The contest between Trump and Biden was supposed to tighten up in the last days of the campaigns, but here we are in the final week and Biden’s lead overall is wider. The nerds now have Trump’s chance of winning down to 11 percent, and Biden’s at 88 percent. That’s the biggest advantage for Biden yet.

In 2016, with a week to go, the nerds had Clinton 45, Trump 42. See also Harry Enton, CNN, 8 days to go: Biden’s lead over Trump is holding, while Clinton’s was collapsing at this point.

The Trump campaign continues to step into doodoo. The headlines this morning told us that hundreds of Trump supporters were stranded for hours in freezing temperatures at a rally venue in Omaha, waiting for buses to take them back to their cars in far-away parking lots. Many of these people were elderly. Police did what they could, but the road to the airport where the rally had taken place was clogged. Seven people were hospitalized, according to the local newspaper. It’s possible Air Force One got back to Washington before some of those rally attendees got home.

This is not a good look for Trump, who has run short of money for television ads and is relying on rallies to get publicity. But if he’s using Air Force One to fly around the country to his rallies he’s supposed to reimburse us taxpayers for that. Not cheap. The time-honored trick of incumbent presidents to get around that is to schedule some kind of official presidential event at some place that just happens to have a campaign event nearby. But I can’t tell from news stories that there was anything going on in Omaha but the rally. Trump flew in; Trump flew out.

And it says something that Trump thinks he needs to shore up support in Nebraska. In 2016 Trump beat Clinton 58.7 percent to 33.7 percent in Nebraska. See also the Cook Political Report, Biden’s Path to 270 Widens, Trump’s Path Narrows, as Texas Moves to Toss Up.

Greg Sargent writes that the newest polls show a dip in support for Trump among White voters, including not-college-educated White voters. Most of this shift from red to blue is because of Trump’s botched pandemic response, Sargent says, although a lot of it is disgust at Trump’s race-baiting.

It’s also the case that Trump clearly had counted on fanning the Hunter Biden scandal to squeak out another Electoral College win, but this time major news media haven’t gone along. See Tina Nguyen at Politico, MAGA scrambles to repair the Hunter Biden narrative. “The Wall Street Journal and Fox News have both reported finding no evidence that former Vice President Joe Biden benefited from the Hunter Biden business dealings that have drawn scrutiny,” Nguyen writes.

The Biden laptop and Clinton email scandals differ in some substantial ways, seems to me. One, the FBI really was investigating Clinton’s emails, and the concern over Clinton’s private server goes back to 2009. It wasn’t a controversy the Trump campaign had to generate. But beside the fact that Hunter Biden isn’t even the candidate, from the beginning the White House and Trump campaign not only had their fingerprints all over the Biden-Ukraine story, they’ve been the sole source of information on new developments, such as the laptop from hell and the alleged Hunter Biden sex tapes (from China via Steve Bannon). Outlets like Breitbart and Gateway Pundit have published everything the Trumpers put out about Hunter Biden, but the more establishment sections of right-wing media have been much more cautious with the stuff. See also Trump Had One Last Story to Sell. The Wall Street Journal Wouldn’t Buy It. by Ben Smith at the New York Times.

About a hundred years ago, when I was a student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, we students got warned about taking jobs with tabloids. Note that the professors at this J School were not academic types but people with years of experience as working journalists. One old newswriting prof named Tom Duffy used to tell us great stories about covering Chicago mobsters as a newspaper reporter in the 1930s, for example. He was a hard ass, but he knew newspapers.

Anyway, the word was that we seniors might get job offers from the supermarket tabloids like the National Enquirer, and that these offers would be tempting because the tabloids paid a lot better than regular newspapers. But, we were told, if you take that job, it’s the only journalism job you will ever have. There was no moving from the supermarket tabloids to legitimate journalism, they told us. I thought of that when I read about the Wall Street Journal playing down the laptop story. Trump will be gone soon enough, but the Wall Street Journal will still live or die by its reputation as a legitimate news source. I guess there are places it won’t go.

One can’t say the same about the New York Post, which is part of the Murdoch empire, but at least one reporter withheld his byline from a Hunter Biden story.

On the other hand, David Graham at the Atlantic complains that the press is giving Trump a free pass and not reporting on some recent scandals, such as his stripping of civil service protections from federal employees.. But if you read Graham’s article, you notice that Graham is learning about the scandals from newspaper stories, like this one. I infer that his gripe is that lots of stuff going on is not being covered on the teevee news. But yeah, we need media reform, bug time. We’ve needed it for years.

But this is Trump’s most recent outrage — Trump to strip protections from Tongass National Forest, one of the biggest intact temperate rainforests.

As of Thursday, it will be legal for logging companies to build roads and cut and remove timber throughout more than 9.3 million acres of forest — featuring old-growth stands of red and yellow cedar, Sitka spruce and Western hemlock. The relatively-pristine expanse is also home to plentiful salmon runs and imposing fjords. The decision, which will be published in the Federal Register, reverses protections President Bill Clinton put in place in 2001 and is one of the most sweeping public lands rollbacks Trump has enacted.

Next week, if Joe Biden finds himself called upon to give a victory speech, I want him to issue a warning to the developers and the logging companies that the protections will be back in place as soon as he’s inagurated, so don’t bother moving equipment to start ripping up the Tongass National Forest.

The nation’s editorial pages are full of SCOTUS commentary today. Here is a sampler.

