Month: September 2020

With America so divided politically and upended by the pandemic there’s a widespread thirst for normalcy. We want to leave home without a mask, go back to the office, put the kids on the school bus.

The year started with our president awaiting trial for committing impeachable offenses. It saw the world grapple with volcanos, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, locusts, and the emergence of a global pandemic. And this was all in the first 100 days.

Throughout it all, one hope has lingered. In November, America will vote on whether or not to retain Donald Trump as its president.

But, if 2020 stays true to its nature, the election won’t bring clarity, but a true constitutional crisis.

Barton Gellman, writing in the Atlantic, explains how events might unfold if there isn’t a clear winner on Election Night:

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 accustomed to choosing electors by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution says it has to be that way. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late 19th century, every state has ceded the decision to its voters. Even so, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” How and when a state might do so has not been tested for well over a century.

Trump may test this. According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.

If Trump wins the most Electoral College votes, these maneuvers will be unnecessary, and he will ungraciously accept Joe Biden’s concession. However, if he is clearly behind or slightly ahead but predicted to lose once all the mail-in, absentee and provisional ballots are counted, this strategy of manipulating the election in selected states could be utilized.

Imagine Iowa, where the polls show a deadlocked race and the Republicans control the legislature and the governor’s mansion. Rather than concede that he has narrowly lost the state, Trump-loyal state legislators could have the Biden electors thrown out and declare him the winner. Their excuse would be that irregularities in the vote make it impossible to determine who actually had the most support.

Obviously, Democrats across the country wouldn’t accept this. But the plan doesn’t contemplate acceptance. The point is to stay in power despite losing, and that requires a willingness to rely on the power of the state to crush all resistance.

Joe Biden has expressed confidence that the military will escort Trump out of the White House if he is defeated and refuses to leave. That’s probably a safe bet. But what if the election is truly undecided because it’s unclear that it was constitutionally impermissible for, say, the Iowa legislature to choose their pro-Trump electors?

Will the military not defer to the Courts?

The country is crying out for normalcy, but time and again it gets chaos. It some ways, it seems completely on brand for 2020 to extend this chaos all the way to Inauguration Day in January 2021. Why would this year from hell be content with staying within its own boundaries?

The Commission on Presidential Debates has released the format and topics for the first showdown between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. It will be moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News:

The first presidential debate will be held on Tuesday, September 29 at Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, OH. The format for the first debate calls for six 15-minute time segments dedicated to topics announced in advance in order to encourage deep discussion of the leading issues facing the country.

Chris Wallace, moderator of the first 2020 presidential debate, has selected the topics for that debate.

Subject to possible changes because of news developments, the topics for the September 29 debate are as follows, not necessarily to be brought up in this order:
The Trump and Biden Records
The Supreme Court
Covid-19
The Economy
Race and Violence in our Cities
The Integrity of the Election

All debates start at 9:00 p.m. ET and run for 90 minutes without commercial interruption.

I guess there’s fodder for hope from both sides in those discussion categories. Trump will push the pre-COVID economy and the strength of the stock market. He’ll emphasize support for the police and opposition to violence and looting rather than racial issues.  He’ll use the platform to raise further doubts about the integrity of mail voting our electoral system. Biden will raise alarm about the Supreme Court and the rushed effort to replace Justice Ginsburg, emphasizing the risk to people’s health care. He’ll slam Trump’s COVID-19 response and his racial insensitivity.  They’ll both have a lot to say about each other’s records.

Once again, somehow climate change doesn’t make the cut. When aliens ask why we went extinct, they’ll have an easy answer.

 

Another midweek, another cafe and lounge. Pull up a chair, pour a beverage, and let’s talk.

Some videos for you:

John Oliver on whether he will dedicate his Emmy Award to Danbury, CT (he’s really excited about getting a sewage plant named after him, potentially):

Stephen Colbert pays tribute to The Notorious RBG:

And why not a little music? Miley Cyrus covers a classic 1978 song by Blondie (“Heart of Glass”), and I’m here for it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBPZELdVAT8

If I am going to give you the cover, I should at least make sure you are reminded of the original:

Same song, but different worlds.

