Democrats

Trump tried to show he’s learned a few thingsIn the days leading up to the debate, Donald Trump’s advisers urged the president to stay calmer than he was at the first presidential debate in Cleveland last month, when he was widely criticized for repeatedly and aggressively interrupting his Democratic presidential rival, Joe Biden.The president, who trails his rival in national polls, accomplished that, though it was a low bar. He interrupted the former vice-president less and he didn’t feud with the moderator, the NBC journalist Kristen Welker, as much. He even followed the debate rules of letting Biden talk when it was Biden’s turn – for the most part.Much of the credit for that control went to Welker herself. Trump, who has been attempting to appeal to female voters who have been turning away from his campaign, praised Welker’s moderation (saying “thank you” and “I appreciate that”) despite spending the days leading up to the debate disparaging her.Trump also wanted to appeal to voters by applying his own experience contracting Covid-19 after the first debate, but with mixed results. He said he “learned a lot” about the disease when he contracted it, said – without evidence and contrary to the statements of public health experts – that a vaccine should be available in the coming weeks.“I take full responsibility. It’s not my fault that it came here, it’s China’s fault,” Trump said. More than 220,000 people have died in the US during the pandemic, and more than 8 million people have been affected – far more than any other country in the world.Foreign policy dominated the debateWhen Welker announced the debate topics, both Biden and Trump wanted to weigh in on foreign policy. But that’s where the common ground ended. Trump wanted to highlight unverified reports that Biden’s son Hunter was using his father’s influence to benefit himself and the Biden family. Biden was eager to talk about a secret bank account the president has kept in China.The attacks at moments mirrored each other.“You were getting a lot of money from Russia. They were paying you a lot of money and they probably still are,” Trump said at one point, without evidence.“What are you hiding? Why are you hiding?” Biden said at another point. “The foreign countries are paying you a lot.”Biden also wanted to frame Trump as a crony of strongmen dictators such as the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.BidencareFor most of the 2020 presidential campaign Biden has portrayed himself as a defender of his former boss’s signature legislation – Obamacare. But during Thursday night’s debate that changed. Biden advocated Obamacare “with a public option” – offering an expansion of existing public programs. “Call it ‘Bidencare’,” he said.Trump meanwhile refrained from offering what his own healthcare replacement plan would be, simply repeating that “Obamacare is no good”. Trump’s main argument on healthcare was to suggest – without evidence – that any alternative to gutting Obamacare, including anything Biden proposed, would “destroy” Medicare and social security, two wildly popular programs.Biden accuses Trump of fueling racismThe most heated exchanges of the night came when Welker steered the discussion toward racism in the US, which has become a key voting issue following the police killing of George Floyd, which sparked mass protests over the summer.Trump, as he often does, claimed that his record on race relations tops almost any other politician’s in American history, except for Abraham Lincoln. He ticked off his favorite points on how the Trump administration passed a criminal justice reform bill, increased funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and how African American unemployment had dipped under his leadership.But he said all of that in response to a question from Welker on racism in America, without directly answering the question. He also conspicuously never used the phrase “institutional racism” or pulled back from his previous criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement.He was eager to attack Biden on the former vice-president’s support for a crime bill from two decades ago.Biden meanwhile went on the attack, mocking Trump by sarcastically calling him “Abraham Lincoln” before saying he’s “one of the most racist presidents in American history. He pours fuel on every single racist fire.”Family separationsTrump was most defensive when Welker asked both candidates about recent reports on family separations of undocumented immigrants. Specifically, Welker asked the candidates about more than 500 children who had been separated from their parents as part of the Trump administration’s push to deter immigration along the southern border. The United States has been unable to reunite those children with their parents.Trump didn’t offer a direct answer. Instead he claimed – wrongly – that many of the children were illegally brought into the country through cartels. He also said the Obama-Biden administration was to blame.“They built cages. They used to say I built the cages,” Trump said. He went on to say “we’re trying very hard” to reunite the children with their parents.Biden, on the other hand, called the practice “criminal” and said “they separated them at the border to make it a disincentive to come to begin with”.The former vice-president added: “It makes us a laughing stock and violates every notion of who we are as a nation.”Moving the dial?Trump’s response to the pandemic and its economic fallout has seen his poll numbers drop, and the president needed to reset his appeal with the coalition of supporters who propelled him to the White House in 2016. But, despite his slightly calmer demeanor, it’s unclear whether he achieved that.Biden was perceived as the winner of the final debate, according to a quick CNN poll of debate viewers and a panel of undecided North Carolina voters. More

