2020 election

White House coronavirus task force member Dr Scott Atlas said during a Tuesday interview with The Spectator there was 'no fair basis' for canceling this week's presidential debate between President Trump and Joe Biden following the President's coronavirus diagnosis. 'The debate absolutely should have been able to continue. Honestly, I think there is no fair basis for canceling that debate — none,' Atlas said. Trump and Biden were scheduled to meet for the second time on the debate stage on Thursday in a town-hall style event moderated by Steve Scully. The Commission on Presidential Debates announced last week, without agreement between the two campaigns, that the debate would be conducted virtually due to health concerns raised by the President contracting the virus.

The vice presidential debate was a predictable clash between two solid professionals, each with plenty of debate experience. Both said what they came to say, and not one jot more. Both evaded several hard questions, such as how they would handle changes in abortion laws, if the Supreme Court rules force some changes. 'I'm glad you asked about baseball, Susan, because the American people love sports. And the sport they really love is football. That's what's on their mind now.' That's how they answered questions. If they had a prepared answer about football, that's the answer they gave. That meant Pence never explained how a second Trump term would handle pre-existing medical conditions and Harris never renounced a court-packing scheme.

Too many pundits are ready to call the 2020 presidential race with a month to go. Four weeks is a lifetime in politics, especially in the age of technology where news travels faster than the facts. With both candidates in their seventies, health issues are always going to cause things to shift quickly. A couple of weeks ago, Joe Biden offered further evidence that all is not well upstairs when he claimed that ‘it’s estimated 200 million people have died of COVID’.Sure, the debate last week appeared to be a debacle for Donald Trump who then ended the week by coming down with COVID — though Hispanic Telemundo viewers thought Trump won the debate soundly.

The United States has always been the world’s leading religious marketplace. Even before independence, the American colonies were more fervently Protestant than any country in Europe. The Pilgrim Fathers turned Massachusetts into a witch-hunting Calvinist theocracy, and no sooner had Puritan power begun to wane than New England was seized by a ‘Great Awakening’ in which vast crowds declared their faith in Jesus with hysterical enthusiasm. But it was the Founding Fathers’ decision to deregulate religion completely that really set America apart from the Old World. In successive ‘awakenings’ lasting well into the 20th century, thousands of sects sprang up, some barely Christian but all of them 100 percent American.

The media is ablaze with worry. Thanks to COVID, Americans, especially Democrats, are voting early and absentee in record numbers. The press is convinced that states will be swamped by this flood of votes. As a result, the theory goes, Donald Trump will be ahead on the night of November 3, only to see his lead erode over the coming days and even weeks, fueling skepticism of the electoral process. The uncertainty will motivate street violence and a constitutional crisis. While there are some reasons for concern, these worries are overblown. States will do a better job tabulating votes than the received wisdom holds and, if past elections set the precedent, Americans will behave themselves.

It’s rather difficult to dissect or analyze policy areas from last night’s horrendous debate. But Freddy Gray and I attempt to do so on the latest episode of his Americano podcast — and considering today’s economic updates, I’ll give it another go.Even in a debate that spent most of its time in the gutter, both President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden had moments of cut-through. For Biden, his call for unity in America felt like a rare throwback to a form of traditional campaigning that tends to play well with watchers at home. For Trump, his most persuasive moments came early in the debate, when he was speaking about the economy.

The first presidential debate in Cleveland was a disaster, to put it bluntly. After 90 minutes of crosstalk, petty jabs, and 'c'mon man’s it's hard to believe many undecided voters will come out of the night with a clear candidate in mind. Most will be begging for presidential politics to stop rather than racing to the polls. In fact, judging from social media, many undecided voters are already saying this debate convinced them not to vote at all. President Trump's performance was perhaps his worst in a major debate so far because he squandered numerous opportunities to let Biden hang himself with his own words.

President Trump and Joe Biden will face off in the first of a series of presidential debates on Tuesday night. Team Trump says he has been preparing by watching videos of Biden and by regularly squaring off with unfriendly press, while Biden is reviewing Trump's tweets and engaging in practice sessions with a group of aides and strategists at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. The President's rather informal preparations have apparently worried the campaign, which is now trying to raise expectations for the candidate that they've repeatedly painted as cognitively impaired. 'We’re prepared to see the same Joe Biden who won his vice presidential debates in 2008 and 2012 on stage versus President Trump.

The compulsive and self-righteous bellicosity of the Democratic leaders in Congress over the Supreme Court vacancy has opened an opportunity for President Trump to strike decisively. It is admittedly controversial for a president to fill a high court vacancy starting six weeks before a presidential election, but it is entirely constitutional. What’s more, it has applicable precedents, including most conspicuously the elevation of Chief Justice John Marshall by President John Adams after he had been defeated in the 1800 election. This is not a provocation to justify the extreme belligerency of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.