Bar is open. Drinks are on the house. Drink responsibly, but only after you’ve checked your voter registration status. Remember to vote early and vote once.

Cheers!

The Senate Democrats held a caucus call on Saturday. Their aim was to develop a strategy for opposing a rush replacement for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Sam Stein and Sam Brodey of the The Daily Beast report that there was a split between liberals who advocate “a dramatic show of resistance with overt political threats” and moderates who want to remain “squarely focused on the implications that the confirmation would have on health care.”

Yet, there was agreement on the goal:  keep the seat open in the hope that Joe Biden can fill it next year. The Republicans can thwart this goal, provided they stay united. The question is whether there is any strategy that can stop them.

The first arrow in the Democrats’ quiver is Senate procedure. Unfortunately, recent rule changes have all but eliminated their ability to resist. In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reached a breaking point with the Republicans’ refusal to seat President Obama’s nominees to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation’s second highest court. At one point during the struggle, there were four vacancies on the D.C. Circuit and Senate Republicans were arguing that none of them should be filled, but rather the court’s size should be reduced.

This led Reid to deploy the “nuclear option.” He changed the Senate’s filibuster. Instead of needing 60 votes to confirm a cabinet member or federal judge, a simple majority of 50 (plus the tie-breaking vice-president) would suffice. The only exception was Supreme Court. Its justices were considered too important to be confirmed without broader consensus. In 2017, with Republicans in control of the Senate, Mitch McConnell eliminated this exception, too, so he could shepherd Neil Gorsuch’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Without the filibuster available as a procedural tool, the Democrats must rely on a motley collection of improvised tactics none of which are likely to thwart a GOP united behind President Trump’s nominee who he plans to announce on Saturday.

The first strategy is delay. It’s found in Rule VI of the Senate Rules.

RULE VI
QUORUM—ABSENT SENATORS MAY BE SENT FOR
Whenever upon such roll call it shall be ascertained that a quorum is not present, a majority of the Senators present may direct the Sergeant at Arms to request, and, when necessary, to compel the attendance of the absent Senators, which order shall be determined without debate; and pending its execution, and until a quorum shall be present, no debate nor motion, except to adjourn, or to recess pursuant to a previous order entered by unanimous consent, shall be in order.

The important thing here is that a quorum consists of “a majority of the Senators duly chosen and sworn,” and Vice-President Mike Pence doesn’t count for this purpose. One Democratic senator would have to be present to raise objections, but if the rest refused to show up, the Republicans would need 50 of their 53 senators in attendance in order to begin debate on the nomination. With many GOP senators campaigning for reelection, this could present some challenges.

Two of them, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have already stated their opposition to confirming Ginsburg’s replacement before the election. If they could be convinced to join the Democrats in denying a quorum, only one more vote would be needed to stop the process. That though presents a lot of “ifs.” Collins and Murkowski oppose a pre-election nominee, but they might well back McConnell and join the rest of their Republican colleagues to stop this Democratic gambit.

The second strategy is try to prevent a vote. The same basic strategy can be deployed at the end of the debate over a nomination to prevent a vote:

RULE XII
VOTING PROCEDURE

No request by a Senator for unanimous consent for the taking of a final vote on a specified date upon the passage of a bill or joint resolution shall be submitted to the Senate for agreement thereto until after a quorum call ordered for the purpose by the Presiding Officer, it shall be disclosed that a quorum of the Senate is present; and when a unanimous consent is thus given the same shall operate as the order of the Senate, but any unanimous consent may be revoked by another unanimous consent granted in the manner prescribed above upon one day’s notice.

The Democrats can also use quorum rules to harass the Republicans’ efforts to move the nomination through the committee process. The rules state that at least two members of the minority must be present in order for a hearing to proceed. The problem is, it’s not likely to be effective because the chairman can just ignore the requirement. This was demonstrated in August 2019, when Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham brushed off the lack of a quorum to push through the Secure and Protect Act. He also simply ignored a provision of the committee rules that state, “At the request of any member…a bill, matter, or nomination on the agenda of the Committee may be held over until the next meeting of the Committee or for one week, whichever occurs later.” No doubt, Chairman Graham would ignore these rules again to speed along the confirmation of a new Supreme Court Justice, but forcing him to do so would still be a smart strategic move. The more it looks like the Senate Republicans are breaking rules and violating norms, the less legitimate their process will appear to the public.

