Even by the outsized standards of the past five years, the political news over the weekend before the first Presidential debate had a totalizing quality. Nothing defied its grip. President Donald Trump announced his nominee for the Supreme Court, the deeply conservative Amy Coney Barrett, and said he thought it is “certainly possible” that the full Court would overturn Roe v. Wade. He followed the pick by insisting that his rival Joe Biden, the seventy-seven-year-old former Vice-President, was taking drugs to sharpen his public performance, and demanding that both candidates submit to a drug test before they take the stage, on Tuesday. Brad Parscale, the six-foot-eight, Ferrari-driving Web-development professional who, until earlier this summer, had been working as Trump’s campaign manager, was taken into police custody in South Florida, after his wife fled their mansion and called 911, saying that Parscale was armed and threatening to hurt himself. On Sunday evening, the Times published perhaps the biggest investigative story of the Trump era, revealing that the President, by most estimates a billionaire, had not paid any federal income taxes in ten of the fifteen years before 2016; that the I.R.S. is investigating the legitimacy of a $72.9-million tax refund he claimed in 2010; and that, in 2016, as he was campaigning for the Presidency as a paragon of business success and a friend of the common man, he was paying precisely seven hundred and fifty dollars in taxes. All this took place just a few days after Trump had refused to commit to transferring power should he lose the election.
Viewers tuning in to the first Presidential debate, on Tuesday, might have a faint feeling that they have been here before. News of the “Access Hollywood” tape broke on October 7, 2016, just two days before the second Presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton. To deflect attention, Trump first claimed that Bill Clinton had “said far worse to me on the golf course” and then held a press conference with three women who had accused President Clinton of sexual misconduct. The polls taken after the debate found that viewers thought Clinton had “won,” but the victory turned out to have a shorter half-life than Trump’s bullying performance. Trump interrupted Clinton to say that, if he were President, “you’d be in jail.” The central image from the event, and perhaps the entire campaign, remains the moment when Trump left his lectern to stand directly behind Clinton as she spoke, looming over her. Clinton might have outperformed Trump, but she hadn’t moved him out of the center of the screen. The debate, and the election, were still all about him.
This year, little is new in the Trump campaign. As he prepared for the debate, in which he means to stand for the conservative heartland against the élitism of big cities, he surrounded himself with familiar advisers: his son-in-law Jared Kushner; the disgraced former New Jersey governor Chris Christie; Christie’s former aide Bill Stepien, who is now Trump’s campaign manager; and Jason Miller, a communications official from the first Trump campaign, who resigned after impregnating a subordinate and then alienating her by pushing for an abortion. (Miller has denied the latter claim.) As in 2016, Trump has been staging large celebratory rallies; his allies have used news footage of Black Lives Matter protests to suggest that the mob would rule in “Biden’s America,” as if Trump were not currently the one in charge. By warning repeatedly that the election would be stolen, and refusing to commit to a transition of power, Trump has made it easy to imagine a very dark November; he has made it hard to picture the next four years. If the first Trump campaign had the effect of crowding out the American past, the second has had the effect of dimming the future, so that all that is left is an overwhelming present, with a revolving set of subjects but a familiar pair of antagonists. That has been the central experience of the Trump era; it also reflects the format of cable news.
A difference between the 2016 and 2020 campaigns is that the real world keeps intruding on this one in a way it rarely did four years ago. Tuesday night’s debate will be held in Cleveland, where, outside the makeshift studio, the number of families seeking food weekly from the Greater Cleveland Food Bank has nearly doubled since the end of July, when the federal supplement to unemployment benefits ran out. Meanwhile, the Cleveland Clinic is leading an extraordinary effort against the coronavirus—swab teams sent to the sites of small outbreaks, to quickly test for the virus’s spread, and a community-testing program (assisted by church and community leaders and the Ohio National Guard) meant to insure that hospitals are not missing potential sites of transmission has led to a statewide positivity rate of 2.8 per cent. None of this suffering or accomplishment has made it onto the main stage of the Trump events I’ve watched. There have been no celebrations of first responders, no discussions of the children kept from an education because of the stringent lockdowns that the President opposes, no emphasis on the many acts of charity that have helped to alleviate suffering. Last week, at a rally at the Toledo airport, the President insisted that COVID-19 “affects elderly people with heart problems and other problems.” Beyond that, he went on, “it affects virtually nobody.” Two hundred and five thousand people have died in the United States. The President is not trying to spin the pandemic so much as ignore it.
