Vice President Mike Pence at a campaign rally in Waterford, Michigan, on October 22. | Jeff Kowalsky/AFP via Getty Images
A new White House case cluster once again throws Trump’s failures into stark relief.
On Saturday evening, news broke of yet another coronavirus case cluster at the White House — this one involving aides to Vice President Mike Pence. Pence himself was exposed, but he doesn’t plan to let the outbreak get in the way of his campaigning.
According to Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, at least five people in Pence’s orbit have tested positive for the virus, including chief of staff Marc Short, outside adviser Marty Obst, and three as of yet unidentified White House staffers who work with the vice president. News of this latest group of cases — which is not the first to affect Pence’s inner circle — comes just four weeks after the development of a White House cluster that included more than 30 confirmed cases, including President Donald Trump.
Haberman reported that White House officials tried to sweep the latest batch of positive tests under the rug:
The statement [confirming the positive tests] did not come from the White House medical unit, but instead from a press aide. Two people briefed on the matter said that the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, had sought to keep news of the outbreak from becoming public.
Pence spokesman Devin O’Malley told Haberman that while Pence was indeed in close contact with Short (and therefore, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, should quarantine for 14 days), he’s not planning to do so because he tested negative and is considered “essential personnel.” Pence is still planning to forge ahead with campaign rallies in Kinston, North Carolina, on Sunday, and Hibbing, Minnesota, on Monday.
During a CNN interview Sunday morning, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows struggled to defend the decision to keep Pence on the campaign trail despite his coronavirus exposure, and made a stunning admission — that the Trump administration has given up trying to contain the pandemic and has resorted to hoping for new treatments while counting on a successful vaccine being available soon.
“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Meadows said, adding later: “What we need to do is make sure we have the proper mitigation factors ... to make sure people don’t die from this.”
MEADOWS: We're not going to control the pandemic
TAPPER: Why not?
M: Because it's a contagious virus
T: Why not make efforts to contain it?
M: What we need to do is make sure we have the proper mitigation factors to make sure people don't die pic.twitter.com/0DYgk4rB3T
The sad irony of this situation is that Pence is chair of the White House coronavirus task force, yet his behavior has been a model of what not to do to protect yourself from the coronavirus.
Pence has steadfastly refused to wear a mask in public throughout the pandemic, even at hospitals. He’s gone on Fox News and paid lip service to CDC guidelines by saying things like “it’s always a good idea to wear a mask,” yet he has not done so at packed campaign events where people visibly aren’t social distancing or wearing masks.
Here’s Mike Pence saying “it’s always a good idea to wear a mask” on Fox News in front of a mask-less crowd that isn’t even distancing pic.twitter.com/xJ6I22Oxmu
Pence has also put himself — and those around him — in danger by initiating physical contact and making a mockery of social distancing guidelines during mask-less events.
Pence is fist-bumping random people while working a rope line during a pandemic pic.twitter.com/WBAV5diSm7
And this behavior has resulted in several exposures beyond his contact with Short. At the Rose Garden event at the White House to introduce Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett, which has been linked with numerous coronavirus cases, a maskless Pence sat directly in front of Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who later tested positive for the coronavirus, and close to first lady Melania Trump and former White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, both of whom also tested positive.
The finger is pointing at Mike Pence who should be in quarantine for 14 days since last exposure.
We can add Chris Christie and White House staffers to the list of people who are now positive & within the air space of Mike Pence
That wasn’t even Pence’s only possible exposure to the coronavirus on that day. Before the Rose Garden event, Pence spent time at a packed prayer march with Pastor Greg Laurie, who tested positive for the coronavirus as well.
A few hours before the Amy Coney Barrett event, Mike Pence spoke at this jam-packed "prayer march" full of thousands of people who weren't wearing masks.
In his capacity as head of the task force, Pence has consistently misled the public about the state of the pandemic, insisting the administration has done a great job and that the end of the pandemic is right around the corner. Some people may have bought that in April and May, but it’s become a harder sell as new daily case numbers hit records in recent days and hospitalizations have increased by more than 33 percent over the last month.
Not only is the White House failing to protect the public, it’s failing to protect itself
News of the coronavirus cluster around Pence comes during a weekend when the US set records for the most new single-day coronavirus cases — around 83,000 on both Friday and Saturday. But you wouldn’t know this from listening to Pence or Trump, both of whom have made brazen lies about the state of the pandemic a staple of their stump speeches.
"It is going away" -- Trump on the coronavirus as the US sets single-day records for new infections and hospitalizations continue to rise pic.twitter.com/jpcqNhyhBn
Pence’s decision to keep campaigning despite his coronavirus exposure doesn’t just put his inner circle at risk — his rallies are also public health hazards. USA Today reported on Friday that a number of places where Trump held rallies in recent weeks have subsequently experienced a spike in coronavirus cases.
The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA TODAY analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota.
Together, those counties saw 1,500 more new cases in the two weeks following Trump’s rallies than the two weeks before – 9,647 cases, up from 8,069.
This means that not only is the White House not protecting the American public from a pandemic that has now killed more than 220,000 Americans, but it’s actively making things worse. And by failing to protect top officials like Trump and Pence, the Trump administration is demonstrating that it can’t even protect itself.
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“Tonight we have a mute button, because it was either that or tranquilizer darts,” said Maya Rudolph as Kristen Welker.
Saturday Night Live parodied the final presidential debate during its opening sketch on Saturday, depicting President Donald Trump as clueless and callous about the third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden as comically old-fashioned and goofy about everything.