Let’s start with the New York Times, which is running a Supreme Court special section of op eds headlined How to Fix the Supreme Court.  Emily Bazelton’s How We Got Here is worth reading. She describes several times in past history in which the Supreme Court was smacked down by the other branches. For example, the number of justices was increased to nine (in 1869) by Congress in anticipation of their interference with Reconstruction. Bazelton continues,

The most pressing question now is whether the conservative majority will issue rulings on voting, the census, redistricting and other foundations of fair and free elections that threaten the majoritarian nature of American democracy itself. If the conservative justices take these steps, they will entrench the power of the Republican Party that gave them their seats just as an increasingly multiracial electorate shifts away from the current Republican coalition.

Even now, Republican dominance over the court is itself counter-majoritarian. Including Amy Barrett, the party has picked six of the last 10 justices although it has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections, and during this period represented a majority of Americansin the Senate only between 1997 and 1998 (if you count half of each state’s population for each senator).

That’s a dangerous proposition for our constitutional order. The court can hold its conservative impulses in check with an eye to the future. Or it can ramp up a power struggle with the other branches that in the end — Marbury or no Marbury — it is destined to lose.

Larry Kramer, former dean of Stanford Law School, says it’s time to “pack” the court.

Liberals say that if Joe Biden wins the election, Democrats should answer by adding justices to the Supreme Court. Republicans respond with faux outrage that this would politicize the judiciary. But they have already politicized the judiciary. The question is whether only one side should play that game. Besides, not only is enlarging the Supreme Court legal, its size has changed seven times over its history.

Adding judges would be a political response to a political act. But the extremes to which Republicans have been willing to go leave the Democrats no other choice. Not for revenge or because turnabout is fair play, but as the only way back to a less politicized process.

This is a lesson we learned decades ago from economists and game theorists: Once cooperation breaks down, the only play to restore it is tit-for-tat. It’s the only way both sides can learn that neither side wins unless they cooperate.

Another fix Kramer suggests is to choose a new justice with each Congress, and the nine most recently appointed justices would be the ones to hear cases. The older justices would still be on the Court and could fill in when a current judge is unavailable. This is a way to put in term limits that would not require a constitutional amendment.

Kent Greenfield, a professor at Boston College Law School, suggests creating a new court that would deal with constitutional questions.

The most contentious and important legal issues — whether states can ban abortion, or whether the president can refuse subpoenas or mandate travel bans — should be shifted from the Supreme Court to a new court created to decide such issues….

… This court would be made up of judges from other federal courts, selected by the president from a slate generated by a bipartisan commission to create legitimacy and balance. The judges would serve limited terms, then return to their previous courts. Staggered terms would guarantee each president several appointments.

Also at the New York Times, see Melody Wang, Don’t Let the Court Choose Its Cases.

At Washington Monthly, see Garrett Epps, Independent Judiciary, RIP.  “If We the People accept without serious reform this new marsupial court as it is being contemptuously thrown to us, we do not deserve self-government.”

At the Washington Post, see Paul Waldman, There’s no more doubt: Democrats have to expand the Supreme Court.

Trump and Barrett after Barrett’s swearing-in at the White House.

Waldman continues,

Here are reading recommendations. There’s a great commentary by David Atkins at Washington Monthly saying that Republican voters are not prepared for Trump to lose, and that’s a problem. Democrats are hoping for a win and increasingly expect to win, but I think I speak for most when I say we’re braced for a loss. But while Republican party leaders may realize the poll numbers don’t look good for them, Republican voters appear to be oblivious to this.

Republican voters have been primed to believe that every reputable poll is a lie, that official elections results are not to be trusted, and that they have a silent majority millions of voters strong. If 36% of the country’s voters walk into election night with that belief and Biden ends up winning easily with over 350 electoral votes, it is impossible to predict what might happen.

Atkins goes on to say that “It is improbable that triumphalist bullies who have spent the last four years hailing their president as a God Emperor and posting memes about drinking liberal tears will easily accept resounding electoral defeat.”

There’s a likelihood of organized violence, of course. Many on the Right will not accept a Biden victory as legitimate. But we’re not obligated to be anyone’s grief counselors. The snowflakes can suck it up, as we did, or face penalties if they get out of line.

***

See also Paul Waldman, We May Not Be Facing Apocalypse, but the Near Future Doesn’t Look Good.

***

At NBC News, Sahil Kapur writes that the GOP bets Democrats won’t expand Supreme Court. Progressives say: Call their bluff.

When Senate Republicans voted on a rainy Sunday to put Amy Coney Barrett on a glide path to a lifetime Supreme Court appointment one week before Election Day, they were making a bet that Democrats wouldn’t retaliate and erase conservative gains.

“A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone, sooner or later, by the next election,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Sunday after the 51-48 procedural vote against Democratic objections. “But they won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.”

But it’s not just progressives talking about expanding the Court. I’m seeing Washington establishment fixtures like Ruth Marcus and E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post say that Dems don’t have a choice but to expand the court. This is a big, fat signal that Dems would get at least some cover in media if they expand the Court. Joe Biden probably doesn’t want to do it, because he knows what firestorm will follow, but he hasn’t ruled it out. IMO there’s a good chance that if Biden wins and the Dems control the Senate, they will increase the number of justices on the court. And not by just a couple. I’m thinking a total of 17 justices would ensure that no one future president will get enough nominations to make that much difference. They may expand some other federal courts as well.

The most common counter-argument for this is that Republicans will add a bunch more justices to the court when they regain power. To which I say — pass laws to end political gerrymandering and protect voting rights. Make Washington DC a state, and Puerto Rico, too, if it wants to be a state. Then watch the Hard Right fail to claw its way back for a long, long time.

***

Worthless entitled privileged wonder Jared Kushner stepped in a big ol’ pile of racist doodoo.

***

Trump has failed utterly to stop the flow of manufacturing jobs going overseas. See Trump’s Carrier deal fades as economic reality intervenes.

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.