US president Donald Trump is tired of hearing about “Covid, Covid, Covid” but Covid isn’t done with America. The second and final presidential debate is done, more than 46 million Americans have voted, 222,000 Americans are dead from the coronavirus and the pandemic continues to haunt Trump as he tries to cut and run.
It was the afternoon of January 28, 2020 during a top-secret daily briefing when Trump’s national security adviser told the president that the coronavirus would be the “biggest national security threat” of his presidency. Trump has been tired of the virus from the day he heard of it, he knew it was “deadly” and kept that a secret from Americans. We all know how that is going. The world’s wealthiest nation is home to the world’s highest coronavirus caseload, death toll and a chaotic federal response. Trump is barrelling into the final sprint in the same fashion, urging his most enthusiastic supporters to inhabit his parallel bubble -- where scientists are “idiots” -- and give him a second shot at the White House.
The final stump speeches and the last debate gave both Donald Trump and Joe Biden a chance to make their closing arguments to voters. Here are 5 takeaways:
First, US president Donald Trump is belting out his greatest hits from 2016. Gaslighting, personal attacks, rambling about dubiously sourced stories - all in the push for social media virality and population scale behaviour change at low cost. The free speech excuse has long been central to the Trumpian re-election run. If we go beyond the rudimentary fact checks and try connecting the dots between America’s virus caseload, Trump’s claims and the tightening poll numbers, the rough edges of a shape begin to form. It suggests that Trump’s final ask from Americans is that they just suspend disbelief. “Before the plague came, I had it made”, he told battleground voters in Pennsylvania, a must-win state for him to win a second term.
Second, Trump continues to congratulate himself for his handling of the pandemic that has killed more than 220,000 Americans. It is not working, though. “We’re rounding the turn, we’re rounding the corner,” Trump claimed, as cases spike across the country. “It’s going away.” Biden, who has made Trump’s coronavirus response the centrepiece of his attack, leaned into a memorable rhetorical moment of the final debate after Trump claimed Americans are “learning to live with it.” Biden shot back, “people are learning to die with it.” Biden’s closing pitch: America’s death toll means Trump must go.
Third, climate change got an entire 15-minute segment for the first time in a presidential debate in the last 20 years. Trump took credit for the cleanest air and water in the country in generations and claimed he is saving American jobs. Biden sounded the alarm about our warming planet, headlined a whole new world of clean energy jobs and a transition away from the oil industry. Biden is calling for the US to have net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050 and promised to end federal subsidies for oil and gas companies. Trump saw an opening there and beamed. He suggests that there will be a political price to pay in oil-producing states where jobs are at stake.
Fourth, the small technical affordance of a mute button marked a big change for the audience in the final debate. Panned as “unfair” by Trump, the muzzle cut off interruptions for the initial two minutes of each candidate’s opening remarks. It helped deliver a coherent and often crackling presentation as Trump had no choice but to bend to its quieting influence.
Finally, the polls. Eleven days out, Donald Trump’s path to a second term hinges on carrying two battleground states: Florida and Pennsylvania. Without Florida, Trump is projected to have less than a 1 in 100 chance of winning the White House again. At least one of the three rustbelt states he won in 2016 is a must-win again: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or Michigan. Pennsylvania, according to polling aggregator FiveThirtyEight, has the highest chance of deciding the election. If he can hold on to Pennsylvania, he stays in the game. Florida, with 29 electoral college votes, is famous for its razor thin margins and has gone to the winner of nearly every presidential race in the US. In 2000, Republican George W. Bush scraped past Al Gore by 537 votes after a recount in Florida. Across six battlegrounds that could tip a closely fought election, Biden continues to maintain a steady 4-point average lead against Trump (RealClearPolitics).
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Nikhila Natarajan is Senior Programme Manager for Media and Digital Content with ORF America. Her work focuses on the future of jobs current research in ...
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