even former Dem Senate leader Harry Reid is calling for the end of the filibuster. See also E.J. Dionne, Enlarging the Supreme Court is the only answer to the right’s judicial radicalism.

Speaking of local news: St. Louis has nearly broken down into civil war over high school sports. For a time the county executive had restricted contact sports, like football. What, no football? The parents of seniors were all over the teevee practically weeping because their darlings will be robbed of their last year of high school football, along with their chances to get scholarships to some major conference school. That’s sad, but I can remember my senior year, when the guys in my class all faced the draft and potentially being sent to Vietnam. That was sadder. Anyway, the St. Louis high schools are playing a shortened football season now. We’ll see what happens to basketball.

Also, too: Several in Mike Pence’s inner circle have tested positive.  Pence, chair of the White House pandemic task force, has been exposed to several of these people but will not quarantine. Meanwhile, WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows admits “We are not going to control the pandemic.”

See Nicholas Kristof, America and the Virus: ‘A Colossal Failure of Leadership’:
In its destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic marks the greatest failure of U.S. governance since Vietnam.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, involving Democrats as well as Republicans, but Trump in particular “recklessly squandered lives,” in the words of an unusual editorial this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death certificates may record the coronavirus as the cause of death, but in a larger sense vast numbers of Americans died because their government was incompetent.

As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth. Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world.

It says something that even the notriously right-wing New Hampshire Union Leader is endorsing Joe Biden.

The great Alexandra Petri has a column up about the candidates’ closing message. Biden talks vaguely about plans and scientists. Trump shrieks hysterically about giant bird-killing windmills. It’s satire, but it’s not that far from the truth.

Right-wing websites are ignoring the pandemic and instead are flogging a new Hunter Biden story. This story claims there Hunter Biden sex videos have been uploaded on a Steve Bannon-connected Chinese website. I’m not going to link to any of this, but you can read about it at Steve M’s place.

And I don’t give a hoohaw whether the videos are authentic or not. Hunter Biden isn’t running for office. Serial rapist Donald Trump is running for office. Hello? Wingnuts? Do you not see how sex scandals might be of limited use to you in this election?

The FiveThirtyEight polling average has been pretty much frozen in place for several days. I think people have made up their minds on this election. I’m going to be uneasy about the Electoral College until we get states called, but I am hopeful, and I’m hopeful about the Senate also. Tonight is the last big potentially game-changing television event, which is the 60 Minute interviews in which, by all accounts, Trump comes across as a whiny, petulant child. I may watch.

The New York Times editorial board has an editorial up headlined R.I.P., G.O.P.

Of all the things President Trump has destroyed, the Republican Party is among the most dismaying.

“Destroyed” is perhaps too simplistic, though. It would be more precise to say that Mr. Trump accelerated his party’s demise, exposing the rot that has been eating at its core for decades and leaving it a hollowed-out shell devoid of ideas, values or integrity, committed solely to preserving its own power even at the expense of democratic norms, institutions and ideals.

Do read the whole thing. And it says something that the cautious New York Times published this.

If we and the nation survive this year, we may look back and decide that it took the combination of Trump and covid to wake people up to the debilitated state of our politics and government. It’s been screwed for a long time before Trump became POTUS, but with the help of complicit news media it managed a charade of normal. But Trump plus covid blew that fiction out of the water. And maybe a fire has been lit under the Democrats so that they will stop being nothing but the party that’s not as bad as the other party.

Elsewhere: Will Bunch at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Trump, TV pundits don’t have a fracking clue about Pennsylvania and fossil fuels.

The pandemic is raging out of control, especially in the Midwest and western Mountain states. Will this impact in-person voting on election day?

I’m not the only one wondering. Ed Kilgore writes about the surge in early voting by Democrats and wonders if Republican voting suppression efforts are backfiring.

Yes, the surge could mean massive overall turnout — or it could simply reflect fears of health risks for in-person voting on Election Day, or unusually early mail-in or in-person voting based on concerns about postal delivery or long lines. And the Democratic skew could mean a big sweep, or simply the partisanship in voting methods resulting from the president’s endless and false attacks on voting by mail….

…My colleague Eric Levitz recently speculated that Trump’s devious tactics might backfire if ongoing spikes in COVID-19 cases keep Republicans the president has convinced to vote in person instead of voting by mail to stay home on November 3. So it’s possible the GOP effort to shape an electorate in its own image could backfire twice, by scaring away Republicans and turbocharging angry Democrats. What goes around comes around, for sure.

Suppression tactics such as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s limiting drop-off boxes to one per county and shenanigans with the mail have inspired Democrats to get their votes in as early as possible, by mail and by early in-person voting. See ‘Warning flare’: New swing-state data shows massive Democratic early-vote lead at Politico. Trump voters appear to be planning to vote on election day — just in time for peak covid.

There has also been a pattern of covid spikes following in the wake of Trump rallies. Way to go, Trumpers.

