Daniel DePetris

'How is the president feeling?' shouldn’t be a difficult question to answer. And yet over the last 24 hours, nobody could say with any clarity that Donald Trump was ill, on the mend, or perfectly fine. Even reporters with impeccable sources in the White House bubble were left flabbergasted as completely contradictory accounts emerged from multiple sources. Minutes after the president’s doctors emerged from the Walter Reed medical complex to brief reporters about a president coming back from the coronavirus strong and in good spirits, the White House chief of staff told the press that Trump’s condition was quite serious.

Last night's presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden started amicably enough. Both men strolled on stage, Trump wearing a red and blue striped tie, ready to battle. Joseph 'Average Joe' Biden greeted the president with a 'How are you, man?' From that point on, the debate quickly degenerated into one of the most despicable, embarrassing clown acts Americans have ever seen on national television. It took about 20 minutes before Biden, visibly exasperated by Trump’s badgering and interrupting, pleaded with his opponent across the debate hall to 'please shut up.

Donald Trump has a lot to worry about these days. The man who is deathly afraid of being 'a loser' could be weeks away from losing in the most visible way to Joe Biden, a competitor Trump has blatantly suggested may be taking performance-enhancing drugs to stay awake on the campaign trail.  He is facing an ongoing coronavirus crisis in the United States which passed the 200,000 fatality mark last week. The polls aren’t looking great for the President either; the Washington Post released a survey on Sunday showing Biden up 10-points nationally. The last thing Trump needed was another public relations fire to put out. But then the New York Times published a months-long investigation on Trump’s history of dodging taxes.

There is no point putting lipstick on a pig: the relationship between the United States and China, two powers holding a combined 40 per cent of the world’s GDP, is at its most depressing and alarming since the establishment of their diplomatic relations in 1979. As soon as you think bilateral ties couldn’t get any worse, Washington and Beijing prove us wrong by closing consulates and harassing each other’s diplomats. This puts the European Union, that slow, cumbersome bureaucratic machine, in a tricky position. On the one hand, Europe doesn’t want to rock the boat with either the US or China.

Public opinion polls haven’t been particularly positive for President Trump or his Republican allies on Capitol Hill. This past weekend was no better. CNN’s most recent poll has presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden leading Trump in Florida by 5 percentage points, Arizona by 4, and Michigan by 12. The Associated Press piled on the bad news with an even more dismal showing for the president: only 32 per cent of Americans support Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And eight in ten Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. America’s presidential election contests are decided in a few swing states like Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.

Kanye West is a great artist. But would he make a great president? Kanye and Trump are certainly similar. They both love publicity and are master self-promoters. So for Kanye, what better way to market oneself than running for the Oval Office? This isn’t the first time the hip-hop mogul thought about throwing his hat in American politics. Kanye said he would be a presidential candidate during the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. He said it again when he won the Video Vanguard Award. He dabbled in the prospect in 2018, when he told a radio host that his platform would be part-Trump, part-Bernie Sanders. Kanye even briefly talked about a future presidential run at the White House, when he told Trump that he didn’t have to worry about him as a potential competitor.

There’s no spinning it: if the U.S. presidential election were held today, it is highly unlikely Donald Trump would win a second term. And that's saying nothing of the damning revelations emerging from John Bolton's book about his former boss, whom he says 'remained stunningly uninformed on how to run the White House'. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll published just this week has former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden up 13 points nationally, with 57 per cent of Americans surveyed disapproving of Trump’s performance in office.

At the beginning of the year, the odds on president Donald Trump winning re-election this November were 60-40 in his favour. After all, the rule is that the incumbent wins when the U.S. economy is in rock solid shape. Americans react to job growth like bees react to honey: with excitement and appreciation. It was a big reason why Ronald Reagan swept the country with a 49-state win in 1984 and why Bill Clinton won a second term with a healthy margin in 1996. Precedent suggests that regardless of his long-winded (some would say, nutty) press conferences, grievance-filled Twitter account, and impeachment asterisk, Trump would have a very good chance at continuing the trend. All of that is now out the window.

