Live-Blogging the…2nd? 3rd? 2020 Presidential Debate

This is Trump’s last chance to make a serious attempt before a broad audience to redeem his ugly, absurd, corrupt, and malignant Presidency. The only advantage that I can think of that Trump has going into tonight’s Debate is the fact that his microphone will cut out when he isn’t supposed to be talking.

10:36 pm: Trump claims with his usual vagueness that if Joe Biden becomes President, we will have the worst depression we have ever seen, or something. I’m sick of the Trump Presidency for a great many reasons, but I’m particularly tired of hearing Trump say that he has been “the greatest President in history for (whatever)” and that whoever he is currently confronting has been “the worst when it comes to (something)” and that a President Biden would bring us to “(some bad, bad thing) like you’ve never seen.” I look forward to our now-inevitable deliverance from the vague and histrionic extremes in rhetoric.

10:32 pm: Vice President Biden speaks with more passion, intensity, and concreteness of focus than either candidate has talked about anything else this evening when referring to his expensive living in a “fence line community” in Delaware near to many refining plants, and the long-term effects of aerosolized pollutants on the residents of those communities.

10:31 pm: Trump brags about working with the governments of Russia and Saudi Arabia to keep the price of oil high, as if that serves the bottom line of Americans.

10:26 pm: Trump claims that Vice President Biden’s climate change mitigation plan was written by “the Squad” of 4 Progressive freshmen Congresswomen. Vice President Biden’s climate change mitigation plan was produced through a compromise between the Biden Campaign and the Progressives, including the Squad as well as 2-time Progressive Presidential prospect Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

10:18 pm: Trump claims, with great drama, that he has done more for Black Americans than any President since Abraham Lincoln. So, move over, Ulysses S. Grant, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Barack Obama; the best friend of the Black Community is the man who has encouraged police to rough-up their suspects and demanded that athletes who silently and peacefully protest racial injustice be summarily fired.

10:14 pm: Trump claims, twice, that President Obama (and by implication, Vice President Biden) failed to pass criminal justice reform in President Obama’s 2nd term. It’s as frustrating as when Trump claimed in Debate 1 that President Obama failed to fill a lot of Federal Court vacancies. In both instances, a wholly Republican Congress refused to give President Obama a political win.

10:07 pm: Trump, retorting to Vice President Biden’s claim that migrants who don’t fear incarceration or arbitrary deportation keep their court dates because they want to remain in the United States legally, says that migrants who keep their court-dates–who follow the law–are “low IQ.”

10:06 pm: Vice President Biden commits to getting a law passed by Congress that will create a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants not currently in the country legally, without costly and traumatizing detentions and deportations.

10:02 pm: Vice President Biden calls Trump’s detention and separation of migrant families at the United States-Mexico border a violation of what Americans are about as a country.

9:56 pm: Trump is back to arguing with the moderator again. He was doing well for the better part of an hour.

9:46 pm: Trump gets a question about the Amy Coney Barrett nomination to the Supreme Court and the impending California v. Texas case that could rule the 2010 Affordable Care Act unconstitutional and deprive 22 million Americans of their existing health insurance. Trump claims that removing the individual mandate penalty from the Affordable Care Act somehow improved health care, claims that he will provide statutory protections for preexisting conditions although he is currently asking the Supreme Court to strike that down, and accuses Vice President Biden of trying to socialize the United States health care system even though Biden explicitly opposed “Medicare for All”. Unsettlingly, Trump also claims that we shouldn’t be concerned about the loss of the Affordable Care Act because 80 million “successful” Americans have employer-provided health insurance.

Vice President Biden reminds viewers that 10 million Americans just lost their employer-provided health insurance because of how badly the Trump Administration has flubbed the handling of the COVID pandemic and the economic recovery.

9:29 pm: Trump goes for broke: He claims, repetitively, that Vice President Biden “took money from Russia.” No particulars and no context are provided, other than that Trump claims that Joe Biden was Vice President when he supposedly received all this unspecified money from Russia.

Vice President Biden counters that he has never taken a cent of foreign money. He refers to the bombshell New York Times story of Trump’s previously undisclosed bank account in China and the $200,000 in taxes paid to China–in sum, apparently far more than he has paid to the Federal Government after expensing post-2008 real estate losses.

9:40 pm: Trump tries to bring up “a very strong email” alleging Vice President Biden trying to solicit bribes from foreign governments. It’s vague, characteristically Trump, and it feels contrived and desperate even by his recent standard.

9:25 pm: Trump loses his cool for the first time when Vice President Biden’s far superior fundraising take–now more than twice Trump’s–comes to the fore.

9:21 pm: Vice President Biden admonishes Trump for throwing schoolchildren, teachers, and retail workers and retail customers to the wolves in encouraging everyone to return to normal business during a 3rd wave outbreak of a pandemic virus this fall and winter.

