POLITICO NIGHTLY: The first Covid debate is here

 

BY RYAN LIZZA AND RENUKA RAYASAM With help from Myah Ward WE MEET AT LAST — Good evening from Cleveland, where Donald John Trump, the 74-year-old 45th American president, and Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., the 77-year-old 47th American vice president, will debate for 90 minutes beginning at 9 p.m. ET. Philippe Reines, a former top aide to Hillary Clinton who played Trump in her mock debates, passed on this observation in a recent conversation: “These two people haven’t been in the same room in four years.” The only confirmed spotting of Trump and Biden together during the president’s first term was at Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017. They have recently shadowed each other in places like Kenosha and Shanksville, but always hours or days apart. Four years ago, Hillary Clinton was pretty sure she hadn’t seen Trump since she attended his and Melania’s wedding in 2005, Reines said. “It’s a big deal because it’s human nature,” he said. “Think about how much of their waking hours they spend thinking about each other. And it’s not until tonight that they will finally see each other.” Both candidates make highly personal assessments of the people they encounter. Trump obsessively comments to aides — and sometimes publicly on Twitter — on the appearances of everyone he meets. Biden is famous for a tactile approach to politics, taking the measure of allies and opponents through in-person meetings. I spent the past few days watching every Trump debate from 2015 and 2016, and, as I wrote today , he is extraordinarily underrated in these settings. He dominated the Republican debates, and he was a much more focused and message-driven candidate against Hillary Clinton than is often remembered. But here’s why Biden is considered the favorite this evening. First, Fox News’s Chris Wallace is the moderator. Wallace has a long history of tangling with Trump. He knows when Trump is kicking up a flurry of BS, and he is usually quick to call him on it. When Biden calls out Trump, plenty of people — or pretty much all people — will see it through a partisan lens. If and when Wallace does it, the fact-check will have more credibility. Second, on balance the topics, which were chosen by Wallace, might be more unfriendly to Trump than Biden. Unlike 2016, Trump has a record. And on the central issue of this race, the coronavirus pandemic, Trump has been judged a failure. While he can spin his tax returns, he can’t spin the fact that more than 200,000 Americans have died of a disease he was in charge of stopping. Wallace’s topics are: “The Trump and Biden Records,” “The Supreme Court,” “Covid-19,” “The Economy,” “Race and Violence in our Cities,” “The Integrity of the Election.” An entire 15-minute section on the pandemic is bad news for Trump. There will be plenty of other opportunities in the sections on the candidates’ records and the economy to bring up the issue as well. (Though Trump may see an advantage in the conversations about the Supreme Court and race and violence.) Finally, as has been amply noted, the Trump campaign’s strategy of nuking Biden as a doddering senile geriatric who can barely string a few sentences together could backfire when Biden clears the low bar set for him. Still, don’t underestimate Trump. He was very effective in this setting last time around. And even if you thought he wasn’t — many observers thought Hillary Clinton won all three debates handily — you probably recall that it didn’t prevent him from winning the election. I just received a notice from the Cleveland Clinic, which has partnered with the Commission on Debates, that my Covid-19 test came back negative. So I’m off to pick up my credentials and a special green wristband to alert everyone of my disease-free status, and then hit the media filing center. Happy debate watching. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Thanks to the reader who pointed out that it’s actually Aretha Franklin who predicted our current moment 35 years ago. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.   GET THE SCOOP FROM THE MILKEN INSTITUTE GLOBAL CONFERENCE: POLITICO's Ryan Heath and Ben White are teaming up to write a special "Global Translations" newsletter and bring you exclusive coverage and the top takeaways from the 23rd annual Milken Institute Global Conference, featuring 4,000+ participants and 500 speakers representing more than 70 countries. Don't miss out on insights from the most influential minds and thought leaders reinventing health, technology, philanthropy, industry, and media. This year's conference will center on the theme "Meeting the Moment," and will address the dual crises of a global pandemic and social injustice. Sign up today for everything you need to know direct from #MIGlobal.     