"It is what it is..."

This past week's news cycle was off the rails even by 2020 standards

About a year ago, my wife and I decided to subscribe to the New York Times. We’d been digital subscribers for years, but made the switch to having an actual bundle of newsprint in a flimsy plastic bag dropped at the foot of our driveway every morning.

Our reasoning was that we are both political and current events enthusiasts, as painful as that has been for the last few years, and that it would set a good example for our two children if they saw us reading actual printed articles instead of just staring at our phones every time a push notification alerts us to the latest cultural sturm und drang.

My wife is pretty good about sitting down and actually reading it every day, but I confess that I still routinely read stories off of my phone, sometimes while the exact same story is staring me in the face from my kitchen table. There’s something about the digital format’s up-to-the-minuteness, not to mention the (often-horrific) interactivity of the comments sections, which I self-loathingly read but never contribute to, that feels more satisfying, more informative, more modern.

But I’ve recently thought of another good reason to keep the subscription, one that has motivated me to keep a neat pile of newspaper in the garage, and to Google phrases like “how to keep newsprint in good condition.” I can easily foresee a time in the near future when a mint condition cache of fall 2020 front pages of the most esteemed daily paper in the country could be worth a tidy sum to a collector

That’s especially been the case this week, as we reel from two enormous, devastatingly important stories – and that’s not even including the Times’ explosive report on Trump’s taxes, which somehow already feels like old news.

The first, of course, is Tuesday’s debate. There is little reason to rehash the embarrassment, the disgrace, the “shit show” that unfolded in Ohio, especially since its abject awfulness is one of the few things in recent memory to inspire bipartisan consensus rather than near-automatic disagreement. It is important to note, however, that much of that consensus revolves around the understanding that Trump was the wild card. Which, of course he was. This is not my own original insight – it’s been noted by several pundits, including the guys at Pod Save America and many others – but there is little doubt that that debate would have unfolded pretty much identically if it had been Trump interacting with any other candidate and any other moderator. Conversely, it would have been relatively civil if it has been Biden and Wallace interacting with any other incumbent.

As many people have advocated, the debate commission has proposed a new format for future debates, which would include:

allowing the moderator to mute candidates’ microphones; having more questions addressed directly to each candidate; adding opening and closing statements; and limiting the ‘free discussion’ period, which developed into inaudible crosstalk during Tuesday’s debate.

To probably nobody’s surprise, Trump has “rejected such ideas,” a rejection he has justified (via Tweet, of course) by arguing that he has no interest in making any changes since he – wait for it – “easily won last time.”

I don’t have enough time to deconstruct the level of delusion that must undergird such a statement. As I noted above, almost no commentator worth taking seriously has characterized Trump’s cruel and semi-coherent showing as helpful to his campaign.

His hardcore base, however, likely DOES think that Trump gave us a master-class in debate strategy. Not because there was anything objectively impressive about it, but because his base now seems to literally define “good” and “successful” as anything that Trump does. Trump’s unwillingness to even entertain the idea of a format change merely provides further evidence that he is only interested in intensifying the enthusiasm of those in his tent, not in making the tent bigger.

But there’s another reason Trump won’t accept these changes. First, of course, they would strip him of his core strategies: interrupting, crudeness, acting coy about white supremacy, slinging grotesquely irrelevant accusations at Biden’s family. Second, and perhaps even more prescient: these changes would make it even more obvious that Trump is constitutionally incapable of staying on topic, of seriously discussing policy without self-aggrandizement and weird tangents, for two minutes at a time.

The commission is attempting to return the institution of the presidential debate to a good-faith democratic process. Trump has no interest in that.

Last night, out of sheer curiosity, I fired up YouTube to watch one of the presidential debates from 1984, between Reagan and the severely outmatched Democrat challenger Walter Mondale. I’m no fan of either of these men, but their ability to speak thoughtfully and respectfully about actual policy issues was, and I am not exaggerating here, mindblowing. In the context of this week, it was like watching a documentary on the democratic norms of some alien species. It’s possible to imagine Biden speaking in this way. It is utterly impossible to imagine Trump doing it.

The other story, which I just woke up to this morning, is that Trump and the First Lady have both tested positive for COVID. I can’t begin to predict how this will affect the election, and I’m not going to try. I will, however, confess that my exhaustion with Trump’s political maneuvering – three-dimensional chess, as his supporters dubiously like to call it – is such that my first thought was literally “What’s his angle?”

Whatever emerges from it, it’s a development that feels deeply historically relevant. It’s not just that a first-term president has a potentially-deadly disease; it’s the way that this caps off over seven months of an all-consuming news story that has, more than any other public health issue I can think of, been utterly and often pointlessly politicized.

I will just say two things to my fellow liberals:

First, don’t allow all of the many legitimate critiques of Trump slide away as this story comes to dominate the news. Given his sneering dismissal of mask-wearing and social distancing, Trump’s contraction of COVID was entirely predictable, and should not be allowed to displace or excuse his rampant lack of fitness for office. As a friend of mine put it in a Facebook post this morning:

No one is talking about Trump's taxes, his refusal to condemn White Supremacy, the fact McMaster said he is aiding & abetting Russian disinformation, the fact Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, his overt, daily racism, the recession, the fact that he traveled after knowing Hope was positive, the First Lady’s disdain for Christmas and her actually not giving two shits about kids in cages. Over the next 14 days keep that in the headlines. Sympathy is not the same as getting a free pass.

Perhaps just as important, let’s go easy on the schadenfreude. It’s easy to think of this in karmic terms, given Trump’s appalling mishandling of and indifference to the virus. But celebrating it is not a good look. And you can bet that his supporters are thrilled to see social media posts that unapologetically revel in this diagnosis. Furthermore, you can bet that they will screencap those posts and share them and declare them proof that liberals never actually cared about containing Coronavirus, that it was only ever a means of attacking the president. We know that isn’t actually true, and we know that the right will claim that it is true, regardless of what we do. Let’s not help them.