9:11 pm: Vice President Biden warns Americans that “we’re going to have a dark winter” with COVID; Trump insists that we are not going to have a dark winter with COVID. Is anyone actually reassured by Trump’s optimism?

9:08 pm: Vice President Biden reminds the audience that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has projected that almost 200,000 more Americans will die of COVID by the end of the year–but that that death toll could be halved if all Americans would wear face masks over that time period–and reminds viewers that Trump and his Administration and Campaign flout not wearing masks.

9:07 pm: Trump acknowledges that the SARS-CoV-2 virus “is a worldwide problem.” It would really be great if Trump hadn’t withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization as a means of casting blame.

9:05 pm: Trump gets the first question, which is about how he will handle the COVID pandemic if reelected. We might as well just put a fork in his Presidency.

9:04 pm: Trump walks out, not wearing a mask to begin with. Vice President Biden walks out and takes his mask off after moving away from others.

Live-Blogging the October 7, 2020 Vice Presidential Debate

Starting at 9:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, the 2020 Vice Presidential Debate will give Vice President Mike Pence an opportunity to sanitize Donald Trump’s viciousness, pettiness, ignorance, cruelty, and questionable sanity with a varnish of pious obscurantism, and Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) an opportunity to bring her skills as a public prosecutor against a corrupt and criminally negligent Administration–hopefully without exciting the reactive resentment that attached so easily to a woman who recently dared to run for the Presidency in her own right.

10:33 pm: The Vice Presidential Debate ends without Vice President Pence promising that there would be a peaceful transfer of power if (when) Trump loses the upcoming Presidential Election.

10:27 pm: Vice President Pence launches into a conspiracy theory that the FBI investigation into several members of the 2016 Trump Campaign (Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page) was politically motivated, rather than directed by actual contacts between those members of the Trump Campaign and Russian or Ukrainian Oligarchs or Russian Government officials.

I will give Vice President Pence this much: He can pass Trump’s crazy and self-serving ideas off as if they were conclusions that a reasonable person could hold. But a fanatic by definition is unreasonable, and Vice President Pence is fanatically loyal to the dangerously intemperate and incompetent Donald Trump, and Vice President Pence would not be the first fanatic to have good manners.

10:15 pm: Vice President Pence is asked if justice was done in the Breonna Taylor verdict. He doesn’t answer the question; he does say that the George Floyd murder at the hands of police in Minneapolis was unjustified, then he leapfrogs into talking about rioting and looting, as if anyone defended rioting and looting as a matter of principle and policy during this Election cycle.

Senator Harris condemns Trump’s statement following the July 2017 Charlottesville White supremacist rally that there were “Fine people on both sides” between Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan on the one side and anti-racist protesters on the other hand.

10:06 pm: A debate ensues over whether Republicans are packing the Courts by stalling Democratic Federal Court nominations or Democrats are planning to pack the Supreme Court when…they have not committed to any plan to pack the Supreme Court. It’s a debate between a hypothetical and a fact.

(In the event of Joe Biden’s Presidential Inauguration, if there are 51 Democratic Senators, the Supreme Court will almost certainly be expanded.)

10:03 pm: Vice President Pence is asked about Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who would bring the Conservative alignment on the Supreme Court to 6 out of 9 Justices, thereby very credibly raising the prospect of the Roe v. Wade decision being overturned–and what States like his native Indiana would do if they were in control of abortion policy. Vice President Pence avails himself of that time to cheer Trump for assassinating the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, and speaks approvingly of Judge Barrett’s academic credentials–running over his time without saying anything about what will happen to abortion access in Red States if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

9:58 pm: Senator Harris: Trump has spoken to President Vladimir Putin of Russia 6 times since the shocking New York Times story that the Russian Government offered bounties to Taliban fighters for killing American soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan, and has not raised the subject with President Putin. Vice President Pence looks frustrated, and tries to speak on the subject, and Ms. Page stops him for trying to appropriate time from the Debate in violation of debate rules. It feels like a threshold has been reached; Ms. Page seems prepared to hold Vice President Pence to the rules.

9:51 pm: Senator Harris observes the “weird…obsession” of the Trump Administration with undoing policy achievements of the Obama-Biden Administration, observing the disaster caused by the Trump Administration removing the pandemic response unit from the National Security Council and the CDC liaison in China; Vice President Pence denies that the Administration did this, but for once, doesn’t start filibustering in defense.

Senator Harris notes that Trump’s steep tariffs on imports from China have cost American consumers billions of dollars and led to a manufacturing recession; Senator Harris calls Trump’s trade war with China “a failure”, and again, Vice President Pence doesn’t defend Trump’s record.