(Update: See Trump campaign flouted agreement to follow health guidelines at rally, documents show.)

Elsewhere — see Jenny Gross at the New York Times, Far-Right Groups Are Behind Most U.S. Terrorist Attacks, Report Finds.

The report, published Thursday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, found that white supremacist groups were responsible for 41 of 61 “terrorist plots and attacks” in the first eight months of this year, or 67 percent.

The finding comes about two weeks after an annual assessment by the Department of Homeland Security warned that violent white supremacy was the “most persistent and lethal threat in the homeland” and that white supremacists were the most deadly among domestic terrorists in recent years.

The report also warned that violence could rise after the election.

Also elsewhere, Jared and Ivanka are upset about these billboards in Times Square.

Jared and Ivanka are suing the Lincoln Project, who paid for the billboards. The quote attributed to Jared is from this Vanity Fair article that said Kushner, in charge of acquiring PPE and other supplies and getting them to where supplies were needed, made the political decision to let the states manage on their own. Blue states, and especially New York City, were being hit hard at the time.

“Free markets will solve this,” Kushner said dismissively. “That is not the role of government.”

The same attendee explained that although he believed in open markets, he feared that the system was breaking. As evidence, he pointed to a CNN report about New York governor Andrew Cuomo and his desperate call for supplies.

“That’s the CNN bullshit,” Kushner snapped. “They lie.”

According to another attendee, Kushner then began to rail against the governor: “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state…. His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.”

When the Lincoln Project received a warning from the couples’ lawyer demanding the billboards be removed, the Lincoln Project tweeted this response.

Nuts! pic.twitter.com/XxxkG43z3W

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 24, 2020

I was thinking this morning that at least we’re past the debates, but I know a lot of people may still be confronted with gubernatorial and senatorial debates. But, really, who needs them now? Do you not know who you are voting for? If not, you learn more about the candidates’ positions on issues by going to their websites, anyway. The debates are just theater.

I’m seeing a lot of commentaries that say last night’s debate was more “substantive” than the first one. But I wouldn’t call last night’s debate “substantive” at all. It was still just sound bytes and too many claims left unchallenged. And while people are tripping all over themselves praising moderator Kristen Welker, I’d give her a C+, B at most. She was better than Chris Wallace or Susan Page, at least.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, I hope that before we have another presidential election, the parties, the debate commission (if it isn’t disbanded), and the networks need to work out an entirely different kind of debate structure that slows down the pace, allows for more time to answer questions in depth, allows more time for challenges of factual claims, and includes robust use of mic cuts.

The fact-check thing remains a problem. Today nearly every newspaper and media outlet has a big honking fact check of the debate that takes everything Trump said last night apart. But most voters are not going to read those fact checks. If it’s not on the teevee, they don’t see it.

However, it’s also the case that lies don’t necessarily work. Some of the claims Trump made about Biden taking millions of dollars from foreign governments were new to me — I take it this stuff is from the right-wing media echo chamber — and I question whether independent viewers who don’t soak their heads in Breitbart and RedState found it credible. See also Trump’s sideshow fizzles out by Ryan Lizza at Politico.

I also doubt anyone but die-hard Trump groupies believe Trump’s promises that the pandemic is almost gone and he’ll have a great new health care plan any minute now.

Oh, and is New York City really a ghost town? Check out the live cams of Times Square and judge for yourself. Times Square has been more crowded, certainly, but that’s not a ghost town.

Regarding the pandemic, it’s possible Trump really doesn’t know that it’s hitting some rural, red-state areas especially hard right now. But the virus is everywhere now, in red states and blue. It’s not confined to one or two hot spots. I looked up states with the highest positivity rates — the top ten right now are South Dakota, Idaho, Wyoming, Iowa (22.3), Kansas, Nebraska, Nevada, Alabama, Mississippi, and Utah. And South Dakota’s rate is a whopping 35.2, which I understand may be the highest on the planet. States with the lowest rates, from lowest to highest, are Maine (0.6), Massachusetts, New York (1.3), Washington DC, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, and Rhode Island (2.4). However, cases are increasing in some of those states. Cases are increasing pretty much everywhere, I understand.

My point is that the American people are not always as stupid as we seem. U.S. politicians can easily get away with lying about stuff going on elsewhere, but when they lie about things going on in people’s real-world lives, at least some of us catch on. Anywhere you live, the local news is telling you how many new cases are in your county, and if the hospitals are full, and how many people have died.

There’s also a story at Politico that says the early voting in battleground states is overwhelmingly Democratic.

Democrats have opened up a yawning gap in early voting over Republicans in six of the most crucial battleground states — but that only begins to tell the story of their advantage heading into Election Day.

In a more worrisome sign for Republicans, Democrats are also turning out more low-frequency and newly registered voters than the GOP, according to internal data shared with POLITICO by Hawkfish, a new Democratic research firm, which was reviewed by Republicans and independent experts.

