Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg in her New York Times column this morning laments all we have lost in America during the four years of Trump’s presidency due to coronavirus death and devastation, children not in school, the likelihood of Roe v. Wade being overturned, mass unemployment, and immigrant children who have no parents.  She then focuses on the time and energy that our country has wasted on our “narcissistic philistine” of  a president  who thinks about nothing but himself and has no appreciation for American values and culture.  Every moment thinking about Trump was a moment that could have been spent contemplating, creating or appreciating something else.

She concludes that America has been living in a perpetual state of emergency under Trump that isn’t healthy or sustainable. “Living in Trump’s panic-inducing eternal present is bad for art and bad for imagination more broadly, including the imagination needed to conceive a future in which Trumpism is unthinkable. If people no longer had to throw themselves in front of the bulldozer of this presidency, there would be more energy for progress and for pleasure. Trump has blocked out the sun. Only when he’s gone will we see how much we’ve been missing.”

Below is the entire column.  Read it and hope that the nightmare of this president will be over soon!

Tony

New York Times

Four Wasted Years Thinking About Donald Trump

By Michelle Goldberg

Oct. 29, 2020

It’s very hard to catalog all the things we’ve lost under the presidency of Donald Trump.

As I write this, over 225,000 Americans have lost their lives to Covid-19. Many of our children have lost months of school. Soon a huge part of the country will lose Thanksgiving.

Because of the Trump administration’s barbaric family separation policy, 545 children may be lost to their parents forever. America has lost its status as a leading democracy. We lost Ruth Bader Ginsburg, so we’re probably going to lose Roe v. Wade. More people have lost their jobs under Trump than under any president since at least World War II.

Compared with all this, mourning the cultural casualties of the Trump years might be frivolous.

But when I think back, from my obviously privileged position, on the texture of daily life during the past four years, all the attention sucked up by this black hole of a president has been its own sort of loss. Every moment spent thinking about Trump is a moment that could have been spent contemplating, creating or appreciating something else. Trump is a narcissistic philistine, and he bent American culture toward him.

Early on, some thought the catastrophe of Trump’s election could be a catalyst for aesthetic glory. “In times of artistic alienation, distress is often repaid to us in the form of great work, much of it galvanizing or clarifying or (believe it or not) empowering,” wrote New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz.

I’ve no doubt that great work was created over the past four years, but I missed much of it, because I was too busy staring in incredulous horror at my phone. That would be the luxury problem of someone who follows politics for a living, except I wasn’t alone.

The easiest place to quantify the cultural impoverishment of the Trump era is in book publishing. There have been so many books about Trump and the fallout from Trumpism that the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada has written a book about all the Trump books. “More political books have sold across all formats during this presidential term than at any point in NPD BookScan history,” said a recent report from the leading data company for U.S. book sales.

I’ve read many of these books and greatly appreciated some of them. But these books, and their blockbuster popularity, made it harder for other work to break through. “Fiction lost out to nonfiction since 2015,” said NPD’s Kristen McLean. The decline in fiction sales began before this presidency, but during the past four years it accelerated. “Trump taking up space in our brain and crowding out our ability to think about anything else is definitely, I think, part of the phenomenon,” she said.

It’s a phenomenon experienced even by some who’ve made literature their lives. The novelist Meg Wolitzer was a co-editor of “The Best American Short Stories 2017.” She described sitting in her apartment after her husband had gone to bed on election night in 2016, story submissions scattered around her. “I saw these stories and I thought, ‘How am I going to return to reading these tomorrow with the great attention and hope that I need to give them?’” she recalled to me. “Is that lost?”

It wasn’t, but she still feels the manic churn of current events fraying her concentration. “Right now it’s all about, ‘How will this end?’” Wolitzer said. “And that is so different from how we read fiction, because it’s about the desire to stay in this world, to be suspended in this world.”