Maya Rudolph, playing moderator and NBC journalist Kristen Welker, began the debate by reminding the participants that she had a mute button — a feature that was added to the actual final debate because of Trump’s relentless interruptions during the first debate in September.
“Tonight we have a mute button, because it was either that or tranquilizer darts — and the president has a very high tolerance for those after his Covid treatment,” Rudolph’s Welker declared.
As the debate began, Trump, played by Alec Baldwin, immediately downplayed the virus as worthy of the public’s concern.
“Coronavirus — boring, right? We’re doing terrific,” Baldwin said. “We’re rounding the corner, in fact we’ve rounded so many corners we’ve gone all the way around the block that we’re back where we started in March.”
Biden, played by Jim Carrey, retorted, “C’mon man, we’re in the middle of a third wave! Where I come from if a girl gave you a third wave, you were practically married.”
Later on, Baldwin’s Trump promised that a coronavirus vaccine would be distributed by the military in spectacular fashion: “The army will come and shoot it with a cannon into your face.”
He then rambled about his own experience with Covid-19.
“Look, I had it, it was very mean to me, but I beat it, and now the doctors say I can never die,” Baldwin said. “And this virus said to me, ‘Sir, sir, I have to leave your body.’ Now the virus was crying, very sad. It didn’t want to leave my body. And the point is we’re all learning to live with it.”
Dramatizing the actual Biden’s response to Trump saying, “We’re learning to live with it,” on Thursday, Carrey said with a squint, “Learning to live with it? We’re learning to die with it man!”
Overall, Biden’s debate performance was characterized as “a little feisty,” and SNL satirized this by having Rudolph’s Welker halt the proceedings to observe, “Looks like Mr. Biden is so mad he’s Eastwooding it a little bit,” in a reference to actor and director Clint Eastwood.
“That’s right, now I believe the little lady asked you about a plan, why don’t you enlighten us, punk?” Carrey said.
Rudy Giuliani, played by Kate McKinnon, also made a brief appearance during the debate.
“Get ready for this truth bomb!” McKinnon’s Giuliani shouted. “Your son Hunter got $3 million from Moscow and his friend Tony Babdooey has emails right there on the wet laptop from hell! And our eyewitness saw everything and he is blind!”
The statement is a reference to a questionable story published by the New York Post alleging the discovery of inappropriate emails by Hunter Biden on a laptop dropped off at a repair shop. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop recently explained, “questions have been raised about whether that story is accurate and whether all the information allegedly on the laptop is authentic.”
In making his closing statement, Carrey’s Biden presented himself as the safe option by likening himself to a reliable car.
“Look, everybody, you know who he is and you know who I am,” he said. “I’m good old Joe. I’m reliable as a rock. I’ve got a five-star safety rating and I’m ranked best midsize in my class by J.D. Power and Associates. I don’t have a gold toilet seat. I have a soft, spongy one that hisses whenever I park my keister.”
“There’s only two things I do,” he added. “I kick ass and I take trains. And I don’t see any trains in sight. And that ladies in gentlemen, is no malarkey.”
Customers browse at Rodney’s Book Store in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 3, 2020. | Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Independent bookstores are doing everything they can to stay in business.
The pandemic arrived early for Emily Powell, owner of Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon. The state had one of the first confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the US in February. As she watched more cases pop up across the country, “I felt an increasing sense of panic and crisis,” she said. On March 15, she abruptly closed her stores in the middle of the day. She immediately shrank her staff from 500 to 60 who were “just helping us turn the lights off and put out-of-office messages on the website.” Almost overnight, she shifted her business entirely to online orders.
She’s since been able to bring back around 150 employees, and thanks to a flood of online sales, a Paycheck Protection Program loan from the federal Small Business Administration, and partial reopenings of her stores, she’s made it this far.
Still, Powell’s and other independent bookstores across the country face an uncertain and undoubtedly difficult future: Government assistance has dried up, foot traffic is still low, and the virus is again threatening to bring everything to a screeching halt. Independent bookstore owners dug deep into their wells of creativity and passion and found ways to transform their businesses to cope with Covid-19. But even so, according to the American Booksellers Association (ABA), 35 member bookstores have closed during the pandemic, with roughly one store closing each week. Twenty percent of independent bookstores across the country are in danger of closing, the ABA says.
Between mid-April and June, the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC) distributed $2.7 million to store owners in need. “That equals the distribution that we had had in the previous eight years,” said executive director Pamela French. The individual grants it gives out have increased 443 percent over last year. The level of need has subsided somewhat since the peak of the pandemic, but it’s remained consistently elevated, even with many stores now open.
A number of bookstores shut their doors voluntarily before any government lockdowns were imposed. “We were one of the first places in our town to close down,” said Suedee Hall-Elkins, manager of Dickson Street Bookshop in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Her store’s aisles are very narrow, so they felt the need to close “for morally responsible reasons.”
Closing off browsing meant a seismic shift in bookstore business models. Kris Kleindienst’s shelves at Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Missouri, were fully stocked with newly released books in March. “All of a sudden, they just became décor,” she said.
Still, owners pivoted as quickly as they could. “These independent bookstore owners are just tenacious,” French said. Owners suddenly found themselves arranging curbside pickups, shipping thousands of online orders, and staging completely virtual events.
Many factors boosted sales just when stores needed them. Customers flooded online ordering systems, many in the hope of helping their local stores, others simply desperate for something to read during lockdown. Amazon started prioritizing essential goods over things like books, giving an edge to independent stores. Annie Philbrick’s online orders at Bank Square Books in Mystic, Connecticut, and Savoy Bookshop & Café in Westerly, Rhode Island, are about 10 times what they were each year for the past five. Michael Fusco-Straub, co-owner of Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, New York, sold 50,000 books during his city’s lockdown.
