by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
I’m writing this just after viewing the second televised Presidential debate between incumbent President Donald Trump and former Vice-President Joe Biden. As usual, I’m writing these reflections just after the debate took place; I’ve made it my practice to set down my reactions to the debates uncolored by TV reporters and pundits telling me what they think I saw, or should have seen, on my TV.
First of all, if there was a real winner in tonight’s debate it was Kristin Welker, NBC News White House correspondent, who -- at least possibly because she, like the rest of us, watched the first Trump-Biden debate and knew what she was up against -- did a far better job of keeping order than Chris Wallace had done in debate one on September 29. Aided by a rules change from the Commission on Presidential Debates that provided that at least for the opening responses to Welker’s questions, one candidate’s microphone would be turned off while the other was speaking, Welker was able to keep the intrusive interrupting both candidates had done the last time (but Trump far more than Biden) to a minimum and actually make it through her list of questions without going more than 10 minutes over the scheduled 90-minute time slot.
Second, Donald Trump -- though still hardly a paragon of civility -- was far better behaved tonight than he was at the last debate or he’s been at media appearances since. He didn’t openly challenge the moderator or question her objectivity the way he did with Savannah Guthrie at last week’s NBC-TV “town hall” that took the place of the second scheduled debate October 15 (along with a competing event by Biden on ABC-TV) after Trump walked out on it because it would be “virtual” and he and Biden wouldn’t be in the same room at the same time, Nor did he storm out in the middle in disgust the way he did when CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes reporter Lesley Stahl tried to tape an interview with him for this Sunday’s episode.
Before tonight’s debate Trump had said he was going to be “angry” but also “happy,” leading a lot of media pundits to ridicule him and question how he could be both in the same event. The answer was he cooled it -- but did not entirely eliminate -- his personal attacks on Biden and his family, He repeated the bizarre claim that Biden had received $3.5 million from the wife of the mayor of Moscow, and he exploited Biden’s son Hunter’s service on corporate boards in Ukraine and China for considerably more than it was worth.
Biden argued that his son had done nothing wrong in accepting a paid position on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma while Biden was vice-president despite knowing absolutely nothing about the energy industry. The truth is bad enough for Biden -- it’s obvious that Hunter Biden got that cushy job because the company wanted to curry favor with the then-vice-president -- but Trump has consistently embroidered it. He’s made allegations of secret payoffs and embraced the New York Post reporting on allegedly corrupt e-mails supposedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop which not only Joe Biden but a number of former U.S. intelligence officials have declared are fakes, products of a Russian disinformation campaign to discredit the Bidens and ensure Trump’s re-election.
Trump treated the revelations of Hunter Biden’s alleged e-mails as if their provenance were as unquestionable as the rise of the sun in the east and its setting in the west. He was showing himself a victim of what Los Angeles Times reporter David Lauter had called his “information bubble” in a story published the morning of the debate (https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-10-22/trump-biden-stakes-for-final-presidential-debate).
“Throughout his presidency, and despite losing the popular vote in 2016, Trump has seemed to believe he can win re-election solely with voters who already support him,” Lauter wrote. “That approach has especially shaped his actions during this campaign year, even as a majority of voters consistently tell pollsters they disapprove of the way he is doing his job.” It’s become obvious in his public statements, including his tweets and his retweets (some of which, including one linking to a white-power Web site, Biden called him on tonight) that while previous Republican candidates used Rupert Murdoch-owned news outlets like Fox News and the New York Post as propaganda outlets to reach the GOP base, Trump actually believes their reporting, including the conspiracy theories these outlets spew.
Trump didn’t sound happy tonight. He sounded as angry as he has throughout his meteoric five-year political career, and though he was a bit more civil than he’d been on the previous debate September 29, but that was probably more due to the rules changes, Welker’s aggressive moderating and his own advisors telling him that his poll numbers had gone down five percent after the last debate (though they’ve since gone back to what they were) than any true change of heart on Trump’s part.