Before Trump, I’d never had the feeling of wanting to fast-forward through the era I was living in, of longing to be in the future, looking back at how it all turned out. The conceit that there’s a gonzo writers room scripting current events is partly about astonishment at how crazy everything seems, but it’s also about a fantasy of narrative coherence — that one day all of this will make sense. When you are living through a baffling, all-encompassing drama, it becomes harder to lose yourself in other, unrelated stories.

I’d have thought that dramatic television would flourish in a time when reality has become so toxic, but instead it feels like Peak TV has, well, peaked. As Vanity’s Fair’s TV critic Sonia Saraiya wrote, “The daily clown show cuts into television’s bandwidth, both figuratively and literally, occupying space in the national conversation, and therefore our brains, that might be instead filled with, among many other things, the heir to ‘The Sopranos.’”

The great shows that have come out over the past four years have largely been riffs on our national calamity, not counterpoints to it. “The Handmaid’s Tale” was a nightmare about sadistic patriarchy. “Succession” is the story of an overbearing right-wing media mogul and his weak-willed children. “Watchmen” was almost a photonegative of Trumpism, in which white nationalism was a guerrilla insurgency rather than a ruling ideology. Like the hit movie “Get Out,” which premiered just days after Trump’s inauguration, it turned on secret racist malice. The 2016 election turned on the same thing.

Of course, it can be thrilling when art and entertainment are politically relevant. But when politics are so alarming that the rest of the world seems to recede, it creates cultural claustrophobia. Since Election Day 2016, writers, artists and critics have wondered what many forms of cultural production — novels, fine art, theater, fashion — mean “in the age of Trump.” It’s a cliché — one I know I’ve used — about the reorientation of almost everything around the monstrous fact of the Trump presidency.

Both the right and the left have rejoinders for those of us who find this cultural climate suffocating. Conservatives love to jeer Democrats for being obsessed with Trump, for letting him live, as many put it, rent-free in our heads. It’s a cruel accusation, like setting someone’s house on fire and then laughing at them for staring at the flames. The outrage Trump sparks leaves less room for many other things — joy, creativity, reflection — but every bit of it is warranted. The problem is the president, not how his victims respond to him.

Some leftists, by contrast, suspect that parts of the Resistance will disengage from politics if and when the object of their loathing is removed from the White House. (Shorthand for this fear is “back to brunch.”) It’s not an unreasonable worry. One reason for the unprecedented progressive mobilization of the past four years is that people used to feeling safe in America — particularly middle-aged, middle-class white women — suddenly didn’t. If Trump is defeated, it might be a challenge for organizers to keep these people mobilized. After four years of “This is not normal!” what happens if a version of political normality returns?

But a perpetual state of emergency isn’t healthy or sustainable. Living in Trump’s panic-inducing eternal present is bad for art, but it’s also bad for imagination more broadly, including the imagination needed to conceive a future in which Trumpism is unthinkable. If people no longer had to throw themselves in front of the bulldozer of this presidency, there would be more energy for progress and for pleasure. Trump has blocked out the sun. Only when he’s gone will we see how much we’ve been missing.

Click on map to make it interactive.

Dear Commons Community,

The 2020 presidential race will be decided by voters in more than a dozen competitive states, where Joe Biden and Donald Trump will focus their efforts to win the 270 electoral votes needed to reach the White House. The New York Times has provided an interactive diagram that allows the viewer to build their build own coalition of states, which are organized according to Cook Political Report ratings, to see potential outcomes.

The bottom line in all possible scenarios: Mr. Trump will need to win some of the states that are currently leaning toward Mr. Biden to reach 270 electoral votes. But he can afford to lose some of the states that he won in 2016 and still win a second term. 

Neat way to examine possible scenarios.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an op-ed this morning examining racial bias in our schools and whether online learning serves to mitigate it to a degree.  Here is an excerpt.

 “Awo Okaikor Aryee-Price, a Black mother of two who lives in Florham Park, N.J., initially laughed off the pronouncement her 13-year-old made in March after the Covid-19 pandemic closed the state’s schools. But it became clear that her daughter, Saige, was serious. So Ms. Aryee-Price started to revisit the things she’d heard her daughter say in response to her daily “How was school?” queries.

