In the era of Donald Trump, major events that would dominate the news for weeks have a shelf life of roughly six hours. But if you can, think back to the first presidential debate last month. If the goal was for Trump to convince anyone outside the base to vote for him, or to make the case he isn’t the worst person on earth, it did not go well. Trump constantly interrupted to Joe Biden, refused to condemn white supremacists, and, while the Democratic nominee was talking about his son who died from brain cancer, interjected to call the living Biden son a deadbeat.

Days later, Trump announced he had COVID-19, giving rise to the possibility he appeared onstage when he was already positive, and potentially that he knew it and went hoping to get his opponent sick. After the debate commission announced that the second event would be virtual so the president couldn’t take down the Biden campaign like he did his own White House, Trump backed out and held his own town hall, where he insisted it was entirely within the realm of possibility that his enemies are running a satanic cult for pedophiles and that on a day of reckoning called “the Storm,” Trump will have all of these people arrested.

Shockingly, that wasn’t what Republicans were hoping the president would do with the opportunity to speak to the American people. “They desperately needed the [second] debate to have a larger audience and to have an opportunity to provide some kind of contrast that would change the race trajectory, meaning a different Trump or an opportunity for a Biden gaffe,” strategist Rob Stutzman told the New York Times.

With 15 days to go until the election, and Trump losing by double digits in most national polls, the third presidential debate represents the final chance for the campaign to change anyone’s mind. And yet, for some reason, Team Trump appears to be laying the groundwork to pull out. In a letter to the Commission on Presidential Debates, Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien demands that the last debate be about foreign policy, rather than the announced topics (Fighting COVID-19, Climate Change, Race in America, American Families, National Security, and Leadership). While Stepien acknowledges that such issues “are serious and worthy of discussion,” and actually do touch on foreign policy, he writes, embarrassingly, that “almost all of them were discussed at length during the first debate won by President Trump over moderator Chris Wallace and candidate Joe Biden.” Then he claims that Biden is “desperate to avoid conversations about his own foreign policy record” and accuses the CPD of “pro-Biden antics” which don’t actually exist outside the deranged heads of the Trump campaign. Then he whines about the fact that there’s been talk of cutting candidate’s mics during the proceedings, which only arose because Trump interrupted Biden so many times during the first debate that it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to zap him with a cattle prod so his opponent could get a word in edgewise:

It is our understanding from media reports that you will soon be holding an internal meeting to discuss other possible rule changes, such as granting an unnamed person the ability to shut off a candidate’s microphone. It is completely unacceptable for anyone to wield such power, and a decision to proceed with that change amounts to turning further editorial control of the debate over to the Commission which has already demonstrated its partiality to Biden. This is reminiscent of the first debate in 2016, when the President’s microphone was oscillated, and it is not acceptable.  

For the good of campaign integrity, and for the benefit of the American people, we urge you to rethink and reissue a set of topics for the October 22 debate, with an emphasis on foreign policy.

While Stepien clearly worked hard crafting 900 words of bullshit, a shorter version of his letter could simply read: Please don’t ask us about COVID-19 again, it’s very bad and we’d rather not talk about the 220,000 people in the U.S. who are dead. Also we’d love to avoid a situation wherein the president might use the phrase “the Blacks” or ask a group of neo-Nazis to watch the returns with him on Election Day.

Incidentally, remember how Trump spent months claiming Biden was too scared to debate him? Weird how Biden wasn’t the one to pull out of the second debate and possibly the third!

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Trump’s new Biden attack: “he’ll listen to the scientists”

One of the problems with Trump’s usual grab bag of insults toward Joe Biden is that none of them land because there isn’t even a shred of truth to any of them. At no time have Biden’s politics remotely resembled anything approaching radical socialist. He doesn’t appear particularly “sleepy.” No one believes that the centrist Democrat is “proposing the biggest tax hike in our country’s history.” And he’s clearly not “hiding” in a “basement” but rather taking the sort of precautions with his campaign that Trump has flouted and which probably led to the president getting COVID-19. Perhaps aware that his attacks have failed to stick, over the weekend, Trump tried a new tack: going after Biden with the truth. Which might’ve been a smarter approach if not for the fact that the truth is actually something that makes the Democratic nominee more attractive to voters, not less.

“He’ll listen to the scientists,” Trump told supporters at a rally in Nevada, as though he was informing them that Biden’s first order of business in the White House will be to shoot everyone’s dog, rather than that he’s planning to craft a policy for dealing with the pandemic that will incorporate relevant expertise and won’t just tell people to drink Drano.

