Elections

President Trump abruptly cut off an interview with the “60 Minutes” star Lesley Stahl at the White House on Tuesday and then taunted her on Twitter, posting a short behind-the-scenes video of her at the taping and noting that she had not been wearing a mask in the clip.Mr. Trump then threatened to post his interview with Ms. Stahl ahead of its intended broadcast time on Sunday evening, calling it “FAKE and BIASED.”The spectacle of a president, two weeks from Election Day, picking a fight with the nation’s most popular television news program began on Tuesday after Mr. Trump grew irritated with Ms. Stahl’s questions, according to two people familiar with the circumstances of the taping.One person briefed on what took place said that Mr. Trump had spent more than 45 minutes filming with Ms. Stahl and her CBS News crew, and that the taping had not wrapped up when the president’s aides had expected it to.So Mr. Trump cut the interview short and then declined to participate in a “walk and talk” segment with Ms. Stahl and Vice President Mike Pence, the people said.It appeared that Ms. Stahl’s approach did not sit well with the president. Hours later, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that he was considering posting the interview with Ms. Stahl “PRIOR TO AIRTIME!” He described it as a “terrible Electoral Intrusion” and suggested that his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., had been treated less harshly by journalistic interlocutors. At a rally in Erie, Pa., on Tuesday night, the president told supporters, “You have to watch what we do to ‘60 Minutes,’ you’ll get such a kick out of it,” adding, “Lesley Stahl is not going to be happy.” On Twitter, Mr. Trump also posted a six-second video clip of Ms. Stahl at the White House, writing: “Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes not wearing a mask in the White House after her interview with me. Much more to come.”In fact, Ms. Stahl had worn a mask at the White House up until the start of her taping with Mr. Trump, including when she first greeted the president, according to a person familiar with the interview.The video posted on Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed showed Ms. Stahl immediately after the interview ended, as she conferred with two of her CBS producers, both of whom were wearing masks. The CBS crew was tested for the coronavirus before entering the White House on Tuesday, the person said.Ms. Stahl has interviewed Mr. Trump twice since the 2016 election, including his first televised interview after winning the presidency. She also filmed with Mr. Trump at the White House in October 2018. Ms. Stahl was hospitalized with the coronavirus in the spring and has since recovered.The president and Mr. Pence were participating in a “60 Minutes” episode set to air on Sunday evening. The episode is also expected to feature interviews with Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California.Mr. Biden taped his interview with the “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell on Monday. He has not yet tweeted about it. More

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The United States and Russia on Tuesday appeared to be edging toward a short-term extension of the main arms control treaty limiting the size of the two nations’ nuclear arsenals, after Russia agreed to add a “political obligation” that would freeze its stockpile of nuclear warheads for a year.It was unclear whether the modest move would be enough for President Trump to extend the New START accord before the presidential election next month, which would allow him to argue that he has gained something in his efforts to nurture a relationship with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — and for his determination to avoid criticizing Mr. Putin for human rights violations, authoritarian crackdowns and cyberattacks on the United States.The treaty expires in February, after the presidential inauguration. Its provisions call for a five-year extension, which Mr. Putin said he was willing to embrace. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the former vice president and Democratic candidate for president, has said the same.But Mr. Trump has called the treaty deeply flawed and refused a straight renewal, saying at first that China had to become a party to the agreement and then that the Russians had to freeze the weapons in their stockpile but not those deployed.Russia on Tuesday proposed that both countries make a “political obligation” to freeze their “existing arsenals of nuclear warheads,” but only for one year, an echo of some type of “agreement in principle” that the administration said last week that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin had reached. More