“Whether it was other students saying that she’s too loud, or people saying she has anger-management issues, it was always something,” Ms. Aryee-Price said, describing the subtle bigotry that Saige experienced but was unable to articulate and name.

Since beginning online learning, she explained, Saige has been liberated from hearing negative tropes about Black girls in the lunchroom and hallways. For one, the eighth grader can control her exposure to racial microaggressions. When a classmate wore a “Make America Great Again” hat — attire that some people see as a symbol of racism — during a video class session, Saige simply changed her settings to view only the teacher.

“Although the violence is still there, she has the ability to maneuver in a way that she didn’t have when she was in school,” Ms. Aryee-Price explained.

As school districts across the country have grappled with whether to reopen school buildings or continue to hold classes remotely, national polling shows Black parents are the most wary of the risks to their health and the well-being of their children that come with in-person learning. Eighty-nine percent saw returning to school as a large or moderate risk, compared with 64 percent of white parents — at a time when Black and Hispanic children and teenagers account for 74 percent of Covid-19 deaths in people under the age of 21.

But one recent analysis indicates that some Black families value keeping their children at home for an entirely different reason: to protect them from racial hostility and bias. Granted, not all Black children are thriving at home. They’re overrepresented among the kids who don’t have reliable Wi-Fi or adequate equipment at home. And supervising online learning is not an option for parents who are essential workers — a group that disproportionately includes Black people. Yet for some of those for whom virtual school is viable, the current disruption has opened up a new world: education without daily anxiety about racism.

Theresa Chapple-McGruder, a Black maternal and child health epidemiologist, immediately saw positive changes in her second grader when her Washington, D.C.-area school district went all virtual. Inundated with news stories focusing on the challenges of virtual schooling, the seasoned researcher set out to determine if she was an outlier. On Sept. 2, she posed a simple question — “What do you like about virtual schools?” — in an online survey of members of the national Facebook group Conscious Parenting for the Culture. The group, which she joined as a founding member in 2017, is made up of more than 10,000 Black parents of children from prekindergarten through 12th grade.

A theme quickly emerged. The 373 parents who responded overwhelmingly said they appreciated the way virtual learning allowed them to shield their children from anti-Black bias and protect them from the school-to-prison pipeline — the well-documented link between the police in schools and the criminalization of Black youth and other students of color. As one respondent wrote, referring to school resource officers, the law enforcement officers who work in schools, “There are no S.R.O.s at home.”

More than 40 parents said they appreciated virtual schooling because it allows them to, as one put it, “hear how the teacher speaks to children.”

To be sure, the informal survey’s sample size was small and the respondents aren’t necessarily representative of Black parents across the country. (The private Facebook group describes itself as “a safe, supportive space for BLACK parents of Black children to openly discuss how racism, white supremacy, and systemic oppression impact our parenting choices, how to work to overcome generational traumas, and how to be a more conscious parent in order to raise culturally, socially, and intellectually liberated children.”) Still, the sentiments expressed track with anecdotal evidence and other research that links Black parents’ motivations for home-schooling to perceptions of racial bias in schools.”

This is an interesting take on online learning.  One that I had never heard before.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The conservative group, The Lincoln Project, took aim again at Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), one of its favorite targets, this time in an ad (see above video)  that taunts him for begging for cash to help keep his job.

Graham, who is locked in a tough race against Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison, has appealed for money on several occasions on Fox News and did so again on Monday after the Senate confirmed Supreme Court Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

“Help me,” Graham beseeched on the right-wing network. “Help all of us keep our seats.”

He then plugged his website, which hits every visitor with a money pitch. The new ad by the never-Trump group called him out for it.

“Lindsey’s always been weak,” the Lincoln Project voiceover states. “But these days he’s just an embarrassment. Pathetic.”

The spot includes a montage of Graham appealing for campaign cash or as the ad puts it, a “sniveling weak crybaby bereft of dignity begging to keep his job.”

“Pathetic” is the right word for Graham.

Good luck to Jaime Harrison!