The Democrats might have more assured success by invoking Rule XVII to cause a two-day delay.

RULE XVII
REFERENCE TO COMMITTEES; MOTIONS TO DISCHARGE; REPORTS OF COMMITTEES; AND HEARINGS AVAILABLE

5.4 Any measure or matter reported by any standing committee shall not be considered in the Senate unless the report of that committee upon that measure or matter has been available to Members for at least two calendar days (excluding Sundays and legal holidays) prior to the consideration of that measure or matter. If hearings have been held on any such measure or matter so reported, the committee reporting the measure or matter shall make every reasonable effort to have such hearings printed and available for distribution to the Members of the Senate prior to the consideration of such measure or matter in the Senate.

With only 41 days until the election, every bit of delay can help. But, as Andrew Prokop of Vox states, “If Republican senators are unconcerned about the appearances of an unseemly rush to a vote, they can certainly” get a confirmation in that window.

In theory, the House of Representatives could intervene. Speaker Nancy Pelosi could exploit Senate Rule  VII on Morning Business which requires the presiding officer to “lay before the Senate…messages from the House of Representatives as may remain upon his table from any previous day’s session undisposed of.” By sending a flurry of messages to the Senate each day, she could cause some mild headaches.

Super longshots from the House. One is to impeach Trump again which is utterly implausible and would likely backfire politically but that would force the Senate to stop all business and conduct a trial. The other is to threaten to shutdown the government, using the same brinksmanship that the GOP has used in the past. Pelosi has already said that she won’t go there.

Perhaps a combination of these stalling and harassment tactics could create such a truncated confirmation process that some Republican senators balk.

If the confirmation is not completed before Election Day, some new opportunities arise. There are two Special Elections, one in Georgia and one in Arizona. The winners of those elections will be seated as soon as the results are certified. The Georgia race will go to a runoff election if no one win’s an outright majority, but the Democrats are heavily favored to win the Arizona seat. By the end of November, it’s likely that astronaut Mark Kelly, the Democrat, will have defeated incumbent Republican Martha McSally in the Senate, giving the Democrats a potentially decisive extra vote in the Lame Duck session. (But it’s also possible the Republican majority in the Senate could find a way to delay seating Kelly.)

The Republicans are not likely to be deterred by procedural moves, but cleverly employed they can raise the political costs for them. Supreme Court confirmations typically take two or three months. Obviously, any lifelong assignment should require very thorough vetting. A rushed process is politically problematic for this reason alone, so the fewer days they have to operate the most suspect their process will seem.

Additionally, the Republicans are operating right at the margin with approximately 51 votes. A delay past the election would put them under more pressure, as it’s expected they’ll be down to 50 votes once Mark Kelly is seated.

If Biden wins the election, as he currently favored to do, and the Democrats take control of the Senate, the costs of pushing through a confirmation following a Democratic sweep will be considerably higher.

If the Republicans nonetheless succeed in their effort to replace Ginsburg, the Democrats will have opportunities to respond, perhaps by expanding the Supreme Court, or ending the filibuster entirely, depriving a future GOP minority in the Senate of any real leverage. For now, delay is Chuck Schumer’s best and only option and it’s not very good.

Starting this week, my job description at the Washington Monthly has changed a bit. I’m not really blogging there anymore, but writing in a more traditional newsy style under the supervision of Matthew Cooper, formerly of Newsweek and Valerie Plame fame. It’s an exciting opportunity, but it comes with a lot of changes for how I operate and organize my day. That’ll all work itself out, but it will definitely change my posting schedule here at Progress Pond. 

You won’t reliably see a new post at 11am because I’m not on a fixed deadline anymore. You’ll still see crossposts from WaMo but they’ll come in less predictably and only after they’ve gone through a thorough editing process. The prime content that I present here will probably remain similar to what you’ve seen in the past, but it may get posted later in the day or at night, as I find the best windows to manage all my responsibilities, which definitely include being a parent to a 10-year old who is doing virtual school in my kitchen.