Apparently Trump supporters are waiting until election day to vote. How many of them are going to test positive between now and then? Wisconsin, Florida, and Pennsylvania aren’t the worst states, but they all have positivity rates above 10. The pandemic could end up suppressing Trump votes.

That said, I doubt that last debate will make any difference or change any minds, which in effect makes it a Biden win. We’ll see if the polls budge in the next two or three days.

There is one more big televised campaign event, which will be the October 18 edition of 60 Minutes on CBS. “The Republican and Democratic candidates for president take questions from Lesley Stahl and Norah O’Donnell, next Sunday,” the promo says. That’s the interview Trump ended abruptly because Lesley Stahl reminded him that he is the president. How dare she! But everything I’ve heard about the interview says it makes Trump look very, very bad. I’ve neard nothing about the Biden interview.

I saw a meme this morning that said, “Let’s simplify this … vote for the guy you’d trust to watch your dog for a week.” So, bottom line: When you pick the dog up from the Biden’s, he’d be fine and probably have a couple of new chew toys. When you pick the dog up from the Trump’s, they will have gone off to one of their other properties, the dog will be missing, and no one on the staff will know who you are and that you’d left a dog.

Stuff to Read

Nancy LeTourneau, Washington Monthly, Fox News May Be Heading Towards an Epic Election-Night Showdown

Greg Sargent, Washington Post, Trump is drowning in his own lies. Here are the latest signs of it.

Paul Krugman, New York Times, How Many Americans Will Ayn Rand Kill?

Thomas Wright, The Atlantic, Real Problems Do Not Exist for Trump

David Frum, The Atlantic, Trump Doesn’t Care

Frank Bruni, New York Times, That’s the Last We Need to Hear From Trump

Update: A couple more – –

Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker, The Republican Identity Crisis

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post, Trump’s Three Fatal Flaws

As threatened, Trump has released his team’s video of the Lesley Stahl 60 Minutes interview. I have not watched it, so I defer to the headline at Daily Beast: Trump Exposes Himself as Whiner-in-Chief in Leaked ‘60 Minutes’ Interview.

Matt Wilstein writes, “what anyone who watches all 38 minutes will see is that the president spent the bulk of his time openly whining about how ‘tough’ the questions were while refusing to actually answer any of them in a coherent manner.”

For example, Stahl’s first tough question was “Why do you want to be president again?” I take it from reading about it that she also pressed him on his second term priorities, and he couldn’t answer that one, either.

On Thursday morning, CBS “This Morning” aired a short preview of Trump’s “60 Minutes” interview that he reportedly walked out on because he was unhappy with “60 Minutes” anchor Lesley Stahl’s tough questioning.

The short clip aired by CBS “This Morning” shows Stahl asking Trump what his “biggest domestic priority” is, but the President proceeded to boast about his supposed economic achievements while dodging the question. Stahl pushed back on Trump’s assertion that his administration “created the greatest economy in the history of our country” by telling him “you know that’s not true.”

And, of course, it’s not true. And it wasn’t true before the pandemic, either.

Trump also got caught with his pants down on health care:

During the interview — a recording of which the White House released ahead of its scheduled airing Sunday — Trump told CBS News journalist Lesley Stahl that he hopes the court abolishes the policy, commonly known as Obamacare.

“I hope that they end it; it’ll be so good if they end it,” Trump said.

Yesterday the New York Times dropped another Trump tax return bomb: Trump has a previously undisclosed bank account in China.  If you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s an abridged version at Forbes.  It begins:

A report from the New York Times reveals a decade of Donald Trump’s unsuccessful business activities in China, including an undisclosed bank account that paid nearly $200,000 in taxes, undermining his own exaggerated claims of Hunter Biden’s business dealings there, as well as his rhetoric that his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, is soft on the country.

The Forbes story leaves out one of the most suspicious parts. Jonathan Chait:

The Chinese bank account belongs to Trump’s subsidiary firm, Trump International Hotels Management. While in previous years the firm has reported small sums, in 2017 — Trump’s first year in office — it reported $17.5 million in revenue, a large spike.

The Forbes article quotes a lawyer from the Trump organization saying that no deals were made or business activity conducted in China; the bank account and five subsidiary companies Trump created in China were meant to pursue business deals, but this pursuit went nowhere. So where did the $17.5 million come from? And where did it go?

This bit of hinkiness comes out at a particularly bad time for Trump. The final scheduled presidential debate is tomorrow night, and the Trump campaign has been whining up a storm because the announced list of topics does not include foreign policy (it does include “national security,” which is inextricably linked to foreign policy, IMO, although Trump may not understand that). The Trump team really, really wants to discuss foreign policy. Possibly they think this is a way they can bring up Hunter Biden and avoid job losses and pandemic response. Today they may be rethinking that, however. Jonathan Chait:

President Trump has spent months insisting Joe Biden is in hoc to China. “China is on a massive disinformation campaign because they are desperate to have Sleepy Joe Biden win the presidential race,” Trump tweeted last spring. “Beijing Biden is so weak on China that the intelligence community recently assessed that the Chinese Communist Party favors Biden,” claimed his son, falsely, this summer. More recently, he has seized upon hacked emails purporting to show financial links between Biden and China.