As the two US presidential candidates left the stage in Tennessee after the final debate of the campaign, Jonathan Freedland and Richard Wolffe talk through the biggest moments of the night

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Donald Trump and Joe Biden faced off for the final time before the US presidential election, in a debate where the mute button was very much the deciding factor. The stage was set in Nashville, Tennessee, and many wondered, hoped, and maybe prayed that we would see a kinder, more civilised approach to debating in comparison with the chaos-fest many of us endured first time around three weeks ago … but did we get it? With Jonathan Freedland to talk through it all, once again, is fellow Guardian columnist from across the Atlantic, Richard Wolffe. Let us know what you think of the podcast. Send your feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

Shockingly, the second and last presidential debate, which was held in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday night, actually contained some discussion of policy. This was not thanks to President Trump, who spent much of the evening dissembling, spreading disinformation and attempting to lend credence to a suspicious story circulating in the rightwing media about a laptop that supposedly once belonged to Joe Biden’s son.
Instead, the substantive moments of the night were almost all secured by the efforts of NBC’s Kristen Welker, the only one of the debate moderators this cycle who was able to handle the president with the calm authoritativeness and unyielding confidence that is required. She did what the previous debate’s moderator, Chris Wallace, could not do: she kept the candidates as close to the designated topic as possible, she maintained her dignity throughout, and she handled the president’s outbursts with the demeanor of sedate decisiveness that experts recommend when handling ill-behaved dogs.
As a result of Welker’s temperament and acuity, the debate contained fewer of Trump’s interruptions and outbursts, and at times almost approached a substantial, if not exactly serious, discussion of the policy differences between the two candidates. This may have also been the result of a visible effort by Trump to contain his temper and avoid the tantrums of the last debate, a chaotic circus of chicanery and contempt that left voters repulsed by Trump and caused his already poor poll numbers to nosedive. At times early in the debate, Trump seemed to be attempting to restrain himself with almost a physical effort, gritting his teeth as he recited memorized sentences drafted by a communications staffer.
Maybe Trump’s performance of attempted restraint was meant to convince the thin and dwindling slice of persuadable voters – estimated at roughly 5%, according to NPR – to vote for him, instead of the challenger. But amid Trump’s viscerally polarizing presidency, that group of undecided voters seems marginal at best, probably too small to meaningfully influence the outcome in most states. Rather, Trump’s comparatively sedate performance in the first 20 or so minutes of the debate seemed aimed at people who voted for him in 2016 – particularly white suburban women – who have since been disappointed, even humiliated, by his presidency.
By attempting to appear calmer, more cogent, Trump was trying to reassure these voters who might not vote this year, or might even be voting Democratic, that he’s not so embarrassing after all. The complete sentences, uttered without those flying drops of involuntary spittle from the president’s mouth that characterized so much of the last debate, seemed designed to give these voters permission to come back to Trump, to vote Republican again, and to convince themselves that a Republican vote is compatible with their own dignity and decency.
Will it work? That probably depends on how long people kept watching. Trump’s coherence seemed practiced and difficult for him, and not long into the debate, he dropped the act and returned to his usual rambling and petulant self.
He made frequent references to obscure conspiracy theories born of the far-right internet, references that were illegible to most viewers and designed more as signals to his already devoted base. He made bizarre claims about the Covid-19 pandemic, boasting that his response was successful because not as many people died as probably could have, and blaming his own infection on his meetings with the families of American soldiers who have been killed overseas. He mocked Biden for the former vice-president’s concern for the welfare of ordinary families. He claimed that he had done more for Black Americans than anyone except maybe Abraham Lincoln, and asserted that he was “the least racist person in the room” – the sort of claim that seems dubious by the mere fact of its having been made. He chillingly described children who his administration kidnapped at the southern border as having been “very well taken care of”. News reports showed these children in cages, and have recently revealed that the federal government cannot locate the parents of more than 500 of them. Trump claimed that Joe Biden, under the direction of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would dismantle buildings in order to rebuild them with smaller windows.
For his part, Biden handled Trump’s attacks with relative aplomb. Policy discussions are not his strong suit: Biden ran on a famously non-specific agenda during the primaries, and has focused his general election campaign more on appeals to Americans’ moral sensibilities than to their policy preferences. But he scored some meaningful points by insisting on tying his climate plan to jobs growth, and levelled attacks on Trump and the Republican party by decrying their inaction on a much-needed economic relief package and pointing out, correctly, that Trump’s Ahab-like focus on the performance of the stock market ignores the real economic conditions of ordinary Americans.
Careful observers would have noticed that Biden stumbled once or twice, repeating lines he had already used in the last debate – his image of an empty chair at the dinner table in homes that have lost a family member to Covid, his insistence that the election is “Not about his family or my family, but about your family.” But Biden did not have to be very good in the debate – he merely had to be better than Trump, and that much he achieved with ease. Trump, meanwhile, is certain to be hailed as having made a pivot in a softer, gentler direction by pundits impressed that he managed some moments of lucidity on the debate stage, but this will be an exaggeration. Expectations were so low for the president after his performance in the first debate than anything more dignified than an on-camera fart would have been hailed as presidential and sophisticated.
But Biden did manage to make one point late in the evening when he copped, disarmingly to the reality of the Obama administration’s limitation. Throughout the night, Trump ceaselessly attacked Biden for his supposed inaction and ineffectiveness while vice-president – “It’s all talk and no action with these politicians,” the sitting president said. But Biden explained this with refreshing candor: they didn’t achieve all of their agenda, he said, “because we had a Republican Congress”. If you want him to enact his aims, the subtext went, you have to vote out the Republicans down ballot, too.
Will voters heed Biden’s call and deliver Congress to the Democrats? It seems that way. For all the drama and preparation that went into tonight’s event, the fact remains that most voters have already made up their minds, and the polls – though they have been horrendously wrong before – seem to indicate that Biden will win the popular vote and that Democrats will expand their lead in the House and possibly retake the Senate. Virtually nothing that could happen during the last debate could change that. An estimated 40 million Americans have already voted, a number that suggests that turnout this year will far exceed 2016. “The character of the country is on the ballot,” Biden said. Many Americans seem to agree with him.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward will discuss the Trump presidency at a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 27 October, 7pm GMT. Book tickets here More