The Monthly is excited to have more resources and staff to produce a higher level of journalism, and I have to do my part by picking up my game. This came at interesting time, as I had just settled on a programmer who is fixing issues on this site, including the comments section, posting videos, and ad displays. This was possible because of many generous donations from loyal readers and subscribers. I hope the end result is an improvement.

In any case, the only way forward is to go straight through, and that’s what we have to do here at Progress Pond and as a nation. Doing it together with you, will make it easier for me.

With fewer than 40 days left before Election Day, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives Joe Biden a 77 percent chance of winning the wresting the presidency away from Donald Trump. In fact, according to calculations by Harry Enten of CNN, “Biden has a better chance (about 45%) of winning 340 electoral votes than Trump has of winning the election (about 25%). Biden’s chance of taking 400 electoral votes is pretty much the same of Trump winning.” The demographic explanation for the state of the race is that Trump has lost a lot of support among white voters.

This point was explored here in early-September in a piece by Robert Shapiro, a former Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs for President Clinton, and it’s reiterated by David Siders of Politico. Polling indicates that Trump has lost support from every kind of white voter, whether male or female, working class or professional, college-educated or not. This is more than offsetting a slightly rosier picture for him than four years ago with Black and Latinx voters.

Yet,Siiders makes a highly contestable point when he argues that “Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court one month before the midterm elections two year (sic)ago did nothing to stop Democrats from steamrolling Trump and the GOP.”

When Nate Cohn of the New York Times did a post-mortem on polling performance in the 2018 midterms, he noted that they were much-improved at the state level over 2016, when they missed Trump’s strength in several traditionally blue states. Still, the polls underestimated the Democratic candidates in New York and California and overestimated them in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and Missouri. What happened is that blue states got bluer and red states got redder. Silver’s post-mortem showed much the same thing, with most of the error in his projections explained by upset Senate and gubernatorial wins for the Republicans in Florida and Mike Braun’s unseating of Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana ,who was leading in most late polls. It’s possible that Kavanaugh polarized the electorate and thereby helped the GOP hold on to enough traditional Republicans to win some statewide races they were primed to lose.

With the startling death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and President Trump’s decision to announce a nominee, we have a repeat of the Supreme Court taking center stage in the election cycle. If the vacant seat polarizes the electorate, it could make it harder for the Democrats to win in red districts and states and affect both the outcome of the presidential election and the battle for control of the Senate.

Consider Mississippi, where the last three presidential polls, dating from April to August, show Trump winning comfortably by 10 or 11 points. Yet, the most recent poll of the Senate election there shows signs of trouble for incumbent Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith. In former Secretary of Agriculture, Mike Espy, she faces a black challenger who she leads, by a single point. The same poll taken in April had her up by 26 points.

The dramatic narrowing of the race is partly attributable to Hyde-Smith’s weaknesses as a candidate. Adam Ganucheau of Mississippi Today reports:

Hyde-Smith, meanwhile, has struggled raising cash this cycle. Among incumbent senators, Hyde-Smith has raised less than 96 incumbent senators, including Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, who faces reelection in 2024. The three Senate incumbents who raised less than Hyde-Smith have announced they will not seek re-election.

If Hyde-Smith is struggling to win enthusiastic support fromher base, the death of Ginsburg could change that. It certainly changed things for her opponent:

Espy has raised nearly $200,000 since Ginsburg’s passing was announced on Friday evening, according to Espy campaign sources. That total — a single-day fundraising record for Espy this cycle — is close to one-third of what he raised from April to June.

Outsiders tend to think of Mississippi as an implacably conservative state, largely indistinguishable from its neighbors. But it has by far the largest black population (37 percent) in the country. And, contrary to its reputation for disenfranchising its black voters, a Kaiser Family Foundation study of the 2018 electorate found a higher percentage (78 percent) of eligible black voters are registered in Mississippi than in any other state. Only 72 percent of eligible white voters there are registered.

What makes Mississippi reliably Republican is the inelasticity of its electorate. According to a post-2018 midterm study by Silver, only Georgia and Alabama had less wiggle in their vote. Both white and black Mississippians are nearly impervious to shifting winds and prevailing political narratives. Yet, if whites begin to abandon the Republican candidates, Mississippi can tip blue faster than any other Deep Southern state.