But Biden does not have financial ties to China. We know this because he released his tax returns. Trump has not released his tax returns. But the New York Times has obtained at least some of them. And they found that Trump has a Chinese bank account, and suggest he has collected earnings from that country while serving as president.

See also Alex Ward at Vox, Trump’s team is pushing for a debate on foreign policy. That could backfire.

The Hunter Biden Chronicles may have taken another blow in Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, in which Rudy Giuliani got sucked into making a fool of himself.

In the film, released on Friday, the former New York mayor and current personal attorney to Donald Trump is seen reaching into his trousers and apparently touching his genitals while reclining on a bed in the presence of the actor playing Borat’s daughter, who is posing as a TV journalist. … They are then interrupted by Borat who runs in and says: “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”

I may have to watch that moviefilm some time.

Other than attempting to flog the Hunter Biden story that so far has gone nowhere, Trump’s closing argument for his reelection seems to be that he doesn’t need any of this shit. Cristina Cabrera, Talking Points Memo:

President Donald Trump got remarkably candid on Tuesday night with his supporters in Pennsylvania, a state he desperately needs to win on Election Day, by telling them that if he had a choice, he wouldn’t have bothered to grace them with his presence.

“Four or five months ago when we started this whole thing….before the plague came in, I had it made,” Trump said during a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania. “I wasn’t coming to Erie. I mean I have to be honest, there’s no way I was coming. I didn’t have to.”

Unfortunately, the President complained to his supporters, the pesky COVID-19 pandemic that’s caused his approval ratings to plummet forced him to actually reach out to them.

“And then we got hit with the plague, and I had to go back to work,” Trump said. “Hello, Erie. Can I please have your vote?”

Strangely enough, the comment met with cheers and applause from the crowd.

One suspects Trump could announce he gets his kicks by locking Barron in a closet with hungry rats, and his culties would cheer and applaud.

His other clever strategy has been to pick fights with women journalists, which is bound to win more votes from women (/sarcasm). He isn’t even waiting until the debate is over to badmouth moderator Kristen Welker, for example.  Caleb Ecarma, Vanity Fair:

With the final presidential debate just a few days out, Donald Trump and his allies have launched a preemptive strike against its moderator, NBC News White House correspondent Kristen Welker, in an attempt to portray the Thursday contest as rigged from the start. “She’s a radical Democrat,” Trump told supporters on Monday in Arizona, adding that the journalist has been “screaming questions at me for a long time.” The onstage attack follows him tweeting Saturday how Welker has “always been terrible & unfair, just like most of the Fake News reporters, but I’ll still play the game.”

Ecarma says this is a strategy of intimidating the moderator in advance. I doubt Welker is intimidated. Trump’s campaign team members have said nice things about Welker in the past, Ecarma continues, but in the past few days they’ve gone overboard portraying Welker and the debate commission as accomplices of the Democrats. I take it they are resigned to Trump screwing up.

And then there’s the Lesly Stahl debacle. Trump stormed out of an interview being filmed for 60 Minutes because, apparently, Stahl had the nerve to ask him questions. And now he’s saying he’s gong to release the tape of the interview made by his team before it airs on 60 Minutes to show how awful Lesley Stahl is.

I am pleased to inform you that, for the sake of accuracy in reporting, I am considering posting my interview with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, PRIOR TO AIRTIME! This will be done so that everybody can get a glimpse of what a FAKE and BIASED interview is all about…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 20, 2020

Somehow I suspect 60 Minutes is thinking about airing an uncut version of the interview also.

According to a person with knowledge of what happened during the interview, Trump was unhappy that Stahl asked him tough questions regarding his rhetoric about Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) and his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the size of the crowds at his rallies and his disputes with Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert. Stahl also told him during the interview that allegations about Biden’s son Hunter were not verified and that the Obama administration did not spy on the Trump campaign. Many of the questions were about the coronavirus pandemic and his handling of it, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the interview frankly.

Trump’s problem is that he’s being called to account for shit he actually did and stuff he actually said. This doesn’t work for him. Greg Sargent writes that Trump only wants to campaign in an alternative fictional universe.

Two more weeks. For once, I wouldn’t mind if time flew a little faster. Suggestion for passing a little time: If you haven’t read the in-depth exposé of Foxconn by Josh Dzieza at The Verge, don’t miss it. It’s absolutely jaw-dropping.

I also recommend The 31-day campaign against QAnon by Stephanie McCrummen at WaPo. This is the story of Kevin Van Ausdal, a political novice leading a nice, ordinary life who decided to run as a Democrat for a seat in the U.S. House from Georgia. He ended up being the Dem opponent of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the infamous QAnon wackjob, The campaign crushed him, and he dropped out a few weeks ago. Charles Pierce has a good summation of the piece here. And it’s hard to say who did the most damage — the QAnon lunatics or the “professional” campaign consultants he hired to help guide him.