Then the Black Lives Matter protests over the death of George Floyd took off, prompting another deluge of purchases as readers were eager to get their hands on books about race and racism. “The summer was mostly fulfilling ... anti-racism orders,” Kleindienst said.
The switch to online and curbside ordering saved bookstores from ruin. But it wasn’t easy, nor was it enjoyable. “It started to feel like a fulfillment warehouse for widgets,” said Steven Salardino, manager of Skylight Books in Los Angeles, California. “It really took a toll on us psychologically.” What kept him going, he said, was getting notes in online orders saying thank you.
Philbrick took it upon herself to pick up books from her two stores and drive them to customers’ homes. “I was a UPS driver for a month or so,” she said. She would hang bags of books on their doors, ring the bell, and walk back to her car. She even drove an hour and a half out of town to bring books to a couple who would leave her snack bags in thanks. “That was a pleasure,” she said.
In many ways, online ordering is the antithesis of what independent bookstores are. “We are a community space that thrived with that in-person, face-to-face conversation about ideas and literature,” said Hilary Gustafson, owner of Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her store typically stages 300 events a year, and the in-store ones pack 50 people “elbow to elbow,” she said. Now, she’s been entirely focused on online orders, which requires “10 times as much work for a sale of one book.”
Stores like Gustafson’s quickly moved their programming — author events, book clubs, classes — to online platforms. But it’s a difficult and often money-losing way to do them. Stores typically make money from free events when people buy books, often getting them autographed. Online, it’s different. “Sales are down even though audience levels are, in some cases, up,” Graham said. Readers also now have a vast array of stores’ events to choose from because they’re all online. “The competition has just become fierce,” Philbrick said.
Despite the many hurdles small-business owners faced in getting PPP loans, all of the stores I spoke to were able to secure loans, and the money was vital. “The thing that got us this far and avoided bankruptcy was the PPP money,” said Bradley Graham, co-owner of Politics and Prose in Washington, DC. Even so, it was gone within a couple of months.
Other money came from unexpected places. Philbrick got $5,000 from Spanx, which was offering grants to women-owned businesses. That, she said, was a turning point of sorts, when she realized that not only would she have a cushion to get through, but “we’re all in this together trying to figure this out.”
Some customers even gave their local bookstores donations in the hope of keeping them alive. Gustafson’s store launched a GoFundMe, which was a “lifeline,” she said. She raised more there than she got in PPP money.
But at this point, most of the money has dried up. “Given the current level of economic activity, it’s not realistic to think that bookstores or other retail businesses can, on their own, make a go of it,” Graham said with a heavy sigh. “More federal assistance is needed so long as the pandemic persists.”
Some stores are doing as well as they would otherwise expect thanks to loyal customers and a thirst for books as people stay closer to home. But those factors aren’t making the numbers work for everyone.
Vroman’s, which bills itself as the oldest and largest independent bookstore in Southern California, has warned that without a significant increase in sales, its 126-year tenure will come to a close. Powell’s has exhausted its PPP loan and isn’t making enough in sales to support the business. Politics & Prose is still not breaking even, and the store will need to make enough in the next few months to have a cushion headed into 2021. “It’s not a sustainable position to continue to operate in the red,” Graham said. Laughing, he added, “You don’t need a degree in anything to understand that fact.”
A number of stores have opened their doors simply to remain as financially solvent as possible. When we spoke, Gustafson was preparing to open with limited hours and days. “Our rent is still due and we still have payables,” she said. “We want to survive, so it’s like, ‘How do we make this work?’”
“We face this tension between the need to welcome in more customers for the holiday shopping season in order to at least get back in the black,” Graham said, “while at the same time being very careful not to create a public health hazard.”
Public health has been at the forefront of the minds of owners who have reopened as fully as possible. All stores have reduced their hours as well as their capacity. Everyone has installed Plexiglas barriers at cash registers and hand sanitizing stations throughout their stores. There’s crowd control not just to limit the number of shoppers but to ensure that masks are worn correctly. Many stores have rearranged their layouts so customers don’t have to squeeze by each other in tight aisles.
Hall-Elkins went even further, installing UV lights and ionizing cleaners in all three of her HVAC units, putting fans around the store, and keeping the door open as much as possible to better ventilate. She replaced her old carpets and installed touchless credit card systems.
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, New York, in May 2020, before reopening at limited capacity.
Owners have found themselves in entirely new roles, worried not just about their business’s finances but the health of their employees, their customers, and their own families. Hall-Elkins finds herself up late reading medical articles. “I’m in a heightened state of anxiety for sure,” she said. Laughing, she added, “I feel responsible for everybody’s life, and that’s a really weird thing to feel as a manager of a bookstore.”
Some have kept their doors closed. When we spoke in the first week of October, Kleindienst said she was planning to open that weekend by appointment and only after 6 pm. “Our staff really did not feel like they wanted people to be just walking in off the street and wandering around,” she explained. “It just didn’t seem like it was worth risking our lives.” She’s hoping that allowing a very select group of customers back in will be enough to keep the store afloat. But, she added, “I don’t see us opening the doors to walk-in traffic for quite a while.”
The holiday season will be crucial. Nearly every bookstore owner mentioned how important the season is normally — and therefore what it will mean now. Graham said the store typically makes anywhere from a quarter to a third of the whole year’s sales in December alone. “It’s an absolutely critical period.”