Trump has been losing white support from every quarter, and Mississippi is no different. He carried the state in 2016 by nearly 18 points, so a 10-11 point poll advantage in 2020 already shows some serious erosion. Espy closing a spring deficit of 26 points down to a 1 point race is not unrelated to this national trend. But Mississippi is also a deeply religious state with a strong anti-choice majority. The white community there has had a contentious relationship with the Supreme Court ever since the 1954 ruling in Brown v. the Kansas Board of Education. Nothing reminds white voters in Mississippi why they vote Republican more than the battle to win conservative control of the Court and roll back Roe v. Wade.

I used Mississippi as to examine a possible Ginsburg effect because it has the starkest racial polarization combined with a clear preference for a big Republican majority on the Supreme Court. The impact might be bigger in the Magnolia State than in places like Montana and Alaska which also have contested Senate elections but where the voters are less religious and more libertarian-minded than in Deep South.

Yet, even in Mississippi, it cuts both ways. Espy’s huge infusion of cash benefits his campaign. Admittedly, almost all of that money probably came from out of state, but it will still have an impact. The problem for the Democrats is that they were already energized while a lot of white Trump voters were drifting away from him. If they come back in the fold over the Ginsburg vacancy, it will make it harder for the Democrats to win red states. Mississippi was always a long shot for both Espy and Biden, but the contests in places like Kansas and Georgia with a lot of social conservatives are probably tougher lifts for the Democrats now.

In 2018, the Democrats over-performed in the House, winning 40 seats. But they suffered a major disappointment in the Senate, and the same thing could happen again, perhaps for the same reason.

I’m not even a woman, and the president’s patronizing attitude to women makes me sick:

Moments after vowing to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court at his campaign rally in North Carolina on Saturday night, President Trump asked some of his female supporters in the crowd if their husbands had approved their attendance. Trump pretended to poll the crowd on who to nominate when he apparently recognized some of the women in Fayetteville from other rallies. “Ok let’s do a poll. Oh there they are. How many of these have you come to?” he said. “What is this, number what? Like, 90? I see ‘em all over the place, they’re great. I hope your husbands are okay with it. Are they okay?” He went on to say he would nominate a woman to fill the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat because “I like women much more than I like men.”

If replacing Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court with Clarence Thomas was an enduring insult to the black community, I imagine Trump’s replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be at least as offensive to women.

I’m so angry right now that I cannot even see.

At some point in the future, I will look back and celebrate Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s amazing and accomplished life, but for today I am only going to discuss the consequences of her dying while the Republican Party controls both the White House and the Senate. I am going to say it once because it needs to be said: she should have followed the advice of people who told her to retire while President Obama was in position to nominate her replacement. She was overconfident that Hillary Clinton would win, and now every single thing she valued lies in ruins.

The Democrats will fight Trump’s nominee and Mitch McConnell’s rush effort to confirm that nominee. They’ll raise money off of it. They’ll tell people the stakes, which are about a serious as an atomic bomb. But the Republican Party has been building to this moment from the moment since the day conservatives took it over, and there is no force in nature that can prevent them from forging ahead.

This is the equivalent of losing the battles of 1860’s and 1960’s. Imagine no Progressive Era, no New Deal, no Civil Rights Era, and no Great Society–all largely wiped away by a single untimely death. Women’s rights will soon be entirely up to the states. Obamacare, or any better alternative, are dead. Regulation of industry for financial or environmental reasons will be rolled back to the era of the robber barons. The traditional separation of church and state will more resemble what we see today in Poland than what we’re accustomed to here in America. Voting rights and election reform efforts will be obliterated. Gay rights will be curtailed, and civil rights for minorities and non-citizens will be eliminated or go unenforced.

Nothing can realistically stop this from happening unless something truly extraordinary happens, and I do not expect any miracles.

However, the Democrats will have options if they win control of the White House and Senate for themselves in November. They can add more seats to the Supreme Court. This isn’t an ideal solution, and it will touch off a political and cultural war not seen since the Missouri Compromise was ruled unconstitutional in the Dred Scott case in 1857.