And then read What I Learned When QAnon Came for Me by Scott Wiener, a member of the California State Senate, at the New York Times. QAnon isn’t just nuts; it’s dangerous. It’s like cancer. I think Wiener is right when he says QAnon is an “outgrowth of our troubled times, when people who have survived decades of extreme income inequality are now suffering through a horrific pandemic. They are turning to conspiracy theories because they think there’s nowhere else to turn.” But that doesn’t mean it has to be tolerated. The United States cannot afford to tolerate something this dangerous.

And then read Matthew Rosenberg, Republican Voters Take a Radical Conspiracy Theory Mainstream, at the New York Times.

Though there has been little public polling, there is growing anecdotal evidence that QAnon followers now make up a

small but significant minority of Republicans. Adherents are running for Congress and flexing their political muscles at the state and local levels. The movement’s growth has picked up pace since the onset of the pandemic in March, and its potency is clear on social media — before Facebook banned QAnon content earlier this month, there were thousands of dedicated Facebook groups with millions of members.

And then see Stanley Greenberg at The Atlantic, After Trump, the Republican Party May Become More Extreme. Greenberg doesn’t mention QAnon, but he does say that the Trump base isn’t going to go away.

Trump built his base in the insurgent anti-government, anti-immigrant movement that, during the last recession, came to prominence as the Tea Party. Then he forged a pact with evangelical Christians, to whom he promised a steady supply of socially conservative federal judges, including on the Supreme Court. He also built a strong alliance with his party’s anti-abortion-rights observant Catholics—a constituency epitomized by Attorney General William Barr. So Trump campaigns unbowed atop a coalition that, by my estimate, constitutes 65 percent of his party. He has lost swing voters but kept his most avid fans. Among the voters who approve of Trump’s job performance, about 70 percent do so strongly.

As Matthew Rosenberg said, there’s been little public polling and no way to know exactly what percent of the Republican Party base aligns with QAnon. But it has to be at least a significant minority at this point. See Caroline Mimbs Nyce, QAnon Isn’t Going Away at The Atlantic.

Oh, and if you’re really confused about what QAnon even is, see The Prophecies of Q by Adrienne LaFrance at The Atlantic.

The question is, what will happen to the Republican Party in the next two or three years? A lot will depend on the election, of course. But let’s assume that Republicans really do lose a lot of elections at both the state and national level. At some point the party’s going to have to choose between continuing to stoke wackjobbery or trying to be an actual political party again instead of a cult, whether Trump or QAnon or whatever.

And I suspect most of the money people would prefer an actual political party. I don’t see the people who bankroll the Heritage Foundation or the Cato Institute or any of that throwing money at candidates who are obsessed with connecting Pizzagate pedophilia rings and the Roswell UFO story with John F. Kennedy, Jr, who didn’t really die but is directing the Q movement from a mysterious underground location. I suspect most of the Never Trumper people long for a party that is mostly about real-world policy, even if their ideas about what the real world needs are from the McKinley Administration. But what percentage of Republican voters do the “serious” Republicans represent any more?

So I’m throwing it to you folks. Where do you think the Republican Party will go from here?

A woman holds a QAnon flag as protesters gather outside Governor Kate Brown’s residence in Salem, Ore., on April 25, 2020, calling for novel coronavirus restrictions to be lifted so that people can get back to work. (Photo by Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images)

Trump’s “events” schedule looks like nonstop rallies/superspreader events starring Trump, Pence, and/or the extended Trump family. Exposing one’s most enthusiastic supporters to a deadly infectious disease just 15 days before the election seems a tad risky to me, but I’m not going to argue with the Trumpers about it.

Trump wants you to know he’s tired of hearing about covid-19. He especially wants you to know he’s tired of covid-19 after Dr. Fauci was on 60 Minutes yesterday saying he wasn’t surprised Trump caught it. Trump has been on a rampage about Fauci since then.

President Donald Trump escalated his attacks against Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the White House’s top experts on COVID-19, into a full-blown smear campaign on Monday.

CNN reported on a call Trump had with his campaign staffers in which the President complained about those who raised alarm over his enormous, largely mask-free rallies that pose serious risk of spreading COVID-19.

“People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots,” he reportedly said.

Trump called the doctor a “nice guy” who’s “been here for 500 years.”

“Fauci is a disaster,” he said, according to CNN. “If I listened to him, we’d have 500,000 deaths.”

The President welcomed the possibility of his remarks getting leaked to the media, saying that “if there’s a reporter on, you can have it just the way I said it, I couldn’t care less.”

We’re all tired of the pandemic, dude. Very, very tired.

Greg Sargent writes that it’s not just Trump; the entire GOP seems to be determined to ignore it. The crisis needs only to be managed by better messaging to change voters’ perceptions of the disease, the GOP thinks.