If there is one thing Donald Trump likes more than patting himself on the back, it’s a convenient scapegoat to shift the public narrative. In what has become a daily ritual, Trump held a coronavirus news conference in the White House Rose Garden yesterday to announce a suspension of U.S. funding to the World Health Organisation. The reason for Trump’s decision: the WHO’s supposed lack of independence from China, which the president cited as a key factor in the global spread of Covid-19.  'The WHO failed in this basic duty and must be held accountable,' Trump said. In the president’s mind and in the minds of many Republicans in Washington, the agency failed while tens of thousands of people, young and old alike, lay gasping for breath in hospital beds.

With Joe Biden now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, there is one president Americans will be seeing a lot more of in the months ahead—and his name is not Donald Trump. In the three years since he vacated the White House, Barack Obama has largely kept to himself. The former commander in chief is following the golden-rule of his own predecessor, George W. Bush: let your successor govern the way he or she wants to govern, and don't constantly criticise those decisions or be a nuisance from the sidelines.

He took nearly a month to assess the state of his campaign after a whopping 15-point defeat in the crucial battleground state of Michigan. But after private deliberations with his wife, Jane, and some lobbying from his senior political advisers, Bernie Sanders came to the conclusion that continuing his presidential campaign would likely do more harm than good. On Wednesday he decided to call it quits, telling his supporters that there was 'no alternative’. Mathematically, he was right. Sanders was trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by over 300 delegates in the primaries and would have needed to win over 60 per cent of the remaining delegates to capture the Democratic Party nomination.

Donald Trump is that rare specimen in US presidential history whose approval ratings have never reached the 50 per cent mark. Any other incumbent would find that fact downright frightening, a prelude to an inevitable defeat in an election year. Trump, however, had something in his back pocket that any politician could only dream of having: a strong and robust economy that added hundreds of thousands of jobs every month. Unfortunately for the President, the key word here is 'had'. A thriving record of economic success over the last three years is now at risk of being completely undermined by a national pandemic that Trump himself didn’t take seriously until the stock markets began cratering.

Mathematically speaking, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign is as dead as disco. After a streak of victories in big, delegate-rich states on and after Super Tuesday, Joe Biden is leading Sanders by 273 delegates. For Sanders to pull off a political miracle, he would need to win 64.2 per cent of the remaining delegates over the next three months, something nobody but the most rabid Bernie supporter envisions the Vermont senator doing.  Some of the largest states left to vote – Georgia, Ohio, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York – aren’t seen as particularly ripe fruit for the Sanders campaign to pluck.

As tens of millions of Americans remain stuck at home in self-isolation, the country's politicians are busy sniping at each other over who is at fault for a epidemic that Dr. Anthony Fauci – Trump's coronavirus expert – predicts could kill up to 200,000 Americans. It’s a story far more interesting and potentially calamitous than the normal tale of Republicans and Democrats pointing fingers at one another (although there is plenty of that too). America’s federalised system of government is at war with itself. Take President Trump, the man at the very top of the system. Ducking responsibility when something goes wrong and hogging all the credit when everything goes right is standard operating procedure for this president.

What does a leading U.S. presidential candidate do when a deadly and highly contagious virus is spreading throughout the mainland United States and hogging all of the news coverage? Well, build an in-home studio in your basement, of course. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is confronting a conundrum most candidates who run for high office don’t have to deal with. In normal times, candidates lose media coverage when they tumble in the polls, run out of money, or fail to excite voters (and reporters) on the stump. That’s an unfortunate part of the business, but it’s something candidates and their advisers anticipate and even control. If a candidate has money to slosh around, he can air more commercials to keep his face in the minds of voters.

If President Donald Trump at first dismissed coronavirus as a menacing-sounding version of the sniffles, he is certainly taking the virus seriously now. One in ten coronavirus victims are in the United States and it’s clear the fallout from the virus is going to get much worse before it gets better.  ‘I want America to understand: this week, it's going to get bad,’ the US surgeon general Dr Jerome Adams has said. Trump, who cares deeply about his legacy in US history as much as he cares about his public image, continues to watch as Wall Street falls down like a ton of bricks and as more depressing market indicators are published by America’s biggest financial firms. Investors appear unimpressed with the US coronavirus stimulus package.