To help stores that need to see high sales without big crowds, the American Booksellers Association has begun a campaign urging consumers to shop early called “October Is the New December.” Other things will have to change, too. Normally, Salardino’s store offers gift-wrapping for a fee, and he’d have a long line of people waiting to have books wrapped. That’s not possible now.
One book could make or break the future for many stores: The first volume of President Barack Obama’s memoir will be released November 17. Not only is it destined to be a bestseller — the publisher ordered a first printing of 3 million copies — but it’s pricey, coming in at $45. “I literally think that that book is going to save a lot of stores,” Fusco-Straub said. His store will be ordering a whole pallet.
The future, of course, remains completely uncertain. It’s difficult just to plan ahead. Philbrick noted she’s ordering paperback copies of hardcover books that she struggled to sell during the shutdown, which means the data she typically relies on to predict future sales are almost useless. “As a business person, we’re all used to being able to forecast,” Powell said. But now, “we can’t see beyond a 30-day time horizon.”
Hall-Elkins worries that a virus spike or just cold weather will keep people home from holiday shopping. Then there’s what could happen with the election or the economy. The immediate pandemic-caused contraction appears to be turning into a full-blown recession. “We don’t know how much folks will be able to shop,” Powell noted. “Books aren’t ... groceries or rent. How much will people be willing to come out to our stores?”
Few owners were willing to contemplate what another complete shutdown would mean. “I don’t even know what we would do,” Hall-Elkins said. “We would probably be in pretty big trouble.”
Losing an independent bookstore is a huge blow to a community. “These are places where folks can come together to discuss what’s going on in the world, to also have a safe haven and a safe place for exploring new ideas,” French said. Bookstores “provide everything from sanctuary to just meditative spaces.” And they help keep an economy humming, retaining money in the local community and generating jobs and tax revenue.
Still, independent bookstores have been through a lot, including competition from big chains and Amazon. “People have been predicting the end of indie bookstores since the Great Depression,” said Kate Weiss, programs manager at BINC. Even with a pandemic, 30 bookstores have opened this year so far, although that’s still a far cry from the 104 that opened in 2019.
“We’re a stalwart bunch,” Philbrick said. “We’re just going to keep going. We’re not dead.”
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President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden participate in the final debate at Belmont University on October 22 in Nashville, Tennessee. | Jim Bourg/Pool/Getty Images
Joe Biden was a winner — as was moderator Kristen Welker.
The final debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, held on Thursday evening, was the first one of the entire campaign that actually felt like a debate.
The first debate was a chaotic disaster thanks to Trump’s constant interruptions; the second one didn’t happen because Trump refused to agree to debate virtually while he had Covid-19 (they had dueling town halls instead). This time around, better moderation and the handy use of a mute button allowed both candidates to express their thoughts — leading to a mix of actual substantive policy exchanges and less-than-coherent mudslinging about families and personal finance.
The format seems to have suited Biden, who seemed energized and on-target — getting in a number of strong attacks on Trump’s record on Covid-19, health care, and family separations. Trump was also better than he was in the first debate, where he came across as an unfit bully, but was outclassed on policy and unable to tell a particularly cogent story on the question of why Americans should care about Hunter Biden’s emails.
A deeper explanation follows of who won and who lost — and not just candidates.
During the primary and general election, Biden hasn’t particularly shined on the debate stage. His answers meander and he mixes up words in ways that take the sting out from attack lines. But on Thursday, Biden was sharper and more on target — allowing his strong qualities, his command over policy and his ability to connect with ordinary Americans, to shine through.
During the first segment debate about the pandemic, for example, Trump said “we’re learning to live with it.” Biden responded with a possibly rehearsed, but nonetheless devastating response — “he says that we’re learning to live with it, people are learning to die with it.”
He continued needling Trump about his refusal to take responsibility for pandemic policy, provoking the president into the most embarrassing stumble from either candidate in the entire debate: “I take full responsibility. It’s not my fault that it came here. It’s China’s fault.” It’s a line that you can bet will be in anti-Trump attack ad in very short order.
Biden was like this for much of the debate, clever and empathetic and even a little feisty.
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Joe Biden responds to questions during the final debate.
He got emotional about family separations (“violates every notion of who we are as a nation”), sounded a populist note on Trump’s obsession with markets (“‘the stock market is booming’ is his only measure of what’s happening”) and effectively hit Trump on his tenuous relationship with the truth (“I don’t know where he comes up with these numbers”). He even got in his favorite catchphrase — “there’s a reason why he’s bringing up all this malarkey.”
Was it an all-time great debate performance? No, I don’t think so.
But it was solid: strong when it really needed to be and certainly better than his opposition. With a lead of nearly 10 points in the national poll averages, that’s more than enough to call this a win for Biden.
— Zack Beauchamp
Loser: Donald Trump
It is perhaps telling that any praise of President Donald Trump’s performance on Twitter during Thursday night’s debate involved terms like “well-tempered” and “composed,” an indication that the biggest hurdle Trump faced was himself.
Trump appeared to take notes during the debate. He managed to avoid interrupting Joe Biden quite as much as in the last round. He was coherent and, as opposed to the first debate, he did not seem entirely out of control. This is the lowest of bars to clear, but he cleared it.
Sergio Flores/Getty Images
Teresa Martinez and her husband watch the final presidential debate from San Antonio, Texas.
Still, far too many of his references only made sense if you watch a lot of Fox News and/or spend a lot of time on right-leaning Twitter. There are viewers to whom “the Big Man” is obviously Joe Biden and “the laptop from hell” is clearly a device that allegedly belonged to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden (who is not, as far as we know, running for the White House), but most of these obscure references to the Trump campaign’s attacks on Hunter Biden likely flew over most viewers’ heads.
