1. NY Times Editorial: Elect Joe Biden, America

When they go to the polls this year, voters aren’t just choosing a leader. They’re deciding what America will be. They’re deciding whether they favor the rule of law, how the government will help them weather the greatest economic calamity in generations, whether they want government to enable everyone to have access to health care, whether they consider global warming a serious threat, whether they believe that racism should be treated as a public policy problem.

Mr. Biden isn’t a perfect candidate and he wouldn’t be a perfect president. But politics is not about perfection. It is about the art of the possible and about encouraging America to embrace its better angels. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/opinion/joe-biden-2020-nytimes-endorsement.html

2. Jonathan Chait: Trump Turning Down Pelosi’s Stimulus Deal Is the Worst Political Blunder in History

In May, the House of Representatives passed a $3 trillion economic relief bill. Over the next four and a half months, Republicans in the White House and Senate dithered, alternating between good-faith engagement and lethargy. The apparent final blow came in the form of a series of tweets by President Trump announcing an end to negotiations.

It is possible Trump — who just yesterday declared his desire to cut a deal — intends this as one of his “clever” negotiating ploys, enabling him to turn around and make a deal that he can paint as a capitulation by his panicked foes. But even if that happens, the window to boost the economy in time to help him (obviously the only consideration Trump cares about) is closing fast. Walking away from the extended hand of an opposition party willing to pump trillions of dollars into the economy may go down as the single greatest political blunder in the history of presidential elections. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/trump-stimulus-deal-coronavirus-worst-mistake-president.html

3. Greg Sargent: Trump reveals why his corrupt ‘October surprise’ scheme will likely fail

When President Trump released videos showcasing his return to the White House on Monday evening as a glorious personal triumph, he showed us exactly how he hopes to salvage his reelection hopes — but also revealed why his planned “October surprise” will likely fail.

Trump portrayed his return as a moment of extraordinary personal valor. One video displayed his arrival by helicopter as akin to that of a conquering hero. The other showed him addressing (prematurely, perhaps) his vanquishing of the virus, declaring: “Don’t be afraid of it.”

But, crucially, Trump also insisted that we will “beat it” because “we have the best medicines,” and “the vaccines are coming momentarily.”

Trump’s endgame is to offset months of towering failures on the coronavirus by showcasing his personal defeat of it as proof that he was right to push the country back to normalcy — while also announcing a vaccine, or at least dangling one as imminent.

But Trump has already blown it on this strategy. He failed to treat this as an occasion to admit error, to show humility, to demonstrate basic humanity toward the more than 200,000 Americans who have been killed by the virus and the many millions who have been negatively impacted.

Instead, Trump reverted to narcissistic form by hyping his own alleged triumph over the virus as having grand, overarching significance.

This helps all but ensure that majorities will see any vaccine announcement as being all about him — as naked subversion of the national interest and more corrupt manipulation of the levers of government toward his own political ends. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/06/trump-reveals-why-his-corrupt-october-surprise-scheme-will-likely-fail/

4. Dana Milbank: Americans showed Trump compassion. He repaid us with contempt.

Americans of all political stripes wished President Trump well in his battle with covid-19. Now he is repaying our compassion with reckless disregard and callous contempt for the well-being of anybody but himself.

Trump, announcing via Twitter on Monday afternoon that he was ending his hospitalization at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after three days, told Americans that the pandemic is no big deal. “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life,” he wrote. “I feel better than I did 20 years ago!” he added.

A more selfish man has never occupied his high office. He received a cutting-edge treatment, monoclonal antibodies, unavailable to virtually all other Americans. He received an antiviral, remdesivir, that is rationed for ordinary Americans. He required oxygen and steroids.