Jill Filipovic: ‘Trump has given up trying to articulate a plan’
If one single thing shone through in Thursday’s debate, it was that Donald Trump has absolutely nothing to say. He has no agenda. He has no plan. He has no ideals or hopes or purpose. All he has is the raw pursuit of power – for his own benefit, no one else’s.
Trump failed to put forward even one specific policy he will push in his second term. He offered some vague hand-waving – he (or the US supreme court) will get rid of Obamacare and he’ll replace it with something better, no you haven’t seen his plan, even though he’s had four years to create it, but he’s working on it, it’s almost done, he swears – but gave Americans no vision for a second-term Trump presidency. Instead, he was purely reactive. Joe Biden would put forward an idea, and Trump’s response was: “Well why didn’t you do that when you were in office?”
Trump is in office, and while a lot has changed in four years, there’s little he can be proud of. More than 220,000 Americans are dead from a disease that has also tanked the economy and pushed thousands of American families to the brink. America is notorious the world over for ripping children from their parents and putting them in cages; more than 500 of those children are still not reunited with their parents, a human rights catastrophe. The US is increasingly a pariah state, having alienated our allies. The president lies with abandon and leads a party that has increasingly moved to the fringes, its followers and even candidates embracing obscene conspiracy theories.
This is Donald Trump’s America. It’s no wonder he doesn’t want to answer for it. What’s stunning, though, is the degree to which he has simply given up on articulating any plan for the future – and that he’s so sure voters won’t care.
Jill Filipovic is the author of: OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind
Art Cullen: ‘Trump needed a big win. He didn’t get one’
He bulled over the moderator, he sucked up the time, spread scurrilous claims, said he did more for black people than anyone since President Lincoln, and that those children in cages were well cared for. He was Donald Trump back from Covid as bellicose as ever during Thursday’s debate, a failing candidate on a flailing campaign. “He’s flat-out lying,” Joe Biden declared. “You know who he is. Look at him. And you know you I am.”
Biden holds the lead. Trump shouting down the questions was not what he needed to score an upset and make up lost ground in the final debate. Dredging up Rudy Giuliani’s escapades trying to dig dirt on Biden’s family isn’t selling with the public. Trump failed to slow down Biden just days before the election. The president needed a big win, but Biden maintained his ground with that one statement, looking straight into the camera: “You know who he is.”
Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book, Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland

Lloyd Green: ‘Trump spoke to his base, Biden spoke to the country’
On Thursday, the interruptions that marred their first debate were gone. In the end, the American public, Joe Biden, and Kristen Welker, the moderator, emerged as the ultimate winners.
The president’s answers were cliched and Biden’s responses were detailed. He successfully demonstrated his capacity to parry Trump’s attacks. The notion that Biden was less than sentient was left in tatters.
Trump’s tropism toward paying taxes in China and his failure to release his tax returns was put front and center with less than two weeks before election day, not exactly great timing for a candidate down by nearly 10 points. Likewise, the president proclaiming “I have many bank accounts … and they are all over the place” sounded tone deaf.
More than 220,000 Americans are dead and the economy lurches. The stock market is clearly not the measure of all things. Four years ago, Trump’s mantra was tailored to US workers. Now, the president sounds like a pitchman for the donor class. When Trump says “I’m the least racist person in this room”, you have to roll your eyes.
Both men had their share of missteps. Trump again predicted the end of Covid and bragged of an imaginarily low mortality rate. Biden attacked the oil industry. The president did nothing to endear himself to seniors, Biden may have lost Texas.
By the end of the evening, Biden had reinforced his middle-class message: Medicare, check; social security, check; compassion, check. The president engaged his base. Biden spoke to a country.
Lloyd Green was opposition research counsel to George HW Bush’s 1988 campaign and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
Malaika Jabali: ‘A frustrating debate that ignored big issues’
With the final chance to make an impression on the electorate before election day, Thursday’s debate was short on forward-looking policy and more about complaints and past controversies. There was mud-slinging about who was getting paid by which Russians, whose racist rhetoric and policies were worst, and when businesses should have been shut down because of Covid-19, among other fodder you can find in your average Facebook comment section.
Yet, for all the talk about Covid-19 that opened the debate, it took 45 minutes to address healthcare, and it took an hour to talk about an economic stimulus. Less than 10 minutes were dedicated to race. This is an indictment of the framing of the debate itself as much as it is the candidates. The foreign disputes that entice legacy media editors probably make most Americans’ eyes glaze over when eviction, homelessness and economic strife have either arrived for millions of Americans or they’re on the horizon.
Sorely lacking was the sense that either of these men have bold ideas to respond to the biggest social justice movement in US history and a transformative plan to help people recover from the health and economic impacts of a pandemic. There was the usual delusional grandstanding from Trump about being (maybe) better for Black Americans than Abraham Lincoln and Joe Biden stating that his response to Covid-19 would be to tell people to wear a mask. There was no discussion about potential domestic voter suppression, less than two weeks before the election. Nothing about far-right white supremacists, who pose the deadliest terror threat in the country. Nothing about policies to reduce racial disparities in unemployment, essential work, Covid-19 deaths and cases, or small business closures.
There was little in this debate to give Americans a substantial sense of security and financial solvency. Apart from the possibility of ridding America of a Trump presidency, that can apply to the election in general.
Malaika Jabali is a Guardian US columnist
Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward will discuss the Trump presidency at a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 27 October, 7pm GMT. Book tickets here More

Normal presidents get their third debate right.
They flunk their first in a fit of presidential pique about standing on stage with their upstart rivals. They over-correct their second after a frantic period of long-delayed rehearsals. By the time the third comes along, they usually remember what got them elected in the first place.
Donald Trump is not a normal president.
He whiffed his first debate by forcing himself down the throat of Joe Biden. He skipped his second debate because he was sick with the pandemic he failed to take seriously. And he never prepped for the third debate, on Thursday night.
It showed. After 25 minutes of failing to shout down his opponent, Trump couldn’t hold it in any longer.
As soon as Joe Biden mentioned how Wall Street was warned about the pandemic before the American people, Trump accused Biden of making money from Wall Street. Then he accused him of not making enough money from Wall Street.
“I would blow away every record, but I don’t do that,” Trump yelled. “I could blow away your records.”
If the Donald Trump who showed up at the final debate was the kinder, gentler version, he measured his kindness in stock market indices. As the candidates clashed over how to fix healthcare, in the middle of a pandemic, Trump retreated to his empathy-free comfort zone.
“They say the stock market will boom if I’m elected president,” he barked. “It will crash if he’s elected.”
There is a limit to how long Trump can pretend to care. Judging from his debate performance, it’s about as long as it takes for a goldfish to swim around a bowl.
When asked how he would reunite the more than 500 children his own officials have separated from their parents – and lost track of them – Trump berated Biden about building cages.
“Who built the cages, Joe?”
“The kids were ripped from their arms. Now the kids are alone,” Biden replied. “It’s criminal.”
“They are so well taken care of,” Trump insisted. “Who built the cages?”