Trump could still win reelection. But currently, he is losing, in the polls and in the eyes of the public, as Covid-19 begins to surge (again) and stimulus negotiations falter (again). “Well-tempered” and “composed” aren’t enough to get it done — especially when the subjects Trump most wishes to discuss are ones largely disconnected from those that matter most to voters.
In sports, this is known as “working the refs.” If you yell at the refs, or in this case the media, enough, maybe they’ll back down and refuse to ask tough questions, or fact-check, or ask meaningful follow-ups. They’ll give you a break.
Jim Bourg/AFP via Getty Images
NBC News anchor Kristen Welker moderating the final debate.
Welker, aided by a mute button (see below) whose absence made the first debate such a disaster, was able to deftly move the debate between different topics. She allowed each candidate ample time to speak, without letting the debate devolve into the unstructured cacophony that Chris Wallace presided over in the first debate.
And she actually challenged the candidates when their responses didn’t add up. When Trump insisted a vaccine for Covid-19 will be ready by the end of the year, she pointed out, “Your own officials say it could take well into 2021” and asked him to clarify. When Joe Biden criticized Trump’s diplomacy with North Korea, she asked, “You said you wouldn’t meet with Kim Jong-un without preconditions. Are there any conditions under which you would meet with him?”
Moderating a debate with as mendacious a liar as Trump is almost impossibly difficult, and Welker wasn’t perfect at holding him to account. But she did quite well overall, and managed to perform in a way that both Biden and Trump supporters agreed was fair — an almost miraculous achievement.
—Dylan Matthews
Winner: The mute button
The first presidential debate didn’t go well. Pundits and journalists’ reviews ranged from “the worst presidential debate I have ever seen in my life” to “a shitshow.” And it was mostly due to Trump, who spent the entire debate interrupting Biden — making it impossible for Biden to get a point in and stifling any semblance of a coherent conversation.
In response, the presidential debate commission decided to use a mute button. The Associated Press explained the set-up:
A representative of the Commission on Presidential Debates — not the moderator — is supposed to ensure each candidate has two full minutes of uninterrupted time to deliver opening answers on six major topics, according to debate commission chair Frank Fahrenkopf. A member of each of the Trump and Biden campaigns was expected to monitor the person who controls the mute button backstage, Fahrenkopf told The Associated Press, noting that the button would not be used beyond the first four minutes of each topic.
That this was necessary at all was a testament to Trump’s disregard for basic norms. In previous presidential debates, from primaries to general elections, the candidates would disagree, but they would at least let each other speak. Trump shattered that basic decorum, leading to a disaster of a debate last month.
Still, the mute button worked. Thursday’s debate was much more productive and substantive (to the extent any debate with Trump can be). At the very least, both candidates had a chance to voice their respective visions for America, and the public was able to follow what was going on.
—German Lopez
Loser: Medicare-for-all
“I support private insurance.”
Biden was unequivocal. He’s not the Medicare-for-all candidate Trump is looking for.
The president tried to turn the health care tables on Biden again, accusing the Democratic nominee of supporting “socialized medicine.” He wanted to lump Biden together with the more progressive Democrats who support a single-payer health care system.
The former vice president wasn’t having it. He wanted to remind voters he’d beaten several candidates — including the godfather of Medicare-for-all, Sen. Bernie Sanders — by promising to preserve private insurance.
“The reason why I had such a fight with 20 candidates for the nomination was I support private insurance,” Biden said. “Not one single person with private insurance would lose their insurance under my plan, nor did they under Obamacare.”
Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Biden speaks during the final presidential debate.
To be clear: Some Americans had a private plan canceled when the ACA’s new rules took effect (but most of them qualified for new coverage); Biden’s plan as written would allow people who get private insurance through their work to enroll in a government-run public option, but only if they choose.
But it is certainly true that Biden was running as the candidate who wanted to build on the current system, not replace it.
Trump has tried to turn Medicare-for-all into an election-year bogeyman, part of his strategy to make Biden look like a stalking horse for the left. But Biden keeps rebutting that argument with a simple truth: He doesn’t support Medicare-for-all. His plan is to build on Obamacare with a plan that the Urban Institute estimates to provide insurance to every legal resident in the United States, including 25 million currently uninsured people.
At Thursday night’s debate, he said he’d even have a name for it: “Bidencare.”
—Dylan Scott
Winner: New York
Trump would like you to think that New York is very, very bad, always and including during Thursday’s debate.
“If you go and look at what’s happened to New York, it’s a ghost town. It’s a ghost town,” President Trump said during the debate. He said the city that he was born and raised in was “wonderful” for so many years, but now it’s “dying,” because everyone’s leaving New York.
So here’s the thing: New York certainly has had its problems, and like anywhere it’s not perfect. But at least judging from the view from my Brooklyn apartment, things are kind of fine?
Noam Galai/Getty Images
People wear protective face masks outside Beacon Theatre on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City on September 27.
New York City was hit hard early on in the pandemic in a way that was painful and heartbreaking. But the city and state have gone to great lengths to get the virus under control and, by and large, have been successful. New York has flattened the curve, and it’s stayed there, with leaders now focusing on so-called “hot spots” where cases are spiking.
On the economic front, yes, it’s difficult, and there’s no denying businesses are being hit hard. But the city is resilient. That said, cities and states across the country, red and blue, need economic help from the federal government right now — help the president could make happen.