Stepping Back from the Carnage
One thing Trump did that was effective was he stepped back from the images of “American carnage” that have been so much a part of his political rhetoric since he started his 2016 campaign. He didn’t once mention the Left-wing Antifa movement or say they were organizing millions of people to take over the streets of America and kill or rape people at random to sow chaos and install an anarchist socialist America. (Actually anarchism and socialism are very different political philosophies, but Trump is far from the only American who lumps them together.)
Instead he actually tried to portray himself as the true friend of Americans of color -- African-Americans in particular. He once again made the preposterous claim that he’s done more for African-Americans than any president since Abraham Lincoln (memo to Trump: does the name “Lyndon Johnson” mean anything to you? The master Congressional manipulator who got the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a 1966 bill banning discrimination in housing which Trump’s company was prosecuted by the federal government for violating in the 1970’s?), he made one legitimate point against Biden.
It was Biden who shepherded the 1994 crime bill through Congress, including denouncing a generation of young Black men as “super-predators” and imposed long mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent federal drug crimes. And it was Trump and a bipartisan Congressional coalition that passed the First Step Act in 2019 that started to undo the havoc Biden’s crime bill had wreaked on America’s Black communities.
It’s an argument Trump could be making far more effectively if he weren’t also denouncing the Black Lives Matter movement and calling for “law and order” in the streets of American cities (issues he ducked tonight), and if Trump didn’t have the record of open racism Biden called him on, including his demand for the death penalty for the so-called “Central Park Five,” young African-Americans who were prosecuted foir gang-raping a white woman -- for whom Trump demanded the death penalty and who turned out to be innocent.
Trump’s most effective moments during the debate were the ones in which he attacked Biden for not having accomplished any of the things he’s promising now during the 47 years he’s previously served in political office. And Biden’s most effective moments came when he talked directly to the American people and told them he cares about them. It’s been the best argument the Democrats have been able to come up with against Trump’s re-election: “Vote for Joe Biden. He’s a normal human being who actually gives a damn about other people.”
The Dems’ Dilemma: Voters vs. Money
Interestingly, Biden didn’t go for the jugular even when the opportunity presented itself. He did not -- as some of the MS-NBC commentators pre-debate had urged him to -- bring up the record of Trump’s own children in public office, including daughter Ivanka Trump’s blatant violation of the Hatch Act in holding down a paid White House staff position and publicly campaigning for her dad. (The Hatch Act is a 1920’s law that says if you take a job with the federal government, you have to give up quite a few of your First Amendment rights, including public participation in political campaigns.)
Biden defended himself in his best aw-shucks Jimmy Stewart manner when Trump accused him of favoring socialized medicine and being a pawn of New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Trump also accused Biden of flip-flopping on the issue of fracking -- a horribly dangerous and environmentally destructive way of getting fossil fuels out of the ground that has increased America’s domestic production of oil and natural gas while both directly and indirectly threatening the environment -- and Biden said he’d opposed fracking on federal lands but not elsewhere.
These responses go directly to the problem Democratic Presidential candidates have had since 1968: the ongoing clash between the party’s progressives (including its younger voters) and its moderates (including most of the party bureaucrats and large donors). I voted for Joe Biden (like an estimated 40 million Americans -- one-third of the likely total of voters -- my husband Charles and I have already cast our ballots) in spite of his opposition to junking private health insurance in favor of a government-run single-payer health plan, and in spite of his support of continued fracking.
The problem just about every Democrat who’s run for the presidency since 1968 -- and a lot of Democrats in down-ballot races as well -- is they have to steer a distance between the progressive demands of much of the Democratic constituency and the moderate priorities of the people who actually fund the party. As former New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli, who was driven out of office in 2003 over a campaign finance scandal, once said, the demands of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party have a “voter constituency” but don’t have a “financial constituency.”
Republicans don’t have this problem because what their voter constituency and what their financial constituency want are pretty much the same things: lower taxes, cutbacks in government regulation of business, cutbacks in environmental regulations (tonight Trump said over and over again that environmental protection programs are “job killers” and Biden stressed the new jobs developing renewable energy would create) and cutbacks in social programs. The one big Republican voter constituency that doesn’t also have a financial constituency is the evangelical Christian community and its demand for big-government regulations on people’s private lives -- especially their sex lives -- which is why Republican Presidents and Congresses have done more to fulfill the party’s libertarian economic agenda than that of the Christian Right.