Tony

Michael Bloomberg

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times and Reuters reported yesterday that billionaire Michael Bloomberg is planning to spend $15 million to help Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden defeat President Donald Trump in Texas and Ohio during the final week of the campaign.

Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who lost to Biden in a crowded field for the Democratic nomination, has vowed to spend up to $100 million of his personal fortune to support Biden’s campaign for the Nov. 3 election.

Bloomberg has been targeting Florida as a state he could push into the Biden column and on Monday he agreed to add Texas and Ohio for a late television advertising blitz, after his team presented polling data showing them as competitive, the Times said.

He will also increase pro-Biden advertising in Florida, the report said.

“We believe that Florida will go down to the wire, and we were looking for additional opportunities to expand the map,” Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson told the Times. “Texas and Ohio present the best opportunities to do that, in our view.”

Wolfson and the Bloomberg team did not immediately respond to a Reuters request to confirm the report.

Trump won Texas and Ohio in his 2016 election, and holding on to both states is crucial to his re-election prospects. As the second and seventh most populous states, both are prizes in the state-by-state contests that decide the presidential race.

Trump had been favored in both at the start of the campaign. Neither state has been bombarded with the kind of television advertising that has dominated other closely divided states, potentially making a late spending campaign effective, the Times said.

Bloomberg is directing his political spending through his super PAC, Independence USA, the Times said.

Thank you, Mr. Bloomberg!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The question above is on the minds of many families as we head into the holiday season.  I know my wife, Elaine and I, have been having discussions about whether or not to have our family over for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Our son and his family live nearby but our daughter and her family are in Seattle and typically would spend a couple of weeks with us.  We are pretty close to the decision that it would be wise not for her to visit us this year.

The article below courtesy of the Huffington Post might help others to decide.

Tony

——————————————————————————————————————

The Huffington Post

Is It Safe To See Grandparents For The Holidays During COVID-19? Experts Weigh In!

The third wave of COVID-19 is here. So what do family gatherings with older relatives look like now?

By Catherine Pearson

10/26/2020 06:26pm EDT

COVID-19 has changed the landscape of the holidays for many families.

On Friday, the United States hit a new record number of daily COVID-19 cases. Hospitalizations are up. Experts believe that the third wave of the virus is here and that it will be worse than what came before.

At the same time, many Americans are experiencing “pandemic fatigue” and now, of course, the holidays are here. Families are eager to get together and squeeze some typical connection and cheer out of this otherwise stressful and isolated year — but how?

HuffPost Parents spoke to several experts about some best practices for safety and having difficult planning discussions when it comes to grandparents, the holidays, and COVID-19.

First, the obvious: Staying home is the safety gold standard.

“While it is really sad, and feels like a loss — in addition to everything we have lost over the past months — it is really safest to not travel and not gather with family and friends in person,” said Dr. Sadiya Khan, assistant professor of preventive medicine in epidemiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

“Staying home is really the best way to protect not only yourself, but others,” she said.

If you have decided to see one another anyway — and Khan said she knows plenty of people will make that choice — do your research, she urged. Public health groups like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has a hub on COVID-19 and the holidays, are providing some of the best, most up-to-date guidelines and considerations for families grappling with how to celebrate this year.

Khan said that certainly if anyone in the family has any symptoms, they should not get together — full stop. “Absolutely don’t travel, don’t go out, don’t see others.” Talk to your doctor about testing and next steps.

Also, look very closely at community levels of COVID-19, both where family members are traveling from as well as where they’ll be gathering, and consider whether anyone is at higher risk of getting really sick with COVID-19 should they catch it. The latter point is obviously a big one for grandparents. Eight out of 10 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. have been in adults age 65 and up.

Testing is NOT enough.

“One of the biggest challenges with COVID is that the period of time before someone has symptoms can be quite long. It rages from five to 14 days and sometimes longer — and a lot of people are asymptomatic,” Khan said.

A person can get a false negative on a COVID-19 test if they have a low viral load, as is often the case in the first few days after they’ve been infected or at the tail end of their infection. As President Trump’s recent COVID-19 diagnosis showed, testing alone is not enough to stop individuals from getting (and spreading) the virus.