Trump wants voters to forget about or disbelieve the facts of the pandemic. Biden, by contrast, has emphasized them. But there is a deeper strategic tension between the two campaigns. Trump wants a television stage so encompassing that it subsumes the experience of a suffering country, while Biden wants to open the windows and let the news of the rest of the world in. The Times’ tax investigation provides a helpful gloss on what Trump did well in the years when he was becoming a political figure and also what he didn’t. In that time span, the Times found, Trump had invested in “a collection of businesses, mostly golf courses, that in the years since have steadily devoured cash.” He was able to sustain the losses because of his success as a TV producer—his half-share of “The Apprentice” made him four hundred and twenty-seven million dollars.
It hasn’t been widely noticed, because his campaign has been one of the quietest in modern history, but Joe Biden has been good lately. Plenty of Republicans (mockingly) and Democrats (anxiously) have wondered about what the former Vice-President has been doing while spending so much of the spring and summer assiduously obeying coronavirus restrictions in his Delaware home. It turns out he has been watching the President. “Oh, he loves his rallies, but the next time he holds one look closely,” Biden said last week, in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, in a speech that seemed an obvious trial run for the debate. “Trump keeps his distance from anyone in the rally. The folks who come are packed in tight as they can be . . . but not Trump.” Without naming her, Biden cited Olivia Troye, a former national-security adviser to Mike Pence, who has told reporters that the President said a good thing about the pandemic was that he no longer had to shake his supporters’ hands. “Now we know what he really thinks of the people who come to his rallies,” Biden said.
In Manitowoc, the audience was characteristically small (citing the pandemic, the Biden campaign has generally limited his crowds to fewer than twenty-five), and the candidate spoke through a thin, blue surgical mask, which drew attention to his small, worried eyes. What Biden seemed to have realized by that time was that, even if he talked only about the coronavirus, he could say everything about Trump that he wanted to say. It wasn’t just an issue of Trump being incompetent, or hostile to science. “You think, like Trump, that fifteen dollars an hour is too much for America’s essential workers?” Biden asked. “You try to take away health care from twenty million Americans in the middle of this pandemic?” Biden dwelled on Trump’s insistence, to Bob Woodward, that he had kept quiet this winter about what he knew of the virus—that it was lethal and would spread widely—because he was afraid of causing panic. Biden argued that the “panic” Trump was most worried about was a panic in the market, which might imperil his Presidency. The virus gave Biden a way to talk about the constant blur of the news, and of what it obscures. “What worries me now is, we’ve been living with this pandemic for so long, I worry we’re risking becoming numb to the toll it has taken on us and our country and communities,” Biden said. “We can’t lose the ability to feel the sorrow and the loss and the anger for so many lives lost.”
Five weeks before the election, it’s become a little easier to see Biden’s strategy. His campaign is focussed on the Midwestern belt where the Clinton campaign, by most accounts, lost the election. The polls look promising in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Two polls last week put Biden slightly ahead of Trump in Ohio, a state that Clinton lost by eight points. Biden will travel there on a train tour after Tuesday night’s debate, a trip that will also take him through western Pennsylvania. Ever since a CNN town hall that he did in his home town earlier this month, Biden has been contrasting his upbringing with Trump’s gilded one: “Scranton versus Park Avenue.” It may not be the most original closing pitch, but it is the reason that Democratic primary voters picked Biden, when more transformative possibilities were available. An important question in any Presidential debate is how the challenger will be defined. In this case, is Biden a defender of the pressured middle class or just a representative of the Democratic establishment? Win that argument, and Biden can make a second one: that the material stakes of this election are bigger than the symbolic ones, and that not all events in American life can be processed in the frenetic format of cable news. There are many more meaningful ways to frame this election than whether you are for or against Trump.
Read More About the 2020 Election
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- To understand the path Donald Trump has taken to the 2020 election, look at what he has provided the executive class.
- What happens if Trump fights the election results?
- The refusal by Mitch McConnell to rein in Trump is looking riskier than ever.
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