Democrats have a fundamental problem because achieving the progressive agenda will require a lot of radical social changes the business community -- even the relatively liberal sectors of it -- will vehemently oppose. The fact is you cannot guarantee all Americans health care as a right -- as Biden promised to do tonight -- while still maintaining a private health-care system run by for-profit insurance companies. And you cannot clean up the environment and reverse the effects of carbon dioxide emissions -- the key factor in global warming and human-caused climate change in general -- if you continue to frack instead of leaving the remaining fossil fuels in the ground.
America’s nature as a capitalist economy throws up immense roadblocks to the kinds of sweeping social, economic and environmental changes the progressive Democrats whose votes Biden needs want. My hope for Biden if he’s elected President is that, like Franklin Roosevelt, he will be pushed to the Left by circumstances and a vibrant activist community like the ones that pushed FDR from the moderate campaign he ran in 1932 (in which he actually accused incumbent Herbert Hoover of running overly big budget deficits in fighting the Great Depression) to his actual policies, including Social Security, the federal minimum wage and the legal recognition of labor unions, as well as using government money actually to hire unemployed people instead of giving “incentives” to the private sector to do it.
Tonight’s debate was full of contradictions that probably won’t get noticed in the media commentaries, including Trump’s assertion at one point that Biden was the candidate of Wall Street (which is largely true; there are reports that Wall Streeters are shifting their campaign donations to Biden, largely out of fear of continued economic chaos if Trump is re-elected) and at other points that Biden’s “socialist” economic agenda will devastate the economy. I’d have liked to see Biden ask Trump, “You say that I’m the candidate of Wall Street and that I’m a socialist whose policies will destroy the economy. If I’m going to destroy the economy, why would Wall Street be giving me money?”
The Looming Threat of the Pandemic
And of course there was the looming threat of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic over the debate, as it is over the entire campaign and the future of American people. Trump got the first question on this topic and ran through his litany of assertions that he stopped the epidemic in its tracks by banning travel from China to the U.S. while Biden was denouncing him as “xenophobic.” (Biden’s response was that he has indeed called Trump “xenoiphobic,” but on issues other than the pandemic.) Trump, as always, seemed to regard SARS-CoV-2 as yet another attack on him personally, saying that he was sailing to an easy re-election on a growing economy until this pesky virus from China came along and ruined things for him.
On the pandemic, Biden does what he does best: he evoked, in terms at once chilling and deeply moving, the families who have an empty place at their dinner tables, the wives or husbands who reach out through force of habit to their spouses in bed only to realize that they’re not there anymore due to COVID-19 (the name of the disease the SARS-CoV-2 virus causes), the human cause of the pandemic. Trump, with his Orwellian doubleplusgood doublethinker’s ability to say contradictory things and believe both of them (and argue both of them with equal sincerity), said he has a great deal of respect for Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, even though Trump has publicly denounced Fauci as “a disaster” and apparently hasn’t spoken to him privately in weeks.
I have no particular love for Fauci -- in his early days in his current job he was so spectacularly incompetent in his response to AIDS that tens of thousands of my Gay male brothers died unnecessarily -- and it’s a tribute to his skills as a bureaucratic politician that he still has that job after 36 years even though he started it with such a spectacular failure. During the debate Trump once again reminded America that in the early days of the pandemic Fauci had told the American people not to wear masks -- something Fauci has probably regretted every day of his life since then. Fauci said it because he was worried that there wouldn’t be enough masks for medical personnel if everyone in the U.S. started wearing them.
Indeed, one of the weirdest aspects of the U.S. response to SARS-CoV-2 has been the whole politicization of masks. It’s not like we weren’t warned -- in the flu pandemic of 1918-1919 the public health director of San Francisco made masks his front-line defense, and he got ridiculed for it. A doctor reporting on that pandemic in 1925 for the American Medical Association said masks were good for “individual prophylaxis” but not “community prophylaxis” -- that wearing a mask could protect you personally either from getting or giving the infection, but it wasn’t going to stop the pandemic because there’d be the same problem there is now: lack of compliance.