During the pandemic, we’ve seen a lot of finger-pointing. If only this state had acted faster, this mayor. And early on in the outbreak, New York was deemed the “bad place.” Now, the city’s doing better, but it’s heartbreaking to see it spread to places like Wisconsin and South Dakota. Maybe if we hadn’t treated this like a New York problem and instead a United States problem early on, could things have been different?
On Thursday, Biden brought home the important point that it doesn’t matter which state people are in to gauge how good or bad they’re doing on the pandemic or how much people should care about them. “They’re all Americans,” he said.
It’s a lesson the president should learn.
—Emily Stewart
Loser: Senate Republicans
Biden made a pointed observation about the reality of stimulus negotiations: Despite Trump’s repeated claims that he wants to “go bigger” on more aid, he hasn’t even been able to get his own party onboard.
When pressed about why there wasn’t another stimulus package even as millions of Americans grapple with unemployment, evictions, and business closures, Trump said that he wanted to get an expansive bill done — and tried to cast blame on Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats.
Biden, however, had a ready retort.
“The Republican leader in the United States Senate said he can’t pass it,” Biden said plainly. “He will not be able to pass it. He does not have Republican votes. Why isn’t [Trump] talking to his Republican friends?”
Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (center) speaks during a news conference following the weekly Senate Republican policy luncheon on October 20, 2020 in Washington, DC.
Biden’s statement spoke to one of the pervasive dynamics of the ongoing stimulus impasse. Throughout it, not only has Trump been an unreliable negotiator — even calling off talks via Twitter at one point — he’s never gotten the full backing of his party.
Senate Republicans earlier this summer were already dismissing a comprehensive stimulus option out of concern about adding to the national debt — and potential backlash from base voters down the line. More recently, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has tried to discourage a larger compromise prior to the election.
Biden’s remarks were a forceful reframing of the blame game over the stimulus.
—Li Zhou
Loser: Social justice
Biden and Trump effectively avoided answering nearly every question about race and the Black Lives Matter movement at the debate. Instead of taking a moment to discuss how they’d combat inequality, the candidates pointed fingers in a game of “who’s more racist than whom.”
“I can’t even see the audience ... but I am the least racist person in this room,” Trump said, staring out into the dark.
“He pours fuel on every single racist fire,” Biden retorted, after defending his role in crafting the 1994 crime bill and clarifying that he did not use the term “super predators” to describe young Black men.
Since late May, millions of Americans have rallied in protest of police brutality and systemic racism following the police killings of Black people like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, making Black Lives Matter the biggest protest movement in American history. Though protesters have called for the defunding of the police, this rhetoric has not made its way to the debate stage. Instead, Trump has emphasized law and order in response to the protests and Biden has simplified the problem of systemic racism in policing to “a few bad apples.”
Jason Whitman/NurPhoto/Getty Images
Demonstrators march during a Black Lives Matter rally in Cincinnati, Ohio, in June.
Though asked why he called Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hate,” Trump was given space to keep pushing the lie that he’s been the best president for Black America since Abraham Lincoln. He also claimed that the first time he heard about the Black Lives Matter movement was when protesters apparently chanted “pigs in a blanket” in response to police officers — the only moment in the debate when the president acknowledged the movement.
Biden, to be fair, tried his best to articulate his newfound vision of criminal justice — people not being locked up for drug use and fully-funded community policing — but it felt like too little, too late.
—Fabiola Cineas
Loser: China
The question of which candidate would be tougher on China has been a constant throughline in this election. That was on full display at the debate.
I mean, really, China came up a lot. You’d think that would make it a winner, but if anything it showed how what may be the next president’s biggest foreign policy challenge has become a punching bag.
President Trump is much of the reason China got a lot of airtime. It feels like years ago (well, this summer) when he tried to make “Beijing Biden” a thing, but Trump has tried to make his tough-on-China policies a centerpiece of his campaign. Among those, he touts his trade war with China and his pushback on China’s handling of the coronavirus.
Biden, meanwhile, tried to make the case that his administration would get China to play by the international rules. “Not like he has done,” Biden said of Trump. “He has caused the deficit to China go up, not down, with China, up not down.” The vice president didn’t give specifics on how he would get China to play the rules at the debate, but Biden has already made it clear that he wants to reassert the US as a Pacific power.
Otherwise, it was a lot of familiar territory. Trump, once again, tried to deflect from his failure to contain the coronavirus pandemic by blaming China for the virus’s spread, saying “it was not my fault” that the pandemic came here. “It’s China’s fault.”
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
President Trump responds to moderator Kristen Welker during the final presidential debate.
Biden fired back by citing Trump’s praise of Chinese President Xi Jinping over the early handling of the outbreak. They wrangled over Trump’s China tariffs. Trump tried to claim that China was paying billions in tariffs; Biden, in an effective exchange, rightly said that wasn’t true.
Trump also brought up China’s windmills, for some reason. Biden, at least, called out China for meddling in US elections.
But beyond policy, many of the oddest — and hardest to follow — exchanges on China came over allegations of personal financial ties to Beijing. Trump tried to argue that Biden wasn’t tough on China because of business ties his son Hunter had there — and that somehow Biden made money off the deal.
Biden denied those attacks (and there’s no evidence to support them), and then flipped it on Trump, bringing up New York Times reporting that revealed Trump had a previously unreported bank account in China. It was a confusing exchange if you’re not totally immersed in all of the latest drama, but the main takeaway seemed to be: doing business in China is bad.
Taken together, China probably took the most hits outside of the two candidates on the stage. Tensions with China have escalated sharply in recent months, sometimes likened to a “Cold War.” How the next president will fix or change that might not be so clear from tonight’s debate — but an easing of tensions with China doesn’t look likely right now, no matter who wins in November.