Republicans are required to pretend that none of this is happening or that it’s simply not that big a deal. Trump’s own rallies — the most visible manifestations of his case for a second term right now — unfold largely without masks and social distancing, themselves dramatizing this pathology as vividly as one could imagine.

As has been predicted by infectious disease experts for months, now that the weather is getting cooler and people are spendng more time indoors, more people are getting sick.

Ten states Friday reported their highest one-day case counts: Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming, according to Johns Hopkins.
As for the entire country, cases are swinging up after a summer surge waned.

As for the entire country, cases are swinging up after a summer surge waned.

See also ‘Uncontrolled Spread’ of COVID in Majority of U.S. States at Newsweek.

Trump’s rallies are focused especially on Pennsylvania and Arizona, so we can expect positivity rates to soar in those states in the coming days. I’m grateful all the strategists are ignoring Missouri. We don’t have early voting here, and the Missouri mail-in ballot rules were designed to make ballots challengable in court, I’m certain. I’m sheltering in place as much as possible so that I can vote in person on election day.

But the larger point is that for Republicans, the severity of the pandemic is the elephant in the room they can’t acknowledge.

Charlotte Klein writes at Vanity Fair:

President Donald Trump continued to spout his rosy narrative of a nation on the mend at a campaign event in Florida on Friday, which was also the second day in a row that new infections in the United States surpassed 64,000 for the first time since July. “The light at the end of the tunnel is near. We are rounding the turn,” Trump told rally-goers. “Don’t listen to the cynics and angry partisans and pessimists.” Playing down the pandemic in an attempt to salvage his chances for reelection—a prospect upended by Trump’s bungling of the public health crisis that has killed more than 218,000 Americans—has taken on new urgency inside the Trump campaign in recent days. After contracting COVID-19, the president has reemerged with more misinformation and disregard for science than ever, flouting safety precautions and undercutting infectious disease experts to serve his political aims. “I don’t know that Donald Trump can see past the current moment,” former task force aide Olivia Troye told the Associated Press.

Yesterday Trump even mocked Biden for lisening to science.

Trump mocks Biden for promising to listen to Dr. Fauci and the science on COVID.

"He'll listen to the scientists. If I listened to the scientists, we'd have a country in a massive depression instead of – we're like a rocket ship."

We're not like a rocket ship. pic.twitter.com/nGImkHowZP

— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) October 19, 2020

More than anything else, covid is defeating Trump. That’s a sobering thing; he’s so awful, so infeffectual, so clearly unsuited to be POTUS, yet it took an extraordinary pandemic-of-the-century to reveal that to a lot of people. There’s still a small chance — 12 percent, according to the nerds — that he would win the election.

And he’s not going to learn. The White House Coronavirus Task Force, problematic all along, is coming apart. See Trump’s den of dissent: Inside the White House task force as coronavirus surges at the Washington Post and What Fans of ‘Herd Immunity’ Don’t Tell You by John Berry at the New York Times.

For months, people have wondered what would happen if Trump loses but refuses to concede and vacate the White House. No matter what the final vote count is, if Trump loses I don’t expect him to concede. But we may not need to send the U.S. Marshals to evict him from the White House. He may be long gone by inauguration day.

This week Trump has made noises that he may leave the country if he loses. Since Trump doesn’t understand humor or jokes, we can assume he is seriously considering leaving the country if he loses and that his internal polling numbers are telling him he’s going to lose. The question is, would that be before or after the January inauguration? Jonathan Chait:

Perhaps one thing on the president’s mind is the developing criminal case against him. He faces serious legal jeopardy by prosecutors in Manhattan and New York State for what seems to be on its face fairly cut-and-dried criminal fraud in his private business dealings. It is also possible that, having left office, prosecutors may turn over some rocks and discover more criminal behavior as president of the United States. (The Department of Justice has a policy of not charging the President with crimes, but that expires if he leaves office.)

Especially if the election result is an unchallengable landslide — and we don’t know that it will be, but let’s pretend — Trump very well might try to flee the reach of prosecutors before he is officially out of office. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he’s gone before Christmas.

But that leaves us with the question of where he might go. Without the powers of the presidency, he’s likely to find he doesn’t have many friends in the world. And then there’s his debt problem. Yesterday a writer at Forbes published an analysis of Trump’s known debts and assets that suggest he’s more than $1 billion in debt, not just $400 million. And, of course, we don’t know who holds all of that debt. Trump may be wanting to avoid whoever that is, also. But if he flees the U.S. to escape prosecution, will he be able to take his Secret Service protection with him?

At the Atlantic, Graeme Wood writes that after the election Trump might vacate the presidency and leave Mike Pence in charge, with the understanding that Pence will pardon him for any federal crimes he might have committed. (Presidential self-pardons are constitutionally iffy.) However, at the moment it’s New York and Manhattan after his ass. And if he’s indicted later at the federal level for ongoing obstruction of justice, Pence’s blanket pardon may not mean much.