Yet Trump has the audacity to tell Americans the virus is no biggie. No doubt the families of the 209,000 dead are greatly reassured. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/05/americans-showed-trump-compassion-he-repaid-us-with-contempt/

5. Andrew Sullivan: Reality Ends The Reality Show

Like all tyrants, Trump lives in an alternate universe where his will, tempered only by his whim, determines everything. And like all tyrants, Trump will eventually be defeated by the distance between his universe and the real one. The question has always been how long that would take, and how much damage would be done in the process. But the toll has been piling up of late. 205,000 dead, a stalled economy, a broken constitution, a bankrupt treasury, a ravaged environment, and the most toxic political culture in memory have not, exactly, made America great “again”. And, with his tax returns now public, the reality that Trump is a failed businessman and tax dodger is as inescapable as the truth that he is a serial sexual abuser. https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/reality-ends-the-reality-show

6. Jonathan Capehart: Joe Biden spoke for millions when he told Trump to ‘shut up, man’

President Trump’s performance at the first presidential debate was so petulant and disgusting that it has taken me this long to put my thoughts to pixels. It’s not like I was surprised by what he did. Trump has been barking lies and obscenities at the American people since June 16, 2015. What was breathtaking on Tuesday was the ferocity of his bullying. It was a Brett Kavanaugh-like performance that reeked of desperation.

The chaos in Cleveland reinforced my belief that Trump will do everything to win. He’ll do anything to maintain his shield from criminal prosecution and to continue monetizing the presidency — perhaps to make enough money to pay the $421 million in debts and loans that are coming due within the next four years, according to the New York Times. Trump is as pathetic as he is dangerous. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/01/joe-biden-spoke-millions-when-he-told-trump-shut-up-man/

7. Jim Rutenberg: How President Trump’s false claim of voter fraud is being used to disenfranchise Americans.

As the 2020 presidential election nears, it is becoming clear that the Trump administration and the Republican Party are not just looking at but heavily investing in the largely nonexistent problem of voter fraud. A New York Times Magazine investigation, based on a review of thousands of pages of court records and interviews with more than 100 key players — lawyers, activists and current and former government officials — found an extensive effort to gain partisan advantage by aggressively promoting the false claim that voter fraud is a pervasive problem. The effort takes its most prominent form in the president’s own public statements, which relentlessly promote the false notion that voter fraud is rampant.

This story did not originate with Trump. It has its roots in Reconstruction-era efforts to suppress the votes of newly freed slaves and came roaring back to life after the passage of the Voting Rights Act. But it is reaching an apex now, as a president who lost the popular vote in 2016 and is currently trailing in the polls harnesses the reality-warping powers of social media and the resources of at least four federal agencies to undermine faith in an election he could very well lose.

Voter fraud is an adaptable fiction, and the president has tailored it to the moment. Even as the coronavirus pandemic poses a grave obstacle to his re-election, the crisis is providing him an opportunity to do what no other president has done before him: use the full force of the federal government to attack the democratic process, suppress the votes of American citizens and spread grievance and suspicion among his followers. Recently, perhaps predictably, the president has begun to suggest that because of his professed distrust in the election process, he will not agree to a peaceful transition of power. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/30/magazine/trump-voter-fraud.html

8. Benjamin Hart: Trump Says Biden Will Make Minnesota a ‘Refugee Camp’

Fresh off the heels of his disastrous presidential debate performance, during which he refused to condemn white nationalists, President Trump traveled to Duluth, Minnesota, on Wednesday, where he engaged in some fresh demagoguery in front of a delighted crowd.

Trump whipped his overwhelmingly white audience into a frenzy on the topic of immigration and Ilhan Omar, the outspoken Minnesota congresswoman who has often been the target of the president’s xenophobic rhetoric.

The president claimed that Joe Biden would enable a 700 percent increase in refugees in the state, turning the state into a “refugee camp” — a claim echoing a recent Trump ad claiming that immigrants will bring more COVID-19 to America, which was so incendiary that it didn’t meet Facebook’s standards. (The crowd booed at the mention of refugees.) Trump then went after Omar, claiming she was guilty of “ballot harvesting” (based on a deceptive video put out by right-wing disinformation prince James O’Keefe) and corruption, and then lobbing a familiar, yet newly repugnant attack. The crowd briefly chanted “Lock Her Up!” — a chorus usually reserved for Hillary Clinton.