WASHINGTON — After the twin traumas of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal came a period of change in the nation’s capital. The system set about reinventing itself to realign the balance of power, establish new guardrails for those in high office and try to enforce greater accountability.Two weeks before an election that will determine whether President Trump wins another term or is repudiated by voters, some in both parties are already looking beyond him to map out a similar rewriting of the rules. After four years in which the old post-Watergate norms have been shattered, the would-be reformers anticipate a counterreaction to establish new ones.“It’s pretty obvious that Trump has, through his actions and words, exposed a number of weaknesses in the normative and legal restraints on the presidency,” said Jack L. Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor. “He has revealed that there are a lot of gaps in presidential accountability and that norms are not as solid as we thought. He has revealed that the presidency is due for an overhaul for accountability akin to the 1974 reforms.”Mr. Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, has teamed up with Robert F. Bauer, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama, to produce what they hope could be a bipartisan blueprint for what such an overhaul would look like. Among their ideas are empowering future special counsels; restricting a president’s pardon power and private business interests; and protecting journalists from government intimidation.They are not the only ones looking ahead. House Democrats led by Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chief House manager in this year’s Senate impeachment trial of Mr. Trump, have assembled a legislative package of similar ideas, including limits on a president’s authority to use declarations of national emergencies to take unilateral action; more protections for inspectors general and whistle-blowers; and an accelerated process to resolve disputes over congressional subpoenas. More

USA Today

Paper makes appeal to undecided voters, saying Trump has handled the pandemic poorly and made over 20,000 false claims More

Donald Trump can still win the 2020 presidential election; something that has a 10 percent or 15 percent chance of happening can certainly transpire. But even more than in 2016, if the president wins this time, we will have to attribute his victory to the workings of divine providence (don’t worry, I have that column pre-written), because what we’re watching is an incumbent doing everything in his power to run up his own margin of defeat.Start with his re-election messaging, to the extent that you can discern such a thing. In 2016, Trump’s campaign was shambolic and punctuated by self-inflicted disasters, but his message against Hillary Clinton, like his message against the Republican establishment in the primaries, had a simplicity and consistency: She supported bad trade deals; she supported stupid wars; she sold the country out to special interests and foreign governments; vote for her and you get more closed factories, more soldiers dead or crippled, more illegal immigration, more power to Wall Street and Washington, D.C.In 2020, on the other hand, the Trump campaign has been stuck toggling back and forth between two very different narratives. One seeks to replay the last campaign, portraying Joe Biden as the embodiment of a failed establishment (hence all the references to his 47 years in Washington) who will sell out American interests to China as soon as he’s back in power (hence the attempts to elevate Hunter Biden’s influence-peddling).But the other narrative goes after Biden as though the Democrats had actually nominated Bernie Sanders, insisting that his advancing age makes him a decrepit vessel for the radical left, a stalking horse not just for Kamala Harris but also for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and antifa.A truly brilliant campaigner might be able to weave these two narratives together, but on the lips of Donald Trump their contradictions are evident. The resulting incoherence just feeds his tendency to return to old grudges and very online grievances, as though he’s running for the presidency of talk radio or his own Twitter feed. Without Steve Bannon to keep him grounded or Clinton to keep him focused, he’s making a closing “argument” that’s indistinguishable from a sales pitch for a TV show or a newsletter — suggesting that even more than four years ago, the president assumes he’ll be in the media business as soon as the election returns come in.But the messaging failure is just the surface; it’s on policy where Trump has really acted like a Black Sox ballplayer trying to throw the World Series. There are two major issues for voters in this election: the pandemic and the economy. Trump’s numbers on handling the virus are lousy, but his numbers on handling the economy are still pretty good, presumably thanks to both the memory of where the unemployment rate stood before the coronavirus hit and the fact that the flood of Covid-19 relief spending kept people’s disposable income up.This context suggested an obvious fall campaign strategy: Push more relief money into the economy, try to ostentatiously take the pandemic seriously and promise the country that mask-wearing and relief dollars are a bridge to a vaccine and normalcy in 2021.Instead Trump has ended up with the opposite approach. He mostly ignored the negotiations over relief money for months, engaging only at a point where he had become so politically weak that both Republican deficit hawks (or the born-again variety, at least) and Democratic free-spenders assume he’ll soon be gone. And meanwhile he’s let himself be drawn ever deeper — especially since his own encounter with the disease — into the libertarian style of Covid-19 contrarianism, which argues that we’re overtesting, overreacting and probably close to herd immunity anyway.There is a mild contrarianism that makes important points: The lockdown approach wasn’t sustainable and can’t be reimposed, most elementary schools should be open because the risks of spread seem pretty low, the virus is less deadly than the initial worst-case projections suggested, and deaths as a share of cases are going down with better treatment.But the strong version keeps being wrong. First, the past two months have made it clear that herd immunity is a moving target: You can achieve it provisionally under social-distancing conditions, but once people relax and start socializing again, the threshold changes, and suddenly you get a renewed spike. This is what happened across Europe, which crushed its case rates in the late spring, returned to more normal life in the summer — and then reaped an early-fall wave that’s now fully out of control, including in countries like Belgium that were hit intensely in the first go-round.Meanwhile, just because tests reveal more mild cases doesn’t mean the virus has stopped killing people. Over and over again, case numbers spike and deaths lag and contrarians talk about how the virus is just a “casedemic” — and then a few weeks go by, and deaths follow cases up. It happened in the United States over the summer, it’s happened in Europe in the past month, and now it’s probably about to happen here again: Our cases have been rising since early September, our hospitalizations have been rising for several weeks, and while deaths are flat for now (at “only” 711 Americans a day), it’s likely they’ll be rising again by the time we hit November.Which means that Trump has chosen to go to war with the idea of testing, with Dr. Anthony Fauci and with “experts” in general at precisely the moment when the fall wave they’ve been warning about seems to be showing up — which is also the moment when the two-thirds of Americans who describe themselves as “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the virus will be going to the polls.Strictly as a policymaking matter, this is Trump’s worst behavior since his springtime push for the fastest-possible reopening. Europe’s renewed crisis shows that the Western failure to contain the virus is much more than just a Trump problem — but on the margins, in the thousands if not the hundreds of thousands, Trumpian denial can still get Americans unnecessarily killed.As politics, meanwhile, even more than the mixed messaging on Biden and the missed opportunities on relief spending, the retreat to corona-minimizing is a case study in how the Trump of 2020 has ceded his biggest general-election advantage from 2016 — his relative distance from the ideological rigidities of the anti-government right — and locked himself into a small box with flatterers and cranks.From these follies the God of surprises might yet deliver him. But every decision of his own lately has been a choice for political defeat.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

