You know that Donald Trump is going to use tonight to try to gamble for resurrection–he will try to make it look like Vice President Biden has forgotten something, or berate the Vice President to try to get him to stutter. Anything to get the American people’s attention off of his failure to address a 100-year pandemic or his decades of cheating on his taxes and incurring hundreds of millions of dollars in debt for his many poor investments.
10:36 pm: Trump calls on his supporters to go to polling places–Trump specifically refers to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania–and watch voters voting, ostensibly to look for voter fraud. He again claims that there are going to be lots of fraudulent Democratic ballots and that ballots for Trump have been thrown out already. Trump says that he has to wait and see if he will accept the outcome of the election.
Chris Wallace asks Vice President Biden if he will urge his supporters to remain calm and personally wait for all the votes to be counted before either declaring victory or conceding; Vice President Biden says, “Yes.”
10:30 pm: Trump…he rambles, he reminds us that he won the 2016 Presidential Election (Ugh. We know.), then he claims that jurisdictions administered by Democrats are somehow committing mail ballot fraud.
10:29 pm: “So: Vote. You have the power to determine what this country looks like for the next 4 years…” Vice President Biden makes a nod to Trump’s attempt to de-legitimize mail-balloting, then points out that Trump voted by mail.
10:27 pm: Vice President Biden says plainly, as he said during the Democratic Presidential Primary earlier in the year, that he doesn’t support the Green New Deal, rather, that he supports the Biden Plan–his own green infrastructure redevelopment plan. Trump crows–I believe for the 3rd time tonight–that Biden “just lost the radical/Socialist Left” because he expressed independence from them on a policy matter. Trump sounds obsequious to…someone in how eager he is to check that box rhetorically.
10:16 pm: Trump kind of admits that human industrial activity is facilitating global warming…and then says that he pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords and froze President Obama’s vehicle fuel-efficiency standards because this would make cars cheaper to buy and “safer” (the latter claim which is absurd).
10:15 pm: Vice President Biden speaks of his deceased son Beau Biden’s Armed Forces service record, including a year tour in Iraq. He criticizes Trump for calling American men and women in the Armed Forces who died in combat “suckers” and “losers”.
Trump does not deny calling American men and women who gave their lives in the Armed Forces suckers and losers. He does say that Vice President Biden’s son was discharged from the Armed Forces for a cocaine addiction. Vice President Biden says that Trump distorted what happened, but admits that Hunter did have a drug problem, which he has overcome and learned to manage. Vice President Biden says that he is proud of his son.
Chris Wallace says to Trump that he would like to have a debate about actual substantive issues.
10:09 pm: Chris Wallace asks Trump to condemn White Supremacist groups. Trump immediately points at Antifa and Left-wing radicals, claiming that he thinks that all of the extremist violence in this country comes from the Left. The quantifiable reality is that most of the extremist violence and the greater national security threat comes from Right-wing extremist groups: This is the assessment of Trump’s own national security establishment and FBI.
Trump doesn’t condemn White Supremacists.
10:00 pm: Vice President Biden speaks compellingly about the need of Americans to be more sensitive to each other. He says that Americans need to come together.
Trump says that Americans are divided because the Democrats are terrible at government.
9:56 pm: Vice President Biden says that peaceful protest is inherently legitimate, while violent protest is inherently illegitimate.
Trump demands that Vice President Biden tell him what he thinks of acts of arson by rioters. Vice President Biden calmly answers that arson is violent and thus illegitimate. It looks like Trump would really rather have this debate with an imaginary Democrat.
9:54 pm: Vice President Biden gets a few minutes to speak without obstruction, and he reminds Americans that in July 2017, Trump looked at Neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan agitators chanting anti-Semitic slogans on the University of Virginia-Charlottesville campus and the young anti-racist protesters arrayed against them–one of whom was killed by a White Supremacist at that rally–and said that there were “good people on both sides.” Vice President also reminds Americans that Trump tear-gassed a peaceful George Floyd protest in front of the White House for a Bible-toting photo op at an Episcopal Cathedral across Lafayette Square from the White House, which the Bishop o that cathedral called a disgrace.