Some people think the best form of defense is offense. Trump thinks the best form of empathy is being offensive.
As the conversation turned to racial justice, Trump insisted that he was the best president for Black Americans since Abraham Lincoln. He then proceeded to trash Black Lives Matter protesters for being offensive to the police.
“Abraham Lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in history,” Biden said. “This guy has a dog whistle as big as a bull horn.”
“I am the least racist person in this room,” Trump claimed, speaking to a nation he hoped had forgotten all about the very fine white supremacists he so admired in Charlottesville.

As with the rest of his presidency, debate night was not a moment for message consistency by Donald Trump.
He started the debate claiming that the first models predicted 2.2 million Americans would die, so things were looking pretty good with more than 220,000 dead. He said there were now “goggles and masks and gowns” so everything was obviously fine and dandy.
As campaign slogans go, “It could have been worse” is not exactly the perfect sequel to making America great again.
Then again, Trump’s closing arguments on the coronavirus were not exactly consistent – like the rest of his presidency. When asked if he took responsibility for the pandemic, Trump was definitively evasive.
“I take full responsibility,” he declared. “It’s not my fault it came here.”

When Donald Trump waddled on stage in the final debate of the 2020 election, he was already having a bad day.
Not by his own standards, of course. By his own impeccable judgment, it was a magnificent day. To be precise, it was a “magnificently brilliant” day, as Trump described his own performance in front of the CBS News cameras of 60 Minutes.
Not to put too a fine point on his presidency, this might just be the fatal flaw in the entire Trump project: the cosmic chasm between Donald’s self-regard and the way the rest of the sentient universe sees him.
Donald apparently sincerely believes he is an elite political athlete, while the majority of American voters keep telling pollsters that his gameplan isn’t working.
Trump is running 10 points behind his rival in national polls, and trailing by seven or eight points in the states – like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – that won him the election four years ago.
It is from this winning position that our winningest candidate is going after the least obvious targets. For some reason unknown to political strategists of all persuasions, Trump is closing this election by attacking 60 Minutes for being mean to him, and attacking Joe Biden’s son for business dealings with China.
This in the week we all learned that Trump has a secret bank account in China, where he has paid more taxes to the People’s Republic than he has to his own country.
Watching Trump’s interview with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, it’s hard to know why Trump feels so aggrieved – other than being the patron saint of the contrived grievances of old white men.
“I will soon be giving a first in television history full, unedited preview of the vicious attempted ‘takeout’ interview of me by Lesley Stahl of @60Minutes,” he tweeted. “Watch her constant interruptions & anger. Compare my full, flowing and ‘magnificently brilliant’ answers to their ‘Q’s’.”
Stahl’s vicious approach amounted to her questioning Trump’s facts about sundry topics, including a certain pandemic you might have heard of. Her anger was so magnificently hidden, you might call it the brilliant disguise of a mildly surprised reporter.
These are trying times for Trump. In addition to trailing in the polls, his campaign has somehow squandered vast sums of cash to the point where he is being outspent by “Sleepy” Joe Biden and yet still has less than half the cash that Rip Van Winkle is slumbering on.
On top of all that, he can’t get no satisfaction from his laser-like focus on the son of the other candidate. This might have more resonance if the year was 2016, or if the supposed corruption involved Joe Biden himself.
Instead, the case against Hunter Biden is being prosecuted by Rudy Giuliani, who was just caught by Borat with his hand down his pants. His co-prosecutor is Steve Bannon, the former campaign guru currently indicted for fraud for bilking Trump fans who wanted to fund the infamous wall on the Mexican border.
Both men are working for an impeached president, whose own daughter works in his White House but somehow secured a fistful of new patents from China.
To the extent Trump had a consistent message at Thursday’s debate, it was about what he called “the laptop from hell” or what the moderator delicately called “foreign entanglements”.
In Trump’s retelling, Biden took millions from Russia and China, while he closed his accounts and never made a penny from either country.
There’s a reason why Donald Trump was impeached, and it wasn’t because he was trying to end corruption.
There’s a reason why he’s losing this election, and it’s not because of his magnificently brilliant approach to the pandemic, which hospitalized him between the last debate and this one.
With less than two weeks to the final day of this historic election, Donald Trump needed to change his flight path dramatically before this Trump Shuttle plunges into the Hudson River. Instead, the captain of this doomed vessel insists that the loss of both engines is a sign of his own aeronautical genius.
Political gravity pulls every leader down to earth eventually. In Trump’s case, the time for stunts is over. This president is in a tailspin; all that is left is the crash landing.
• Legendary Watergate reporter Bob Woodward will discuss the Trump presidency at a Guardian Live online event on Tuesday 27 October, 7pm GMT. Book tickets here More