We begin today’s roundup with a run down of the nearly six dozen lies Trump has told over the last few days on the trail as he hosts one superspreader event after another. From CNN’s Daniel Dale:
President Donald Trump's dishonesty is getting worse.
Trump has been reliably deceptive for his entire presidency, filling his speeches and tweets with lies and other false statements.
The frequency and magnitude of his deception tends to
accelerate, however, during campaign season -- when he complements his usual ad-libbed inaccuracy with a barrage of inaccurate statements that are written into his speech scripts.
For fact checkers, the period from Friday through Sunday was one of the most challenging of Trump's entire presidency: he made at least 66 separate false or misleading claims over that three-day span. In other words, it was 66 false or misleading claims without even counting all the times he repeated some of those same 66 claims over the course of the three days.
Also at CNN, Stephen Collinson analyzes Trump’s bizarre new strategy of attacking Dr. Fauci:
President Donald Trump's election endgame argument, far from bristling with new solutions to a pandemic that has killed 220,000 Americans, on Monday devolved into a campaign of insults against Dr. Anthony Fauci -- for telling the truth about the disease.
His personal warfare against Fauci on a frenzied day on the campaign trail, while indecent and questionable from a strategic political perspective, revealed how the US government effort to beat the pandemic has been suppressed in the service of Trump's reelection.
At The Washington Post, Eugene Robinson explains how Trump has all but given up on actual governing or managing the pandemic:
It's hard to believe, but Trump doesn't even seem to be trying to slow the spread of the deadly virus that has killed nearly 220,000 Americans, ravaged the economy and seriously damaged his chances of winning a second term. With the election just two weeks away and polls heavily favoring Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Trump has been spending his days frantically jetting around the country to campaign rallies that look like potential superspreader events — big, tightly packed, noisy gatherings where most people are not wearing masks.
Meanwhile, the editorials are rolling in in support of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. USA Today:
If this were a choice between two capable major party nominees who happened to have opposing ideas, we wouldn’t choose sides. Different voters have different concerns. But this is not a normal election, and these are not normal times. This year, character, competence and credibility are on the ballot. Given Trump’s refusal to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power if he loses, so, too, is the future of America's democracy.
For nearly four decades, the Editorial Board has stood for certain core values: truth, accountability, civility in public discourse, opposition to racism, common-ground solutions to the nation’s problems, and steadfast support for First Amendment rights. These aren’t partisan issues, or at least they shouldn’t be.
Rolling Stone:
We’ve lived for the past four years under a man categorically unfit to be president. Fortunately for America, Joe Biden is Donald Trump’s opposite in nearly every category: The Democratic presidential nominee evinces competence, compassion, steadiness, integrity, and restraint. Perhaps most important in this moment, Biden holds a profound respect for the institutions of American democracy, as well as a deep knowledge about how our government — and our system of checks and balances — is meant to work; he aspires to lead the nation as its president, not its dictator. The 2020 election, then, offers the nation a chance to reboot and rebuild from the racist, authoritarian, know-nothing wreckage wrought by the 45th president. And there are few Americans better suited to the challenge than Joe Biden.
David Frum at The Atlantic writes about a possible Trump lame-duck presidency:
His hopes for the future—starting with staying out of prison—depend on transforming the remains of the Republican Party into an ongoing Trump Defense League, like those bogus anti-defamation groups stepped up by New York City mobsters in the 1970s. And the surest way to achieve that end is by empowering the QAnon fantasy to become a power bloc inside the Republican Party. In the original QAnon myth, Trump was a messiah battling a demonic “deep state.” Now he’ll be reimagined as a martyr instead—or perhaps as a messiah awaiting a second coming. The more Trump can propagate wild claims during his lame-duck presidency, the tighter he can bolt the conservative messaging machine to his cause during his post-presidency.
On a final note, Scott Bixby and Hanna Trudo at The Daily Beast highlight another way the Biden camp is preparing for the election and its aftermath:
According to fundraisers who spoke to The Daily Beast, the campaign is still leaning hard on its donor network, explicitly pointing ahead to its potential need to fund legal battles in multiple states following the election. The expectations on that network are high; according to a Biden Victory Fund calendar of events obtained by The Daily Beast, the campaign has 37 events planned from Oct. 17 through Oct. 24—nearly five a day, on average.
The rationale? In part, lingering anxieties that President Donald Trump will make good on his public statements implying that he may refuse to accept election results if he loses, which could trigger court fights in multiple states and appellate courts—the kind of legal battle that could get very expensive very quickly.