9:50 pm: Trump makes a previously repudiated claim that Vice President Biden’s son Hunter received $3.5 million from the Mayor of Moscow. (The reality is that Trump’s leaked tax documents show that he has tried to secure business with the Mayor of Moscow.) Vice President Biden says that this isn’t true and that it has already been refuted, and Trump interrupts him repeatedly.
9:42 pm: Chris Wallace gets frustrated demanding that Trump say how much he paid in Federal income tax in for 2016 and 2017. Trump rambles on and on, and eventually claims that he paid millions in Federal income taxes for those 2 years. The New York Times has started a multi-part story involving obtained tax documentation that found that Trump paid $750 each in 2016 and 2017.
Trump claims that he will release his tax returns soon. Trump has been claiming this since he started his first Presidential run in 2015, and he has never done so. Vice President Biden asks Trump, “When?” and Trump doesn’t address an answer to Vice President Biden or to Chris Wallace.
9:37 pm: Vice President Biden says that he isn’t in favor of fully reopening schools because the Trump Administration has not presented an effective plan that includes adequate Federal funding to allow schools to reopen safely while observing social distancing, enforcing mask-wearing, and disinfecting the schools’ interior spaces. Vice President Biden says that he hasn’t seen the plan that would effectively allow this to happen safely.
9:36 pm: Amazing. Trump claims that he hasn’t enforced social distancing and mask-wearing at his rallies because that’s what his crowd size requires, that Vice President Biden would do the same if he could draw larger crowds for a rally, and he even says “Nobody cares” about social distancing and wearing masks at political functions.
9:30 pm: Chris Wallace points out to Trump that his own CDC Director and the chief of his vaccine program have said that a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine won’t be widely available until summer 2021. Trump said that he has spoken to several pharmaceutical executives and that he will see to it that a vaccine is made widely available in a matter of weeks. Trump contradicts the scientists who work for his Administration, and claims that only “politics” would prevent a virus from being available sooner than they had said it would!
Vice President Biden again addresses Americans directly: You know that you don’t trust Trump to deliver a rushed vaccine that is safe and effective.
9:25 pm: Vice President Biden addresses Americans at home, asking them how many of them have an empty seat at the table right now because of a loss due to the COVID-19 illness. He asks how many Americans weren’t able to say goodbye to a loved one who has died this year because it wasn’t safe to visit them or they were in intensive care at the time that they passed. Trump interrupts him to defend himself.
9:21 pm: “It is what it is because you are who you are.” Vice President Biden connects the death toll from the COVID-19 respiratory illness–over 206,000 dead in 7 months–to Trump’s lack of concern and engagement with the problem.
9:15 pm: Trump rambles on multiple instances, talking about the Socialist Left, calling Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) “Pocahontas”, and offering vague promises to provide Americans with a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Trump repeatedly interrupts Vice President Biden in order to…state that the Federal individual mandate to buy health insurance was very unpopular. Trump ends with an uninspiring flourish, claiming that Joe Biden has done nothing in 47 years in government. That’s silly. I understand that Trump doesn’t know the nuances of his predecessors Administration, and he certainly didn’t care about the Violence Against Women Act, but he should be a fan of the 1994 Crime Bill.
9:10 pm: Vice President Biden draws first blood, making Trump angry and ramble a bit when connecting Judge Barrett’s Conservative credentials to the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act, to over 200,000 Americans killed from the COVID pandemic. Trump gets mad and blames Vice President Biden for not keeping Chinese people out of the United States. SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have entered the human population in China in late 2019.
9:05 pm: Trump takes moderator Chris Wallace’s first question, specifically about why he should name Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the United States Supreme Court. His answer is unusually sedate: He was elected President, Republicans were elected to a majority in the United States Senate. (He neglects to mention that both were elected by a minority, having gotten about the mid-40s in the popular vote.) The President has the duty and the privilege to nominate judges to the Federal Courts; the Senate as the duty and the privilege to hear and confirm those nominees to the Federal Courts, etc. In 2016 a Republican Senate declined to confirm a Democratic President’s nominee to the Supreme Court, as was its right. This year, there is a Republican President and Senate. And if he were President and Democrats controlled the Senate, they would stonewall his nomination to the Supreme Court on similar terms to what the Republican Senate did to President Barack Obama in 2016.
The Liberal Ironist 