But they have a rationale for doing it. The Republicans’ decision to block President’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016 because it was an election year was unprecedented and a completely bad faith power move. It effectively stole a Supreme Court seat for the Republicans. For them to now turn around and ram home a nominee mere weeks before an election, or even in the lame duck session, possibly after Trump has been defeated, is such egregious hypocrisy and so consequential, that the Democrats are justified to act in kind.

If they have the power to level the playing field again and don’t do it, then they’ll give away everything they stand for in exchange for the maintenance of norms that no longer exist.

It’s a shame that it’s coming to this because Joe Biden had the potential to be a healing force in our country, but he’s not going to have that opportunity.

Unfortunately, this fight will help Trump unify the right behind him. The Democrats were already unified and energized, so they don’t get the same benefit. It’s now much less likely that the Democrats will win the Senate and much more likely that Trump will be reelected.

Calling this a catastrophe doesn’t really describe it. We’re facing the end of the country as we know it, and the left isn’t going to consent to be governed under this new regime. Civil war is now a real possibility.

 

 

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be starting a new painting. It is a scene from Jerome, Arizona. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

I started my sketch using my usual grind, duplicating the grid I made over a copy of the photo itself. Next week some actual paint.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

On Thursday, Joe Biden participated in a CNN town hall near his hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was similar to the one President Trump held on Tuesday in Philadelphia. It’s not hard to understand why they both chose the Keystone State. According to the analysts at FiveThirtyEight, Biden has 96 percent chance of winning the election if he carries Pennsylvania, which compares to an 84 percent chance for the president.

The reviews of Biden’s performance have so far been vastly less critical than the near-total condemnation that greeted Trump’s erratic performance. One of the main critiques of Trump’s town hall was that he delivered a “a firehose of lying,” as CNN fact checker Daniel Dale put it.

 

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler said Trump made “four Pinocchio” statements “over and over again.” But Kessler also found fault with some of Biden’s material.

Some examples include falsely saying that Trump held the Bible upside down during his photo-op after the clearing of demonstrators in Lafayette Park, and implausibly arguing that Trump could have prevented any American COVID-19 deaths if he had only done his job. At one point, Biden incorrectly attributed a University of Washington estimate on how many lives can be saved by wearing masks to Centers of Disease Control director Dr. Robert Redfield. He was also sloppy when he expressed incredulity that some people in the media make a big deal out of him not having an Ivy League degree. No one has suggested that he’d be the first president who didn’t attend an Ivy–in fact, Ronald Reagan graduated from Eureka College in Illinois.

But one thing to note about Biden’s misstatements is that they weren’t exactly crowdpleasers. Democrats tend to cringe when their candidate wastes a good attack line by overstating the case, and they actually care when statistics are misattributed or mistakes are made in describing recent events. Biden will mostly likely clean these things up rather than make them a staple of his campaign.

Trump’s inaccuracies were more familiar and completely different in nature. He lied for the umpteenth time about the Obama administration not bequeathing him an adequate supply of ventilators. He lied about when we can expect a vaccine, and he will continue to make this a key part of his pitch for reelection. He lied about how America compares to other nations with respect to the pandemic, and he once again said nonsensically that we’d have fewer cases if we did fewer tests. Whether he was falsely accusing Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden of criticizing his (belated and incomplete) travel ban of Chinese travel or he was disputing that he had downplayed the threat of the virus, Trump’s lies were part of a routine. His audience enjoys it when calls COVID-19 the “Kung-Flu” or the “China virus.” They get a big kick out of attacks on Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Trump tells these lies to entertain his base, and he tries to evade responsibility at every turn. That’s why no amount of fact-checking will deter him and he will repeat these same lies for as long as the campaign lasts.

By contrast, Joe Biden will not continue to say Trump was holding the Bible upside down, and he’ll correct his citation about the lives that can saved through wearing masks. He’ll probably continue to talk about his lack of an Ivy League degree, but he’ll be careful not to say he’d be the first president without one. He’ll do these things in part because he’s not a fundamentally dishonest person, but also because Democrats don’t enjoy or reward dishonesty.