That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea for everyone to be tested before family members gather for the holidays, if possible, Khan said. But know you could all test negative, and for one individual (or more) the results might be wrong.

“The test is not perfect. It misses a lot of people that have it, and it misses if you don’t yet have enough of the virus built up,” she said. “Using that as a way to guide unprotected interaction is not a good idea.”

Have a clear plan for the weeks before the holiday.

Before you get together with grandparents (or anyone) run through some basic questions so you are all going into the holidays with a clear sense of your collective risk. Dr. Anthony Barile, infectious disease medical director of Health First, recommends asking something along the lines of: “Has everyone been following CDC guidelines — socially distancing, wearing a mask in public, etc.?”

It’s also important to ask if everyone has gotten a flu shot, he urged.

Even if you have all been following guidelines, you might want to ramp up safety measures before you gather with grandparents or other family members. It might be a good idea to “ask guests to avoid contact with people outside their households for 14 days prior to your gathering.”

Of course, if you’ve got kids who are going to school in-person, that’s not really possible. Which is why it is important to have really clear conversations about everyone’s exposures and preventive behaviors ahead of time.

If you get together, layer on protection. Which — yes — means wearing masks.

If you decide to see grandparents this year, keep the gathering as small as possible. Hold it outdoors if possible. If you’re indoors, open the windows if you can, Khan said. Stay at least six feet apart. Wash your hands frequently. And wear masks.

When asked if there was one of those measures she believes is more important than any of the others, Khan was unequivocal:

“Masks, absolutely the mask. It’s annoying, it’s the first thing you want to take off when you’re indoors, especially if you’re gathering with family,” she said. “But it’s still not your immediate household. So that’s going to be the most important.”

She believes the best data we have on how risky it might be to gather indoors sans masks over the holidays comes from the emerging data on indoor dining, which is comparable in some ways because it’s people inside, eating, drinking and talking. And while it definitely has limitations, a CDC survey from September found that people who had COVID-19 were twice as likely to have recently eaten at a restaurant than those who did not have the virus.

In planning conversations, remind yourselves: You’re doing this out of love.

The holidays can be fraught and emotional enough without the added complications of COVID-19, so Dr. Aderonke Pederson, a psychiatrist with Northwestern Medicine, urged families to be really deliberate how they frame plans, whenever those conversations begin. Understand that people around the country—within your family and not—are making very different decisions even when presented with the exact same data.

“Each person, each family unit, has to make their own decisions, and no one should feel forced into a decision,” she said. “Have these conversations early — now. Don’t wait.”

Reassure each other that you still care for each other, even if this year your children don’t gather with their grandparents. The reason why families are having difficult discussions about forgoing holiday celebrations this year is because they love each other, and because everyone wants to stay healthy and safe.

“I think for everyone, one core value would be: ‘I don’t want to give COVID-19 to my family member, especially to my elderly family member,’” Pederson said. “The reason why these conversations are difficult is because we care about each other, and we’re really trying to look out for each other.”

Dear Commons Community,

As expected, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative appeals court judge and protégée of former Justice Antonin Scalia, was confirmed last night to the US Supreme Court, capping a Senate approval that handed President Trump a victory ahead of the election and promised to tip the court to the right for years to come.

Inside a Capitol mostly emptied by the coronavirus pandemic and an election eight days away, Republicans overcame unanimous Democratic opposition to make Judge Barrett the 115th justice of the Supreme Court and the fifth woman. The vote was 52 to 48, with all but one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, who is battling for re-election, supporting her.

It was the first time in 151 years that a justice was confirmed without the support of a single member of the minority party, a sign of how bitter Washington’s war over judicial nominations has become. As reported by The New York Times: 

“The vote concluded a drive by Republicans to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg just six weeks before the election. They shredded their own past pronouncements and bypassed rules in the process, even as they stared down the potential loss of the White House and the Senate.