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.
Chris Wallace on the set of his Fox News show in 2017 in Washington, DC. | Paul Morigi/Getty Images
Chris Wallace, who moderated the first debate, was “jealous.”
Fox News’s initial reaction to the final debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden was surprise: Surprise at how well moderator Kristen Welker did, and surprise at how well the candidates matched up.
Chris Wallace, the anchor of Fox News Sunday who moderated the infamous interruption-filled first debate, immediately said how “jealous” he was with how tamely tonight’s events proceeded.
“First of all, I’m jealous,” Wallace said. “I would have liked to have been able to moderate that debate and to get a real exchange of views instead of hundreds of interruptions.”
Bret Baier, another top anchor at the conservative network, added, “It was a debate of substance.” Compared to the first iteration, that’s true. This debate got into the weeds on how to handle the coronavirus, climate change, health care, and even a bit on foreign policy. And without so many interruptions — mainly from the president — both candidates were able to make their pitches to voters.
That Trump mostly kept his cool is what led senior political analyst Brit Hume to praise him, though he noted Biden met the president blow for blow.
“I thought Trump gave his best debate performance perhaps ever — but I think the vice president, the former vice president, fought him to at least a draw,” Hume said in his initial reaction. “I don’t know if this debate will change the state of the race. I think probably not.”
Of course, Fox News was still Fox News. The channel tweeted out portions of the debate that focused on Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s business dealings, which Trump allies are trying to spin up into a scandal to hurt the Democratic nominee. And Sean Hannity, the prominent talk show host who’s close with Trump, spent much of his opening monologue bashing Biden as a bad, corrupt candidate.
But as far as initial reactions go — Wallace feeling jealous, Baier happy with the substance, and Hume calling the race a draw — perhaps the real surprise was how normal Fox News seemed right after the debate.
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.
President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during the final presidential debate on October 22, 2020 in Nashville, Tennessee.
The mask slips.
Though he lied a lot, President Donald Trump generally came across better during Thursday’s second and final presidential debate with Joe Biden than he did during the first, when his constant interruptions and unhinged behavior rendered it unwatchable (and ultimately hurt him in the polls). But one moment revealed the inhumanity at the core of his politics.
On the topic of immigration, Trump defended his administration’s strict immigrant detention policies by claiming that only people with “the lowest IQ” follow the law by showing up for court proceedings.
Perhaps sensing that he was about to say something unfortunate, Trump seemed to catch himself while the words were slipping out of his mouth — but it was too late. Here’s the clip:
"Only the reaaaaaallllllly-- I hate to say this, but those with the lowest IQ. They might come back." -- Trump pic.twitter.com/RWfbAt68ff
Not only is the idea that only less intelligent people follow the law corrosive to the rule of law, but the specific claim Trump made is entirely false. As my colleague Nicole Narea detailed when Trump made similar claims in January of this year, almost all immigrants show up for hearings:
About 99 percent of asylum seekers who were not detained or who were previously released from immigration custody showed up for their hearings over the last year, according to new data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, a think tank that tracks data in the immigration courts.
Studies from previous years have also disproven the idea that most migrants will choose to live in the US without authorization rather than see their immigration cases through. But it’s nevertheless a central idea in Trump’s immigration policies, including those that aim to keep migrants in Mexico rather than letting them walk free in the US.
The immigration part of the debate in general didn’t go well for Trump. It began with him struggling to downplay new findings from lawyers appointed by a federal judge that the parents of 545 children — who were separated from their parents as a result of his administration’s “zero tolerance” policy — can’t be found.
“These children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they used to use them to get into our country,” Trump claimed, without evidence.
Q: The US can't locate the parents of more than 500 children who were separated from them. How will they be reunited?
TRUMP: "These children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they used to use them to get into our country." pic.twitter.com/kDvTCwEOXR
After Biden pointed out that “these 500 plus kids came with parents” and the child separation policy “makes us a laughingstock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation,” Trump replied by trying to pin blame for his administration’s policy on Obama and Biden. But as Dara Lind explained for Vox in 2018, there’s really no comparison.
It’s not that no family was ever separated at the border under the Obama administration. But former Obama administration officials specify that families were separated only in particular circumstances — for instance, if a father was carrying drugs — that went above and beyond a typical case of illegal entry.
To be clear, the Obama administration’s record on immigration isn’t necessarily great either — as of last year Obama still held the record for most deportations. But the Obama/Biden policy was only to separate families when there was a reason to do so. Trump did it broadly and thought it was a deterrent. And as his comments during Thursday’s debate revealed, he’s never been particularly concerned about the humanity of those affects.
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.
President Donald Trump debates Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on October 22 in Nashville, Tennessee. | Jim Bourg/Pool/Getty Images
Separating families was one of Trump’s cruelest immigration policies.
During Thursday night’s presidential debate, President Donald Trump was asked to answer for the 545 migrant children who may never see their parents again after his administration separated them from their families at the US-Mexico border.
But the president instead took the opportunity to air his xenophobic views of immigrants, falsely claiming that the affected children were brought to the US by smugglers known as “coyotes,” cartels, gangs and “lots of bad people.” He also argued that the Obama administration built the cages that his administration later used to take the children into immigration custody, and claimed that the children were treated well while in those facilities.
“They are so well taken care of,” he said. “They’re in facilities that were so clean.”
All of the 545 children, who are now party to a lawsuit in federal court, came to the US with their parents. Many of them have been separated from their parents since 2017, before the Trump administration began separating immigrant families routinely, hoping to deter immigrants from crossing the border without authorization.