Some Republicans offered extremely mild criticism of Trump after he told the violent group Proud Boys to “stand by” on Tuesday. But poisonous anti-immigrant (and particularly Islamophobic) rhetoric is so standard for the president that Wednesday’s comments are unlikely to cause much of a ripple among his allies — or even among his Democratic adversaries, who like the general public have become inured to racism as a campaign strategy. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/trump-says-biden-will-make-minnesota-a-refugee-camp.html

9. Barton Gellman: The Election That Could Break America

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for post-election maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

“We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Prince­ton professor of history and public affairs, told me. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/

10. Stephen Wertheim: How Trump Brought Home the Endless War

Having come to power exploiting the fears spawned by perpetual war abroad, Trump is defining the enemy of his war at home just as expansively. “To stop the political violence,” he said in Kenosha, “we must also confront the radical ideology that includes this violence.” For Trump, this allegedly radical ideology pushes “the destructive message that our nation and our law enforcement are oppressive or racist.” The implication is that anyone who objects to police brutality or racism is abetting insurrectionist violence. Either you are with Trump, in other words, or you are with the terrorists.

If he loses the election in November, will he step aside in deference to those he claims would destroy the country? Will his supporters? This summer the United States entered into a condition of “incipient insurgency,” in the estimation of David Kilcullen, a former adviser to the Army. The vast majority of protests associated with Black Lives Matter have been completely peaceful, but twenty violent groups, both left and right, have entered the fray, in addition to individual attackers and routine shootings by police. In the name of law and order, the President has stoked one side of the violence, encouraging toughness by police and militias and waving away the lethal conduct of Trump supporters like Kyle Rittenhouse.

The Republican National Convention made clear that Trump is no longer running against the establishment. This time around, he is running a militant campaign against the half of the country that rejects his rule and is certain to vote against him in November. “If the Democrat Party wants to stand with anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters, and flag burners, that is up to them,” Trump declared in his seventy-minute address. He has since suggested that protesters are well funded, organized, and part of a coup to take him down. The Department of Homeland Security indicates otherwise; it reportedly projects that white supremacists, not left-wing radicals, will remain the most “persistent and lethal threat” in the United States in the next year. At what point might America’s cold civil war become hot? Has it already? https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-trump-brought-home-the-endless-war

11.  Susan B. Glasser: “There Is Zero Reason to Panic”: On Trump’s Coronavirus Case and the Shredded Credibility of His White House

As Thursday began, it seemed like just another day of Trumpian meltdown in the nation’s capital. The President was still refusing to repudiate white supremacy and his press secretary was still lying about it, part of the continued fallout from Trump’s disastrous debate performance days earlier. Trump’s former national-security adviser was on television charging that the President is “aiding and abetting” Vladimir Putin by attacking the legitimacy of the forthcoming election. On Thursday evening, news broke that Trump’s wife had been secretly taped by her former best friend ranting about her onerous White House Christmas duties and the unfairness of being blamed for her husband locking up migrant children in cages. “Give me a fucking break,” the First Lady said.

In the upside-down world of this Presidency, it was not necessarily a terrible few hours on the campaign trail. At least the headlines were not focussed on the pandemic and concurrent economic crisis, which experts warned were on the precipice of getting much, much worse. In the seven months since the coronavirus became a national crisis, Trump has done everything he could to deny, deflect, and generally distract from the pandemic and his government’s botched handling of it. If there is one thing he has not wanted the election of 2020 to be a referendum on, it is his handling of the disease. So much for that. At 12:54 a.m. a Presidential tweet confirmed that Trump and the First Lady both have covid-19. For the rest of the campaign, we will be talking about it, and pretty much nothing else.

The truth is, this is probably the least surprising national shock ever. For months, Trump has made coronavirus denialism his signature, at great cost to millions of Americans, more than two hundred thousand of whom are now dead. He courted personal as well as political disaster by refusing to wear a mask publicly and by encouraging others not to do so, either. His positive coronavirus test always had the feel of an inevitable plot twist. But the President of the United States getting diagnosed with a potentially lethal illness for which there is no cure a month before a national election is no less monumental for being fully anticipated. Will Trump recover? Will we believe him, or his discredited White House, if he claims that he has?