Wood also doesn’t think Trump will either try to start a civil war to stay in office or leave the country but instead will go back to his old patterns of grifting.

I think this scenario is in fact the most likely one, if Trump loses the election. And it may even be his preferred scenario, better than an outright victory (which would require another four years of onerous employment), better than showing up on Inauguration Day and having to duel Joe Biden for the right to be sworn in. As for the prospect of civil war: Trump is a coward, and all evidence suggests that he would run from the responsibility, even more burdensome than normal service as president, of overseeing the violent fracture of America. A civil war sounds like a lot of work. The easiest path is also the most lucrative. Get on Marine One, protesting all the way, and spend the rest of your days fleecing the 40 percent of Americans who still think you are the Messiah, and who will watch you on cable news, spend their money on whatever hypoallergenic pillow you endorse, and come to see you whenever you visit their town.

And that’s plausible also, assuming he can wiggle out of his legal problems.

The Biden campaign wants you to know that their internal polls are showing a tighter race than the public polls, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Vote, dammit.

As I’ve written before, the Trump campaign is preparing teams of lawyers to go in and stop the count of mail-in votes in states where Trump has an election-night lead. This is still our primary concern. However, the huge early voting numbers may save us.

Chris Smith at Vanity Fair:

While no one in Bidenworld is projecting a landslide, or showing any sign of overconfidence, the candidate’s braintrust has been gaming out what to do if Biden is declared the winner, especially if it’s by a modest margin—and Trump refuses to accept the results. “Look, we may need the entire campaign operation to move to Pennsylvania to ensure that absentee ballots are counted,” a Biden adviser says. “That’s going to require money and manpower, and we’re making sure we have all of that.” Longtime Biden senior aide Ron Klain, plus campaign legal heads Dana Remus and Bob Bauer, are among the top staff thinking through the multiple court actions that might be necessary.

But it’s also the case, Smith says, that Trump is unlikely to want to be photographed  being hauled out of the White House kicking and screaming, which is what would happen eventually. If it comes to the point that it’s obvious even to Trump that Biden will be inaugurated, Trump will more than likely just leave. Maybe in the dead of night.

And then on that day — it’s like a miracle, Trump will disappear. For a while, anyway.

Yesterday word was going around that Trump wanted to take the time slot against Biden’s town hall so that he could beat Biden’s ratings. Variety says the early numbers show he failed.

Biden drew 12.7 million total viewers on the Disney-owned network, while Trump drew 10.4 million in the same 9-10 p.m. time slot on NBC. Across the entire runtime, the Biden town hall averaged 12.3 million viewers. In terms of the fast national 18-49 demographic, Biden is comfortably on top with a 2.6 rating to Trump’s 1.7.

It may be that after the streams are calculated those numbers will change. But from what I’ve read, Savannah Guthrie took Trump into hand and didn’t let him go. It might be worth watching.

One, who talks like that? Two, this tells me he hasn’t actually listened to women in his entire adult life.

As Michelle Goldberg notes today, there were some women who tuned out Trump’s obvious misogyny in 2016, but fewer of them are doing it now. They’ve seen him belittle and talk over women too many times now. And one thing most women aren’t comfortable with is male anger. In 2016 Trump was revealed to be an adulterous lech, but now he’s coming across as a bully and an abuser. That’s an act that went out of style a long time ago.

So if Trump wants better ratings, I suggest he get a new act. Stand-up is out; he doesn’t get humor. I assume he can’t sing or dance. Maybe he should try a magic act. He could make himself disappear. That would be popular.

There is much speculation that the Supreme Court, especially with Amy Barrett on it, will gut or overturn the Affordable Care Act. The challenge to the ACA is scheduled to be heard on November 10. The legal issues involved in the challenge give me a headache, frankly, and I have no idea what the Court might do.

What I do know is that if the ACA is overturned, the insurance companies are no longer constrained from refusing to cover people with preexisting condtions (or “a medical history” in more civilized countries). What I also know is that Republicans have no clue what they might replace the ACA with to keep people with medical histories covered.

Local television is swamped with candidate ads right now, and nearly all of them at least mention health care. Some of them are entirely about health care. Ads from Democratic candidates, especially for the U.S. House, often accuse their Republican opponents of voting to take health care away from people with preexisting conditions. I assume this means the Republican opponent, usually an incumbent, at some point voted against the Affordable Care Act or supports the suit challenging it. (My senators, unfortunately, aren’t up for reelection.)

The Republican incumbents then release their own television ads in which they quiver with indignation that they are being accused of wanting to take health care away from people with preexisting conditions. My goodness, why would anyone accuse them of such a callous thing? But, of course, they never explain how such coverage might be restored if the ACA is overturned.