Democrats insisted Republican should have waited for voters to have their say on Election Day. They warned of a disastrous precedent that would draw retaliation should they win power, and, in a last-ditch act of protest, tried unsuccessfully to force the Senate to adjourn before the confirmation vote.

Republicans said it was their right as the majority party and exulted in their win. In replacing Justice Ginsburg, a liberal icon, the court is gaining a conservative who could sway cases in every area of American life, including abortion rights, gay rights, business regulation and the environment.

“The reason this outcome came about is because we had a series of successful elections,” said Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, who was the architect of the strategy. “What this administration and this Republican Senate has done is exercise the power that was given to us by the American people in a manner that is entirely within the rules of the Senate and the Constitution of the United States.”

Judge Barrett’s impact could be felt right away. There are major election disputes awaiting immediate action by the Supreme Court from the battleground states of North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Both concern the date by which absentee ballots may be accepted.

Soon after, she will confront a docket studded with major cases on Mr. Trump’s policies, not to mention a potential challenge to the election results that the president had cited as a reason he needed a full complement of justices before Nov. 3. Coming up quickly are challenges related to the Affordable Care Act, signature Trump administration immigration plans, the rights of same-sex couples and the census.

The court is also slated to act soon on a last-ditch attempt from Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers to block the release of his financial records to a grand jury in Manhattan.”

In addition to the presidential election, the deliberations of the US Supreme Court will be followed most closely by the news media in the coming months.

Tony

Mark Meadows

Dear Commons Community,

Finally, someone in Donald Trump’s inner circle has told the truth about the coronavirus pandemic.  White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said yesterday:  “We are not going to control the pandemic. We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas.” Meadows’ remarks came during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

The comments from President Donald Trump’s chief of staff come as coronavirus cases surge across the US and the administration continues to consistently disregard advice from government health experts to wear masks, social distance and avoid large gatherings as a way to curb the spread of the virus. The White House is also facing a potential second outbreak of the virus after at least five people on Vice President Mike Pence’s staff  have tested positive in recent days, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Pressed by Tapper on why the US isn’t going to get the pandemic under control, Meadows said: “Because it is a contagious virus just like the flu.” He added that the Trump administration is “making efforts to contain it.”

“What we need to do is make sure that we have the proper mitigation factors, whether it’s therapies or vaccines or treatments to make sure that people don’t die from this,” Meadows said.

The US reported its second-highest day of new cases on Saturday, with nearly 84,000 Americans contracting the deadly virus. As of Sunday, there were at least 8,575,000 total cases of coronavirus in the US, and at least 224,800 Americans have died from the virus, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The concession from President Donald Trump’s top aide was quickly criticized by congressional Democrats and some Republicans, as well as Biden’s campaign.

“This wasn’t a slip by Meadows,” Biden said in a statement on Sunday. “It was a candid acknowledgment of what President Trump’s strategy has clearly been from the beginning of this crisis: to wave the white flag of defeat and hope that by ignoring it, the virus would simply go away. It hasn’t, and it won’t.”

Meadows insisted today that the “full context” of his remarks referred to the “need to make sure that we have therapeutics and vaccines” to treat Covid-19. He also said that administration officials were “very hopeful, based on a number of conversations, that vaccines are just a few weeks away, and we’re in preparation for that.”

But public health experts have warned that a coronavirus vaccine likely will not be widely accessible until the second half of 2021. And even if a vaccine is authorized on a narrow basis for a subset of health care workers and vulnerable Americans, several leading candidates require two doses that would be administered weeks apart.

Thank you, Mr. Meadows for your honesty.  Please discuss this approach with your boss!

Tony  

Dear Commons Community,

Last night I watched Leslie Stahl’s interview with Donald Trump on CBS’s 60 Minutes. I rarely watch this program because I find it a bit ponderous.  I decided to watch it to see what all the fuss was about Trump abruptly cutting off the interview and leaving the room.