By Friday, nothing was clear except that Washington was trapped in a new waiting game, wondering about the health of an obese seventy-four-year-old with a penchant for not telling the truth about his health. Wondering how it would affect the election thirty-two days from now; wondering how 2020 could once again deal us such a hand. History is so much less exhausting when it happens to other people. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/there-is-zero-reason-to-panic-on-trumps-covid-case-and-the-shredded-credibility-of-his-white-house

12. Jonathan Chait: Trump Is Now Living His Coronavirus Management Strategy

“I don’t wear masks like him,” President Trump sneered at Joe Biden at the debate Tuesday night. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”

COVID-19 is not a morality test. It afflicts the careful as well as the heedless. Some of its victims have jobs that inherently expose them to risk. Biden has taken every precaution, but might contract the virus because he was exposed to Trump, who hasn’t. And nobody, however heedless they may be to the safety of themselves or others, deserves to suffer.

But as coronavirus victims go, Donald Trump is as far from innocent as you can get. He and his supporters may wish to treat his positive test as a national tragedy for which we can express no thought other than a prayer for his recovery, a kind of mini-9/11. The truth is that Trump is deeply culpable not only for the national response to the pandemic but his own condition. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/10/trump-coronavirus-positive-test-rallies-biden-masks-circles-social-distancing.html

13. Maureen Dowd: Reality Bursts the Trumpworld Bubble

Fate leads the willing, Seneca said, while the unwilling get dragged.

For his entire life, Donald Trump has stayed one step ahead of disaster, plying his gift for holding reality at bay.

He conjured his own threadbare reality, about success, about virility, about imbroglios with women, even about the height of Trump Tower.

As president, he has created a bubble within his bubble, keeping out science and anything that made him look bad. He has played a dangerous game of alchemizing wishes to facts, pretending that he was a strong leader, pretending that the virus will magically disappear and that it “affects virtually nobody,’’ pretending that we don’t have to wear masks, pretending that dicey remedies could work, pretending that the vaccine is right around the corner.

Now, in a moment that feels biblical, the implacable virus has come to his door.

This was the week when many of the president’s pernicious deceptions boomeranged on him. It was redolent of the “Night on Bald Mountain” scene in “Fantasia,’’ when all the bad spirits come out in a dark swarm.

It’s impossible to know how — or even whether — this illness will change the president. But hopefully it will change his skeptical followers and make them realize that this vicious microbe really is contagious, that President Trump is not invulnerable and that therefore they are not either, that crowding together at rallies is not smart, that wearing a mask is important, and that it’s not all going to disappear like a miracle. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/03/opinion/sunday/trump-coronavirus-covid.html

14. Amy Davidson Sorkin: What a Positive Test Won’t Change About Trump and the Pandemic

Trump’s negligence about the coronavirus is of a piece with who he is. By the end of Tuesday night’s debate, it was easy to wonder just how many forms of violence Trump might be willing to inflict on the country, from heedlessly telling quasi-militarized white supremacists to “stand back and stand by” to urging supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”

When Wallace asked if he was telling people to take to the streets, he didn’t deny it. He was ready to expose Americans to another source of physical harm: the unmanaged pandemic. “You got to open these states up. It’s not fair!” Trump said—meaning, presumably, that not doing so was inconsiderate of his electoral prospects and his vanity.

The reality that, with children returning to school and cold weather on its way, the next weeks will require vigilance and delicate coördination to head off a truly devastating winter, seems lost on him. Instead, he complained that Democratic governors were deliberately waiting until the week after the election to reopen, for no reason other than that “they think they’re hurting us.” https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/what-a-positive-test-wont-change-about-trump-and-the-pandemic

15. Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Tax Returns Show Lying Is His Only Marketable Skill

While Donald was never able to equal his father’s prowess as a builder and landlord, his talent as a confidence man far surpassed it. Trump leveraged his fame into a series of scams: “Trump University” (a fake real-estate-training seminar designed to bleed its victims dry); the “Trump Network” (selling its targets urine-testing systems, which would be used to direct them to buy overpriced vitamins); using the “Trump Foundation” as a racket to funnel supposedly charitable funds into his pocket, and so on.

At times, these scams have edged close to outright criminality. At other times, they have crossed over the line. Trump is currently under investigation for tax fraud. And, as law professor and tax expert Daniel Shaviro argues, the information in Trump’s recent returns strongly suggests more outright fraud — deductions like hairstyling and a country estate seem to violate black-letter rules governing tax deductions.