In his classic account of the 1918-1919 flu, America’s Forgotten Pandemic, historian Alfred Crosby wrote that the mask requirement in San Francisco turned into an object of ridicule. In this pandemic something even worse has happened: mask-wearing has become a political statement of which side you are on in America’s great political divide. We heard that once again in tonight’s debate, with Trump coming on without a mask and Biden entering with one (though he quickly removed it before he went on camera). A mask has become as much a visual symbol that you don’t like Trump and the Republicans as a MAGA hat has become a symbol that you do.
Trump tried to justify his handling of SARS-CoV-2 tonight the way he always has: he said it was a totally unexpected viral threat, that it was China’s fault for not cooperating with international health authorities early on (this is actually a defensible argument, but not from the President who pulled the U.S, out of the World Health Organization at the height of the pandemic), and that we need to reopen the economy and send kids back to school immediately regardless of the potential health hazards.
Of course, he’s also downplayed the potential health hazards, saying that children are virtually immune from either getting COVID-19 or spreading SARS-CoV-2 (neither, alas, is true) and the whole risk of the pandemic has been overhyped by sinister elites who want to use it as an excuse to destroy the American economy. In his Los Angeles Times article cited above, David Lauter quoted Trump’s statement at a recent rally denouncing the media for over-reporting on the pandemic and wrote, “That sentiment reflects the widespread agreement within Trump’s bubble that the pandemic has passed its peak and was never as bad as the media said.”
Unfortunately for Trump and all his wishful thinking that the virus would “just go away” and economic lockdowns were not only useless but counterproductive, viruses have their own agenda. A virus is a submicroscopic particle of nucleic acid, proteins and a lipid coat that allow them to attach themselves to cells, infect them and use those cells to replicate. The more opportunities we give SARS-CoV-2 particles to do that, the longer the pandemic will last and the more people will die from it. There are really only two ways to stop a viral epidemic: either you develop a vaccine so the human immune system will be able to defend against the infection, or you eliminate the transmission vectors that allow the virus to spread from one host to another.
The 1918-1919 flu pandemic ended not because we developed a vaccine (back then scientists still thought flu was caused by a bacterium, not a virus), but because World War I ended and thus humans stopped creating near-ideal transmission vectors (crowded troop ships, overcrowded field hospitals and the filthy trenches in which the soldiers lived during combat). This led the killer strains of flu to die out because they couldn’t spread to new hosts as fast as they were killing the old ones. Right now our best shot at stopping people from dying of COVID-19 is to wear masks, enforce social distancing and keep limiting large public gatherings -- the very measures so many of Trump’s supporters routinely denounce as instruments of some vast authoritarian conspiracy to undermine America’s economy and turn us all into slaves.
I want to end these reflections by quoting from a real leader, one Trump’s most reality-challenged Republican supporters insist on comparing him to even though they couldn’t be more different. HIs name was Winston Churchill, and he led the British government through most of World War II. “There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away,” Churchill said in early 1942, when the war situation looked dire for both Britain and the U.S. “The British people can face peril or misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy, but they bitterly resent being deceived or finding that those responsible for their affairs are themselves dwelling in a fool’s paradise.”
Winston Churchill was a leader. Donald Trump is a huckster who tells people whatever he thinks he needs to say to get them to do what he wants -- buy condos in Trump Tower, gamble at Trump casinos, attend Trump University, or vote for him. Had he followed Churchill’s advice, been honest with the American people about the dangers posed by SARS-CoV-2, and embraced the radical public-health measures that could have stopped it well before the U.S., death toll reached 220,000, Trump would probably have been hailed as a great leader and be coasting to an easy re-election. Instead he’s trailing badly in the polls -- a standing this debate is not likely to change -- and, with so many people having already voted, he’s running out of time to stage the dramatic from-behind comeback he would need to win re-election fairly.