Voters Prefer Biden Over Trump on Almost All Major Issues, Poll ShowsJoe Biden leads President Trump, 50 percent to 41 percent, a New York Times/Siena College poll shows, with voters favoring him by wide margins on the coronavirus and law and order. More

This time, the candidates will get the silent treatment.The microphones of President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. will be muted during portions of the final presidential debate on Thursday, the organizers said late Monday, in an unusual effort to avoid the unruly spectacle of the candidates’ first meeting in Cleveland last month.The debate’s rules remain the same: Each candidate will be allotted two minutes to initially answer the moderator’s questions. But the Commission on Presidential Debates said it would turn off each candidate’s audio feed while his rival had the floor.Once each candidate has delivered his two-minute reply, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden, the Democratic nominee, will be allowed to freely engage with each other for the remainder of each 15-minute segment, with both microphones fully functional.The incoherence of the first debate — during which Mr. Trump’s relentless interruptions of Mr. Biden and the moderator, Chris Wallace of Fox News, derailed the proceedings — put pressure on the nonpartisan debate commission to improve enforcement of the rules, despite its members’ longstanding reluctance to change any aspects of the debates in the middle of a campaign.The moderator of Thursday’s debate in Nashville, Kristen Welker of NBC News, will not be in control of turning the candidates’ microphones on and off; that task will be left to the commission’s production crew. There is also the potential for a new kind of gaffe: Mr. Trump’s voice may be picked up by Mr. Biden’s microphone, and vice versa, meaning that an attempted interruption may still be heard, at least faintly, by viewers watching at home. More