The arc of Trump’s career has been to exploit a series of victims, pocket his winnings, and use them to find new ones. He lied to a series of reporters, built and sold an image as a brilliant deal-maker, scammed his fans out of their money, and lied to the government about his income.

Trump’s political career is a natural step in the progression, one he had been contemplating for decades. The Republican Party was a perfect vehicle for a character like Trump. The mainstream media had grown steadily more resistant to his lies, but the conservative media ecosystem was fertile terrain, a propaganda machine so attuned to his needs that he didn’t even need to try to fool them. Whatever lies other Republicans would spout about Barack Obama or climate change or the wonder-working powers of tax cuts, Trump would exceed them. From Fox News to Hugh Hewitt to the anti-anti-Trumpers, his acolytes simply did not care whether anything he said was true.

Trump (or, more precisely, his ghostwriter) once claimed, “Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals.” The last four years have made it apparent Trump is bad at striking deals, despite being free of the burden of having principles. Deals are not his art form.

Lying is. Lying is how he rebuilt his fortune after he ran through his inheritance, and how he kept his head above water financially. Lying may or may not be enough to get him a second term, or even to keep him out of prison. But if you are betting that Trump’s lies will stop working, you are betting against the evidence of his entire adult life. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/trump-tax-returns-new-york-times-taxes-criminal-lying-business.html

16. Marina Hyde: After Donald Trump's deranged balcony address, we're all gasping together

A rare moment of unity in the US election, as Donald Trump marked his return to the White House by gasping along with his detractors. On Monday night, the president puffed up the front staircase of his residence, his face coated in several more gallons of paint than the front elevation of the building. “Don’t let it dominate your lives,” he panted of the virus, a bad case of which tends to dominate your death.

Yet there he was, this hideous kink in the arc of history, giving the most dangerous balcony performance since Michael Jackson had his baby crowdsurf off one. The American people are all Blanket now.

As for the optics, “deranged balcony address” is certainly a look – but not one that tends to end well. How might this version turn out? Unfortunately, it’s not a question Trump’s attention span equips him to answer. His reference points for the form are the occasional three minutes of historical documentaries he’s forced to watch while searching his stomach-folds for the TV remote. It feels like he switches over to Fox News before discovering how a whole series of 20th-century balcony stories ended. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/06/donald-trump-coronavirus-balcony-drugs

17. Julie Brigham-Grette and Steve Petsch: Dramatic changes in the Arctic suggest climate change could return Earth to Pliocene conditions of 3 million years ago

Today human activities are overwhelming the natural processes that pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. At the dawn of the Industrial Era in 1750, atmospheric CO2 stood at about 280 parts per million. It has taken humans only 200 years to completely reverse the trajectory begun 50 million years ago and return the planet to CO2 levels not experienced for millions of years.

Most of that shift has happened since World War II. Yearly increases of 2-3 parts per million now are common. And in response, the Earth is warming at a fast pace. Since roughly 1880 the planet has warmed by 1 degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit)– many times faster than any warming episode in the past 65 million years of Earth’s history.

In the Arctic, losses of reflective snow and ice cover have amplified this warming to +5 C (9 F). As a result, summertime Arctic sea ice coverage is trending lower and lower. Scientists project that the Arctic will be completely ice-free in summerwithin the next two decades.

This isn’t the only evidence of drastic Arctic warming. Scientists have recorded extreme summer melt rates across the Greenland Ice Sheet. In early August, Canada’s last remaining ice shelf, in the territory of Nunavut, collapsed into the sea. Parts of Arctic Siberia and Svalbard, a group of Norwegian islands in the Arctic Ocean, reached record-shattering high temperatures this summer.

Coastal cities, agricultural breadbasket regions and water supplies for many communities all will be radically different if this planet returns to a Pliocene CO2 world. This future is not inevitable – but avoiding it will require big steps now to decrease fossil fuel use and turn down Earth’s thermostat. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dramatic-changes-in-the-arctic-suggest-climate-change-could-return-earth-to-pliocene-conditions-of-3-million-years-ago-11601495655