Even though Stahl started the interview stating that she would be asking “tough questions” I did not find her questions at all “tough.”  She asked basic questions about the pandemic, health care, and Trump’s use of social media that Trump should have been able to answer or at least skirt around.  I thought that there were several moments when Stahl could have asked “tough” follow-up questions to Trump’s answers and did not do it especially with regard to the pandemic.

The segment ends with Trump leaving and his press secretary Kayleigh McEnany giving Stahl a large book that was described as Trump’s healthcare plan. It held “executive orders and congressional initiatives,” but no details about a healthcare plan.  Here is review of the segment courtesy of The Huffington Post.

““60 Minutes” aired footage on Sunday of President Donald Trump abruptly ending an interview with the network after host Lesley Stahl asked a series of questions about his response to the COVID-19 pandemic and his use of social media to govern by tweet and attack his political opponents.

The release of the interview concluded an ongoing spat between CBS and the White House that grew last week after Trump said he had left a sit-down with Stahl he called “fake” and “biased.” He later threatened to release the footage himself, turning the interview into a headline-grabbing event before it even aired.

Stahl opened the segment asking the president if he was ready for “some tough questions,” going on to ask about rising rates of coronavirus infections in the United States, the loss of millions of jobs and his ongoing criticism of mask-wearing to prevent the spread of COVID-19.

The final question, however, prompted Trump to end the interview early.

Stahl: Do you think that your tweets and your name-calling are turning people off?

Trump: No, I think I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have social media. The media is fake. And frankly, if I didn’t have social media, I’d have no way of getting out my voice.

A few moments later, a producer interjects to note how much time remained in the interview. The president then said he was done.

“I think we have enough of an interview here, Hope,” Trump said, appearing to speak to aide Hope Hicks. “Okay? That’s enough. Let’s go.”

Throughout the segment, Trump told Stahl she was being “so negative” and accused “60 Minutes” of throwing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden “softball after softball.” 

When asked later in the program about Trump’s exit, Vice President Mike Pence said the president was “a man who speaks his mind.”

“I think it’s one of the great strengths that he’s had as president of the United States,” Pence said. “The American people always know where they stand.”

The president followed through on threats to release unaired footage from the interview on Thursday after complaining of “bias, hatred and rudeness on behalf of 60 Minutes and CBS.” Shortly after the interview concluded, Trump took to Twitter to mock Stahl and attempt to smear her for not wearing a mask in the White House. People familiar with the interview told The New York Times she had, in fact, worn a mask up until taping began and only took it off as the cameras rolled.

CBS told HuffPost later that evening Trump’s decision would not deter the network from “providing its full, fair and contextual reporting which presidents have participated in for decades.”

The full interview also added more context about a binder the White House provided to Stahl at the end of the interview.

The show noted White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany gave Stahl a large book that was described as Trump’s healthcare plan. It held “executive orders and congressional initiatives,” but no details about the proposal.

“It was heavy. Filled with executive orders, congressional initiatives, but no comprehensive health plan,” Stahl said. In the footage, she can be heard saying “I can’t lift it.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Although the “Hunter Biden – laptop – email” story has not gained much traction other than on Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, has done its due diligence in trying to confirm the story and has decided that there is nothing there.  Here is a review of the events and analysis courtesy of The New York Times.

“By early October, even people inside the White House believed President Trump’s re-election campaign needed a desperate rescue mission. So three men allied with the president gathered at a house in McLean, Va., to launch one.

The host was Arthur Schwartz, a New York public relations man close to President Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr. The guests were a White House lawyer, Eric Herschmann, and a former deputy White House counsel, Stefan Passantino, according to two people familiar with the meeting.

Mr. Herschmann knew the subject matter they were there to discuss. He had represented Mr. Trump during the impeachment trial early this year, and he tried to deflect allegations against the president in part by pointing to Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine. More recently, he has been working on the White House payroll with a hazy portfolio, listed as “a senior adviser to the president,” and remains close to Jared Kushner.