The conditions under which the children were held drew widespread condemnation in 2018. Some were placed in US Customs and Border Protection holding cells that got so cold that they were called “hieleras” — Spanish for “freezer” — where they slept on concrete floors with nothing but thin Mylar blankets to keep them warm. They often lacked basic hygiene products, including soap and toothbrushes, and were not provided regular meals and snacks as required by agency guidelines.
“It makes us a laughing stock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation,” Biden said of the policy on Thursday. “It’s criminal.”
Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union said that they still cannot find the parents of 283 children despite thorough on-the-ground searches in Central America, and don’t expect to be able to reach them by telephone, meaning that the families may never be reunited.
The children have been released to sponsors, who are typically family members or friends, but also include foster families. Their parents, two-thirds of whom were deported before a federal judge ordered that they be identified and reunited with their children in 2018, either have not been located or have not been successfully contacted. The group Justice in Motion is continuing to work to locate the parents in Mexico and Central America, though that has become more difficult amid the pandemic.
Trump offered no plan to help reunite the families on Thursday.
The US government had a policy of separating families — despite officials’ denials
Beginning in mid-2017, the federal government ran a pilot program in El Paso, Texas, under which it began filing criminal charges against anyone who crossed the border without authorization, including parents with minor children — even though many of them intended to seek asylum in the US, which is legal.
Parents were sent to immigration detention to await deportation proceedings. Their children, meanwhile, were sent to separate facilities operated by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement and, in some cases, released to other family members in the US or to foster homes. (Previous administrations, in most cases, would have simply released the families from detention.)
The Trump administration formalized the policy in May 2018, which it dubbed the “zero tolerance policy.” At least 5,000 families were separated before a California federal court ordered the federal government in June 2018 to reunify the families affected and end the policy.
The federal government, however, neglected to link the children to their parents in its databases, making the reunification process difficult, especially in the hundreds of cases of children who were under the age of 5, including one who was just 4 months old.
Unlike the Trump administration, the Obama administration did not have a policy of separating families, but it did try to detain families together on a wide scale and deport them as quickly as possible during the 2014 migrant crisis. Cecilia Muñoz, director of the Obama administration’s Domestic Policy Council, told the New York Times in 2018 that the administration had briefly considered pursuing family separations but quickly dropped the idea.
“We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea,” she told the Times. “The morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”
Senior Trump administration officials, including former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have repeatedly denied that they pursued a policy of family separation. Nielsen told Congress in December 2018 that the administration “never had a policy for family separation.” It was later revealed that she had, in fact, signed a memo greenlighting the practice, which clearly stated that DHS could “permissibly direct the separation of parents or legal guardians and minors held in immigration detention so that the parent or legal guardian can be prosecuted.”
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the administration has tried to carry out what immigrant advocates call a new kind of family separation. It pressured parents already detained within the US to voluntarily separate from their children by presenting them with what the administration has called a “binary choice”: Either allow their children to be placed with relatives or a foster family in the US while the parents remain detained, or stay together as a family in indefinite detention and risk contracting the coronavirus.
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.
President Donald Trump answers a question during the second debate of the 2020 election cycle in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 22. | Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images
Donald Trump can be funny — but also misses the joke when it’s on him.
During the final presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday, the president apparently got tripped up by a joke made by his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden. In a section discussing race in America and how Black families have to give “the talk” to their children about interactions with the police, President Trump started off with what is often his typical defense. He pointed to Biden’s role in the 1994 crime bill, touted his own record on race, and claimed he’s the biggest gift to Black people in America since Lincoln.
“Nobody has done more for the black community than Donald Trump. And if you look, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln,” he said, before adding, “I’m the least racist person in this room.”
When Biden was asked to respond, he began with an obvious joke and a hit: “Abraham Lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history.”
Except Trump didn’t get the joke. After Biden finished his response, Trump said, “You made a reference to ‘Abraham Lincoln here.’ Where did that come in?”
“You said you’re Abraham Lincoln,” Biden said, again, continuing the joke.
“No, no, I said not since Abraham Lincoln has anybody done what I’ve done for the Black community. I didn’t say I’m Abraham Lincoln,” Trump said.
"I'm the least racist person in this room," Pres. Trump says.
In case you are confused: Donald Trump is not Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States who died on April 15, 1865.
There are a couple of things going on here. For one thing, Trump is, indeed, not the best thing to happen to Black America since Lincoln. Per my colleague at Vox, Fabiola Cineas:
While Trump may be confident in his claim of having done the most for Black Americans, his record begs to differ. He has repeatedly cited his efforts on criminal justice reform and the economy as the reasons he’s been the best president for Black America since Lincoln — who signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people in the Confederacy, and clearing the way for the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery across the US — but rarely does Trump put his supposed “wins” in context. For example, Trump often tries to take credit for a decline in violent crime, though the downward trend predates him by many years.
But beyond that, the president is weird at jokes. He can be and often is funny on the campaign trail — in a way that his critics, so emphatic about catching him in some sort of pickle, sometimes fail to understand. But in this case, it was Trump who wasn’t in on the joke. He often plays the role of the insult comic — Crooked Hillary, Sleepy Joe, Crazy Bernie — and on Thursday, he missed the subtle wink aimed at him. And so, he was left explaining that he is aware he is not a person who has been dead for 150 years.
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.
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President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during the final presidential debate on October 22, 2020 in Nashville, Tennessee.
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President Donald Trump answers a question during the second debate of the 2020 election cycle in Nashville, Tennessee, on October 22. | Morry Gash-Pool/Getty Images