9:48 pm: Vice President Pence calls the USMCA trade agreement an Administration accomplishment, and observes that Senator Harris voted against that agreement: 48 minutes in, he makes his first point.

9:46 pm: Vice President Pence calls former Vice President Biden “a cheerleader for Communist China”. Vice President Pence’s statements tonight have mostly been trite and cliche-ridden.

9:43 pm: Vice President Pence gets a question about global warming; he says that the climate is changing and that the Administration will follow the science…and then tries to claim, again, that a President Biden will raise everyone’s taxes (that old Republican go-to), and doesn’t address global warming again.

9:41 pm: Senator Harris clarifies–twice–that a President Biden will not raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 a year. Republicans, one notes, never commit not to cut taxes for anyone making more than any income, however-exhorbitant.

9:40 pm: For a man who claims that he cannot be alone with professional women due to loyalty to his wife, Vice President Pence sure interrupts and talks over them with an ease and comfort suggestive of experience; he interrupts Senator Harris and filibusters, he blows past his allocated time limit and filibusters.

9:38 pm: Vice President Pence claims that air and water pollution are currently at an all-time low; of course, he leaves out that this is due to the abrupt halt of economic activity in this country due to the uncontrolled domestic SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in this country.

9:35 pm: Vice President Pence interrupted Senator Harris and then filibustered; the moderator didn’t intervene and stop the interruption, in an unsettling allegory for last week’s Presidential Debate. Senator Harris, about to be cut off by the moderator, notes that she was interrupted by Vice President Pence and asks to get her time back; the moderator relents.

9:32 pm: Vice President Pence again tells us that something is “unconscionable”, in this case it’s to repeal Trump’s December 2017 tax cuts–the first tax cut passed by Congress that I have ever heard of that was manifestly unpopular with the public for giving so much money to the very rich. Obviously Vice President Pence doesn’t discuss Trump’s tweet earlier this week killing off negotiations on an additional emergency assistance/stimulus bill.

9:28 pm: Senator Harris can answer a debate question and raise and discuss an additional point in less time than it takes Vice President Pence to not answer the question he’s given.

9:25 pm: Senator Harris responds to another risible example of Vice President Pence’s stiff graciousness with reference to Trump paying $750 a year in taxes in the rare recent years that Trump has actually paid taxes.

Moderator Page’s question had been about whether the American people have the right to know about the status of a President’s health; Senator Harris had banked the time to launch into Trump’s tax avoidance by saying simply, “Yes.”

9:19 pm: Vice President Pence absolves himself of the need to answer the question actually given to him by the moderator, and says to Senator Harris, “That you would play politics with people’s health is unconscionable.” If Vice President Pence really believes that Senator Harris is playing politics with people’s health and finds it to be unconscionable, he must be profoundly disconnected from human emotion, because it very much feels like he’s just trying to score points.

Vice President Pence refers to the 2009 swine flu, calling that a failure to control a pandemic. He claims that 60 million Americans were infected at the time; what he doesn’t say is that the total number of American deaths that year was typical for an influenza season.

9:18 pm: Ms. Page asks Senator Harris if she would take a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine once it’s said to be ready. Senator Harris says, “If public health experts say that we should take it–if Dr. Fauci says that we should take it, I will take it; if Donald Trump says we should take it, I’m not taking it.”

9:14 pm: Vice President Pence is already flouting the Debate rules, talking over his allotted time with regularity and interrupting Senator Harris at will.

9:10 pm: Vice President Pence thanks the debate hosting venue and informs Senator Harris that “it’s an honor” to debate her. Vice President Pence seeks to varnish the Trump Administration’s vacant vulgarity with Midwestern nice. He claims that the Trump Administration was proactive in protecting the public from the SARS-CoV-2 virus because Trump barred (some) travel from China. This continues to be almost the only thing that Trump Administration officials say in Trump’s defense; the virus simply entered the United States from Italy and ran rampant in the New York Metropolitan Area, then spread from there to the rest of the country in large part because of the carelessness of State Republican officials.

9:07 pm: Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) opens with both barrels, calling the Trump Administration’s handling of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 respiratory illness pandemic “the worst failure in Presidential history.” Senator Harris notes that Trump and Vice President Pence were informed on January 28, 2020 of the highly contagious and deadly nature of this virus and illness and didn’t inform the public of these facts, and that “this Administration has forfeited their right to reelection because of this.”

9:05 pm: Plexiglass shields protect both candidates and the moderator Susan Page from any respiratory droplets that may carry the SARS-CoV-2 virus on the air. Ms. Page is very insistent at the outset that she will enforce the Debate rules out of sense of obligation to the voting public; this will be a welcome change from last week’s Presidential Debate, at which Trump’s behavior was outrageous, but then she is also working with 2 Vice Presidential candidates who probably intend to follow those rules.