The three had pinned their hopes for re-electing the president on a fourth guest, a straight-shooting Wall Street Journal White House reporter named Michael Bender. They delivered the goods to him there: a cache of emails detailing Hunter Biden’s business activities, and, on speaker phone, a former business partner of Hunter Biden’s named Tony Bobulinski. Mr. Bobulinski was willing to go on the record in The Journal with an explosive claim: that Joe Biden, the former vice president, had been aware of, and profited from, his son’s activities. The Trump team left believing that The Journal would blow the thing open and their excitement was conveyed to the president.

The Journal had seemed to be the perfect outlet for a story the Trump advisers believed could sink Mr. Biden’s candidacy. Its small-c conservatism in reporting means the work of its news pages carries credibility across the industry. And its readership leans further right than other big news outlets. Its Washington bureau chief, Paul Beckett, recently remarked at a virtual gathering of Journal reporters and editors that while he knows that the paper often delivers unwelcome news to the many Trump supporters who read it, The Journal should protect its unique position of being trusted across the political spectrum, two people familiar with the remarks said.

As the Trump team waited with excited anticipation for a Journal exposé, the newspaper did its due diligence: Mr. Bender and Mr. Beckett handed the story off to a well-regarded China correspondent, James Areddy, and a Capitol Hill reporter who had followed the Hunter Biden story, Andrew Duehren. Mr. Areddy interviewed Mr. Bobulinski. They began drafting an article.

Then things got messy. Without warning his allies, Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now a lawyer for President Trump, burst onto the scene with the tabloid version of the McLean crew’s carefully laid plot. Mr. Giuliani delivered a cache of documents of questionable provenance — but containing some of the same emails — to The New York Post, a sister publication to The Journal in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Mr. Giuliani had been working with the former Trump aide Steve Bannon, who also began leaking some of the emails to favored right-wing outlets. Mr. Giuliani’s complicated claim that the emails came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned, and his refusal to let some reporters examine the laptop, cast a pall over the story — as did The Post’s reporting, which alleged but could not prove that Joe Biden had been involved in his son’s activities.

While the Trump team was clearly jumpy, editors in The Journal’s Washington bureau were wrestling with a central question: Could the documents, or Mr. Bobulinski, prove that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s lobbying? Or was this yet another story of the younger Mr. Biden trading on his family’s name — a perfectly good theme, but not a new one or one that needed urgently to be revealed before the election.

Mr. Trump and his allies expected the Journal story to appear Monday, Oct. 19, according to Mr. Bannon. That would be late in the campaign, but not too late — and could shape that week’s news cycle heading into the crucial final debate last Thursday. An “important piece” in The Journal would be coming soon, Mr. Trump told aides on a conference call that day.

His comment was not appreciated inside The Journal.

“The editors didn’t like Trump’s insinuation that we were being teed up to do this hit job,” a Journal reporter who wasn’t directly involved in the story told me. But the reporters continued to work on the draft as the Thursday debate approached, indifferent to the White House’s frantic timeline.

Finally, Mr. Bobulinski got tired of waiting.

“He got spooked about whether they were going to do it or not,” Mr. Bannon said.

At 7:35 Wednesday evening, Mr. Bobulinski emailed an on-the-record, 684-word statement making his case to a range of news outlets. Breitbart News published it in full. He appeared the next day in Nashville to attend the debate as Mr. Trump’s surprise guest, and less than two hours before the debate was to begin, he read a six-minute statement to the press, detailing his allegations that the former vice president had involvement in his son’s business dealings.

When Mr. Trump stepped on stage, the president acted as though the details of the emails and the allegations were common knowledge. “You’re the big man, I think. I don’t know, maybe you’re not,” he told Mr. Biden at some point, a reference to an ambiguous sentence from the documents.

As the debate ended, The Wall Street Journal published a brief item, just the stub of Mr. Areddy and Mr. Duehren’s reporting. The core of it was that Mr. Bobulinski had failed to prove the central claim. “Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden,” The Journal reported.

Asked about The Journal’s handling of the story, the editor in chief, Matt Murray, said the paper did not discuss its newsgathering. “Our rigorous and trusted journalism speaks for itself,” Mr. Murray said in an emailed statement.”

Tony