Ooo, he’ll listen to the scientists, how scary! Next you’ll be telling us he’ll let pilots fly Air Force One! In a sign of just how not damaging it was for Trump to claim Biden will listen to experts when it comes to the pandemic, this was the response from the Biden campaign:

On Monday, Trump revived the line of attack, telling a crowd in Arizona that Biden “wants to listen to Dr. Fauci,” instead of continuing with the approach that’s led to 220,000 dead people:

Really terrifying stuff!

Lara Trump: the president was just “having fun” when he downplayed the kidnapping attempt against the governor of Michigan and let his crowd chant “lock her up”

Trump is seemingly focused on clinching that right-wing militia vote. Per the New York Times:

A new low point came on Saturday, when Mr. Trump held a rally in Muskegon, Mich., where he demanded that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer reopen the state and then said “lock them all up” after his supporters chanted “lock her up!” It was a stunningly reckless comment from a president whose own FBI this month arrested 14 men who it said had been plotting to kidnap Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat, and were captured on video with an array of weapons allegedly planning the crime. Mr. Trump has assailed Ms. Whitmer for months, disregarding her solid approval ratings with independent voters and women, two groups he is purportedly trying to court.

On Sunday, Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump told CNN that her father-in-law was simply “having fun at a Trump rally” and that such events are “a fun, light atmosphere.” She added that “of course he wasn’t encouraging people to threaten this woman,” which would be more comforting if “this woman” hadn’t just been the subject of a kidnapping plot.

Donald Trump really likes milkshakes

Which would be fine and perhaps even somewhat humanizing given the deliciousness of the frosty drink if not for the fact that he’s reportedly more focused on them than national security, according to Politico:

President Donald Trump was in the middle of receiving a highly classified briefing on Afghanistan at his New Jersey golf club when he suddenly craved a malted milkshake. “Does anyone want a malt?” he asked the senior defense and intelligence officials gathered around him, an august group that included the head of the CIA’s Special Activities Center, which is responsible for covert operations and paramilitary operations. “We have the best malts, you have to try them,” Trump insisted, as he beckoned a waiter into the room where code-word classified intelligence was being discussed.

The malt episode, which took place a few months after Trump took office in 2017, became legendary inside the CIA, said three former officials. It was seen as an early harbinger of Trump’s disinterest in intelligence, which would later be borne out by the new president’s notorious resistance to reading his classified daily briefing, known as the PDB, and his impatience with the briefers, current and former officials said.

But what initially seemed like mere boredom—which demoralized intelligence officials but could potentially be managed by including pictures and charts in briefings to hold the president’s attention—later morphed into something the officials saw as more sinister: an interest in wielding intelligence as a political cudgel. Whether selectively declassified by spy chiefs he installed for their loyalty, or obscured from congressional and public scrutiny if it conflicted with his preferred narrative, intelligence became just another weapon in the president’s arsenal.

Restoring morale inside intelligence agencies and public trust in the intelligence community’s leadership “will be among the most important things a President Biden would need to do—and that he’ll want to do—immediately,” Tony Blinken, a top adviser to the Biden campaign, told Politico. “I know from several conversations with him about this that he has deep concern about what has been done to the IC these last several years in terms of the politicization, and repairing that starts at the top with the president.” And if he wants to sip on a refreshing beverage that’s fine too, assuming he won’t be doing so while tweeting “Fuck the FBI! Screw the CIA,” as Trump has basically done daily over the last four years. \

Yeah, what’s up with that? Who cares about COVID anymore these days anyway?

Elsewhere!

Inside the “Malarkey Factory,” Biden’s online war room (Washington Post)

Pelosi, Mnuchin Narrowing Gap on Stimulus, to Talk Again Tuesday (Bloomberg)

Here’s how long it could take for Americans to get more government help if stimulus talks fail (CNBC)

The race to be Biden’s secretary of State is already underway (Politico)

Trump calls journalists “Fredo,” “corrupt,” “crooked,“ and “real garbage” all in one rally (Twitter)

Meet the couple who bought this internet-famous “villain’s lair” (NYP)

“Big pile” of eels dumped in NYC park; impact not yet known (AP)\

— Progressives Are Going Rogue to Flip Pennsylvania for Biden
— White House Reporters Fume Over Team Trump’s “Reckless” COVID Response
— Why Anti–Trump Attack Ads Might Actually Be Helping Him
— Tax Mess Aside, Can Trump Pay Off His $1 Billion in Debt?
— News Media Begins to Contemplate a Post–Trump White House
— The Kimberly Guilfoyle Sexual Harassment Allegations Get Even Darker
— As Trump Falters, Democrats See an Expanding 2020 Senate Map
— From the Archive: Inside Trump’s Twisted, Epic Battle for Mar-a-Lago
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