One such speciment, Rodney Davis (R-IL; the local teevee runs ads for both Missouri and Illinois politicians) is running an ad in which his wife tearfully explains that she has a preexisting condition and her children might have inherited it and it’s just so unfair that her husband’s Democratic opponent (Betsy Dirksen Londrigan) claims he would take health care away from people with preexisting conditions. Here is the ad:

I checked Davis’s record. Yes, in 2017 he voted to overturn the Affordable Care Act. I checked his web page. No, he doesn’t explain what he’s going to offer the private insurance companies to get them to agree to cover people with preexisting conditions. So Mrs. Davis is just spewing bullshit. It’s very sincere bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless.

Republicans have had ten years to come up with a comprehensive replacement for the Affordable Care Act. They have failed. Ending the Affordable Care Act would end insurance coverage for millions and allow insurance companies to deny coverage to anyone they want to deny. Any politician who wants to end the Affordable Care Act has no leg to stand on when accused of denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions.

(In case any righties read this and need this explained to them: Private for-profit insurance companies can only stay in business if most of the people paying premiums do not need expensive medical care. For that reason, insurance companies are reluctant to issue new policies to people who look like they’re going to need care that will cost the company a lot of money. Further, if they can’t deny coverage to such people, what’s to stop everyone from waiting until they get sick to buy an insurance policy? And then the private health insurance business model fails, and the insurance companies all go belly up.

This page from the Kaiser Family Foundation explains how the ACA worked out the problem:

The ACA included both a carrot and a stick to encourage currently healthy people to buy insurance. The stick was the individual mandate penalty, which has since been repealed. The carrot is the current subsidy provided to low and middle income people. Providing comprehensive pre-existing condition protections without some similar mechanism to create a balanced insurance pool would cause premiums to increase substantially and result in an unstable market.

In other words, it might be that after the ACA the insurance companies will continue to offer policies to people with preexisting conditions, but without substantial government subsidies the cost of that insurance will be way too high for most people to pay. So fat lot of good it will do them.

And among all the zombie ideas about health care Republicans have promoted over the years in lieu of a comprehensive health care plan, there is absolutely nothing that honestly addresses this problem.)

Every time I see one of these ads I want to tie the Republican candidate to a chair, shine a light in his face and grill him mercilessly about HOW he is going to guarantee health care to people with preexisting conditions. What is your plan, dude? And if they don’t have a plan, it’s perfectly legitimate for their Democratic opponents to say that they are trying to take health care away from people with preexisting conditions. Because they are. That’s just plain fact. They may pretend even to themselves that’s not what they are doing. But that’s what they are doing.

A few days ago Paul Waldman wrote a column about the secret Republican health care plan.

It’s true, as Democrats insist, that there is no Republican “plan,” if like some kind of nerd you define it as a series of specific steps written down somewhere that lay out a health care policy that will be followed by the government and the country.

But in another sense, Republicans actually do have a plan. It’s not the kind of “plan” that involves legislation or regulations. Here’s what it is: Nothing.

Waldman argues that ending the ACA without a replacement would be a catastrophe for the Republican Party, because the consequences would be terrible. Millions really would lose their health care. People with preexisting conditions would be unable to get coverage again.

Yet, at the same time, they’ve badmouthed the ACA for so long that their voters, who have no clue what they are asking for, demand that the Republican Party oppose it. So the plan is to publicly oppose it while hoping like hell it is never overturned.

Poor dopey Republican voters simply accept on face value that nothing awful would happen if the ACA is voided. And they are too stupid to understand that Donald Trump can’t just sign an executive order that people with preexisting conditions must be covered, and that fixes everything. Greg Sargent, a couple of weeks ago:

Two reporters for the Upshot talked to numerous Trump voters and found that their faith in his intention to protect preexisting conditions was rock-solid. …

…“I’ve heard from him that he would continue with preexisting conditions so that people would not lose their health insurance,” one Florida woman told the Upshot of Trump. Her husband has a heart condition.

But this bit from the Upshot piece was most revealing:

“There is not a single guy or woman who would run for president that would make it so that preexisting conditions wouldn’t be covered,” said Phil Bowman, a 59-year-old retiree in Linville, N.C. “Nobody would vote for him.”

And that’s why Trump, and Republicans around the country, are denying loudly that they will take health care away from people with preexisting conditions, even though the policies they want to enact would do exactly that.

Trump is benefiting from a perverse dynamic: He isn’t being held accountable — at least by many of his voters — for not offering an actual plan to replace the ACA precisely because wiping out the ACA’s protections, and not having any plan to replace them, seems politically unthinkable to them. And that enables him to politically get away with it — among those voters, anyway.

And down-ticket candidates like Rodney Davis are trying to pull the same scam.

It’s unfortunate that the ACA challenge won’t be heard by the SCOTUS until after the election. And if Trump loses the election and the ACA goes down, his dimwit groupies will assume they’ve lost their health care because Trump lost the election.

On the other hand, if Dems take the Senate and White House and the ACA goes down, this could push even Joe Biden to accept something a lot closer to single payer next time.