Unsanitized, Election Edition: Debate Night in America

A look at Trump and Biden in the final high-profile event before voting closes. This is The Election 2020 Daily Report for October 23, 2020.

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Universal Family Care

Here are the final stories from our special issue on universal family care:

• Robert Kuttner interviews Sen. Elizabeth Warren about the importance of care infrastructure.

• Our fabulous interns Shera Avi-Yonah, Blaise Malley, and Alex J. Rouhandeh interviewed eight people caught up in the care economy, as providers, as workers, as caregivers, as care recipients. They tell their stories.

You can see all the stories from our family care issue now at prospect.org/familycare. Please do!

Trump Finally Told About Consequences

The only significant date of the presidential election was the day in early March when everyone realized we were headed into lockdown. It certainly wasn’t September 29 or October 22, the two dates of the presidential debates. These things are over-analyzed and over-determined. But as long as I’m here and committed to writing about the election until the final day (and hey, with coronavirus case counts rising to their highest level ever, it was a perfect moment to pause writing about the pandemic!), I might as well articulate some thoughts.

I’ve read a theory that the debate rules, giving each candidate two uninterrupted minutes to answer the first question of a new topic by cutting the opponent’s mic, as well as the implied threat of muting later on, subdued Trump, at least at the outset. He was also clearly prepped to be “likable,” which I guess translated into Trump-ese means “somber.” He got revved up a bit when the talk turned to Hunter Biden, but the general “today, he became a president” praise seems pretty misplaced.

That was especially evident when Trump was forced to confront something he has completely shied away from this year: his immigration record. NBC News broke this week that 545 children separated from their parents in 2017 have yet to be reunited because the parents cannot be found. It’s an encapsulation of the incompetence, cruelty, and ideological rigidity of the Trump regime. And Trump, looking actually uncomfortable discussing it, had no answer for his actions.

Read all of our Unsanitized reports

He started by claiming the kids were brought in by coyotes and gangs to get migrants to pass through into the country, but these kids were in fact forcibly separated from parents at the border. He pivoted to talk about the cages being built by the Obama administration, which is true—Nick Miroff of the Washington Post has a good explanation of it—but building the cages is not fully relevant to using them for the purposes of separating parents from children is a different matter. Then Trump touted how clean the facilities are (which ironically is exactly what the Obama administration said when the cages were built), which again is irrelevant. Then he closed by saying he ended the policy so there’s no problem. Of course, there’s a big problem for 545 orphaned children.

Trump implemented an indefensible policy, deliberately, to frighten immigrants from entering the country, and now he can’t defend it. That’s why immigration, a defining feature of Trump’s rise in the Republican Party, has all but disappeared from his campaign agenda. This too makes Trump more like a normal Republican: he wants to hide from voters the consequences of his actions.

On the Biden Side

Joe Biden had an interesting exchange in that immigration section as well, one that will give any close observer of the Democratic primary some whiplash. Asked about record deportations and family detentions under the Obama administration, Biden forthrightly said “we made a mistake.” He flew away from Obama’s immigration position, the standard historical Democratic line of being tough on the border to show seriousness before seeking a path to citizenship.

That wasn’t the only move away from Obama, from a candidate that used Obama as a human shield to secure the nomination. Biden rejected austerity by lauding the ability of the federal government to deficit spend to make up for revenue shortfalls in the states. He talked about “Bidencare,” mainly by adding a public option (though the rhetoric he’s using is very confused; he appears to be calling the public option a fallback option for states that didn’t expand Medicaid) and negotiating with pharmaceutical companies over price, which Obama also ran on but then deep-sixed in a deal with the drug industry.

Biden called climate change “an existential threat to humanity” and articulated a just transition, in association with labor, to move away from fossil fuels. The Trump team will try to get a lot of mileage over the final 11 days about Biden “closing down the oil industry,” which Biden decided to clean up in post-debate remarks (he said he meant phasing out fossil fuel subsidies). But the section where he discussed “fence lines” was a powerful call for environmental justice for downtrodden communities.

Biden mocked the idea that regular people should care about the movement of the stock market. He gave the most significant defense of a $15 an hour minimum wage that has ever been seen in general-election presidential politics, completely dismissing (correctly) the idea that it will crush businesses. (The minimum wage has been popular wherever it’s been put to voters, including deep-red states, so this was a no-brainer.)

I have few illusions about who we’re getting in Joe Biden if he wins, and the range of possibilities for a Biden administration. But the fact that he felt necessary to pull away from his predecessor Obama on austerity and deportations, that he felt necessary to go populist on wages, signals where Biden thinks the electorate is at. And that will be important for his potential future decision-making.

Pandemic Watch

• As I mentioned, the highest one-day case total was yesterday. • Trump made and then retracted a little news in the debate, saying there would be a vaccine announced within “weeks.” The problem is that there’s no actual funding for distributing the vaccine; that was part of the endlessly stalled stimulus bill. • The experience of Iowa, which never locked down but is still seeing a depressed economy, signals that Americans aren’t idiots, and they don’t need their government to tell them they can’t get Jalapeno Poppers at TGI Friday’s to know that it’s dangerous. Until the virus is eradicated, we will have a serious demand shortfall. • PPP loan forgiveness is still a black box.

Today I Learned, Election Edition

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