THE DEBATES TRY TO AVOID A MISTAKE ON THE LAKE — Before the meeting between Trump and Biden in Cleveland, POLITICO has plenty of pregame reading: — “Now comes a debate when context makes the old obsessions and analytical prisms that surround presidential debates look like the height of irrelevance,” founding editor John Harris writes in his latest Altitude column, on an abnormal debate for an abnormal moment. — “Even without the live audience, the 90-minute debate could attract an audience of 100 million viewers, both on television and online,” writes White House correspondent Anita Kumar, who takes us through the peculiarities of the (nearly) audience-free debate. — Head to POLITICO’s 2020 Debate homepage for the latest news and analysis, and join some of our plugged-in reporters and editors starting at 8:30 p.m. ET for live insights during the event. FIRST IN NIGHTLY THE ARMED WOMEN IN LOUISVILLE — At the city’s protests of the killing of Breonna Taylor, a self-proclaimed security team helps keep the demonstrations going without letting them go too far. In Louisville, as in many of the demonstrations across the country, there is no single person or group in charge. The protests are decentralized and sprawling, and the mood on any night can shift depending on who shows up and who holds the megaphone, Jamie Thompson writes in POLITICO Magazine. But small groups have sprung up and developed loose organizational structures to bring a semblance of order to the nightly marches. It’s vital, they believe, to sustaining momentum, and why they’ve been able to keep the demonstrations going since May. Along with security teams, volunteer medics wear helmets and treat everything from rubber bullet wounds to asthma attacks. Demonstrators have their own news correspondents traveling the city on foot and bicycle. The reporters call themselves “502 Livestreamers,” named after the city’s area code, and broadcast live on Facebook. The presence of the armed security teams are a reminder of how far the nationwide protests, now entering their fifth month, have come from the mostly spontaneous demonstrations that erupted in the days after George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis. Now, a state of tense permanence has taken hold in cities across the country where almost nightly marches proceed with clockwork regularity through shuttered downtowns. But the routine is spiked with an air of unpredictability. With weapons in the hands of people on all sides — the protesters, the police and the right-wing militias who periodically appear — any night is a cat-and-mouse test of constitutional limits in which the guardrails against deadly violence are fragile at best. Seventh U.S. Circuit Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, and Vice President Mike Pence arrive at the U.S. Capitol where Barrett is attending a series of meetings in preparation for her confirmation hearing. | Getty Images ON THE HILL TIME SHORT FOR A LONGSHOT — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding out one more day for an eleventh-hour agreement with Republicans on a coronavirus relief package, hoping to clinch a longshot deal as talks with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin drag on this week. After a 50-minute conversation today, Pelosi and Mnuchin made plans to speak again Wednesday, Heather Caygle, Sarah Ferris and John Bresnahan write. “I’m hopeful,” Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol after her conversation with Mnuchin. The California Democrat will huddle with her leadership team tonight. The full Democratic caucus will be briefed on the negotiations Wednesday morning, with centrist Democrats desperate for a deal that they can tout on the campaign trail in the final weeks before the election. Democrats unveiled their latest offer, a $2.2 trillion bill, on Monday night. Senior Democrats described Pelosi’s conversation with Mnuchin as positive, noting that White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — who has thrown up roadblocks to Democratic proposals in recent months — was not on the call. Those Democrats are expecting an offer from Mnuchin in the next 24 hours, they said. Despite not being on the call with Pelosi, Meadows also expressed hope about the chances for a deal. “The secretary and I have had a couple of conversations this morning. We also had a conversation with the president, so hopefully we’ll make some progress and find a solution for the American people,” he told reporters in the Capitol today. AROUND THE NATION TODAY’S LESSON: PERCENTAGES — After months of dwindling Covid-19 infections in New York City, positive test rates topped 3 percent today, triple the figure of recent weeks. The rise comes just as kids made their way back to in-person schooling for the first time since March, threatening what was already a fragile reopening plan. POLITICO’s City Hall editor David Giambusso emails us: Mayor Bill de Blasio has been adamant on reopening schools over the objections of union leaders and fellow elected officials who say it is too soon and too dangerous to bring students and teachers back to school facilities. After two school opening delays already, the city now finds itself in the midst of a troubling resurgence in coronavirus cases — one emanating largely from the city’s Orthodox Jewish community, which last year experienced widespread measles outbreaks. During the summer, de Blasio touted that only 25 percent of New York City families had opted for fully remote learning. After the delays, concerns over building safety, staffing shortages and a series of last-minute changes to how classes would be conducted, that number has grown to 48 percent. More than 500,000 of the city’s 1.1 million K-12 students are coming back to school this week. (Roughly 90,000 pre-K students and students with special needs came back to school a week earlier.) The path to reopening was rocky even before today’s confirmed rise in cases. School leaders and teachers were hit with yet another last-minute change over the weekend when the city announced that remote-only teachers could work from home instead of the classroom — a move that prompted the city’s principals union to give a vote of “no confidence” in de Blasio and schools Chancellor Richard Carranza on Sunday. “All summer long we’ve been running into roadblock after roadblock with changing guidance, confusing guidance, sometimes no guidance,” said Mark Cannizzaro, the principal union’s president. Today teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said the city left too much planning to the last minute. “If the mayor would have listened in April and started planning with us in April, these issues would not have happened,” he told reporters. De Blasio seemed to admit the delays were due in part to a recalcitrant bureaucracy. “I do think there was a problem of sort of clinging to past procedure and approach that everyone needed to break out of and understand that we were in, you know, an absolutely unprecedented situation,” he said today. “I think that’s an area where we all could have done better.” ASK THE AUDIENCE Nightly asks you: Have you adopted a new pet during the pandemic? Send us a picture of your new furry, scaled or feathered friend to nightly@politico.com, and we’ll include select photos in our Friday edition. COVID-2020 HOW TO BECOME FLUENT IN BODY LANGUAGE — Ever since the first televised presidential debate in 1960, the physical moves candidates make on the debate stage have been nearly as important as their policy positions. Mary Newman talks to an expert on what to look for when Trump and Biden get moving. A TAXING REVELATION — Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court dominated headlines last week. Then, the New York Times released a bombshell on Sunday showing that Trump has paid next to nothing in federal income taxes in recent years. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, national correspondent Natasha Korecki breaks down why the report puts the president in a tricky position for his first debate with Biden tonight. Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast THE GLOBAL FIGHT ON THE ROAD, AGAIN? European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s visit to Portugal today and Monday raised a question: What in the name of Covid was so urgent that she needed to travel to Lisbon? In normal times, von der Leyen’s two-day trip — to give a speech, attend a government meeting and meet Prime Minister António Costa and other top officials — would seem utterly routine. But with coronavirus infections rising across Europe, the Commission is stuck in Phase 1 of its lifting of lockdown measures imposed in the spring, meaning that teleworking is the norm and only the most essential business travel should take place, chief Brussels correspondent David M. Herszenhorn writes. “I think our position on missions is very clear: only essential missions are allowed,” a Commission spokesman, Balazs Ujvari, said. “Everything else should be had via videoconference or should be replaced or even canceled.” The persistent risk of infection — and increasing disruptions to EU business — have been quite visible in recent days. Last week, Council President Charles Michel postponed a leaders’ summit and went into isolation after a security officer with whom he had been in close contact tested positive for coronavirus. Since then, three EU commissioners — First Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans, Executive Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis, and Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides — have gone into self-quarantine after risks of exposure. NIGHTLY NUMBER 28,000 The number of employees Disney is laying off across its parks, experiences and consumer products division, according to a letter to employees today. PARTING WORDS ‘THE ACCESS IS PRETTY INCREDIBLE’ — Many strange aspects of pandemic-era politics will end whenever (and however ) Covid subsides. Babies will be forced to endure candidate kisses once again, and large indoor campaign rallies will be routine. But not everything from the days of Covid will go away. The Zoom fundraiser is one pandemic innovation that seems likely to outlast the virus. Online fundraising is no longer just a way to solicit small-dollar donations. The high-cost virtual fundraiser is expected to complement megabucks in-person gatherings in 2024 and beyond. Six months into the pandemic, political rainmakers have ironed out the kinks of attracting donors and reduced the awkward Zoom small talk and dead time. Early on, said Alexandra Acker-Lyons, a consultant who advises donors on how to give away money and Democratic campaigns on how to attract it, candidates would try too hard to replicate an in-person event. They would sit in front of a campaign sign talking to dozens of people. “That was pretty boring,” she said. “Everyone got over that pretty quickly.” Creative online fundraisers have been organized for small donors, too. The Wisconsin Democratic party recently gathered the original cast of The Princess Bride for a script reading. The price of admission was $1, though the suggested donation was $27. But for big donors, the Zoom fundraiser has replaced the cocktail-party handshake, and it’s better than the retro version: a phone call from the candidate. Dan Eberhart, a major Republican donor based in Arizona who helped raise money for Wyoming’s lone House representative, Republican Liz Cheney, said his favorite event so far was a Zoom conversation with the candidate’s dad, former vice president Dick Cheney, that had only a couple of other guests. “A lot of walls have come down and the access is pretty incredible,” Eberhart said. Jon Bon Jovi kicked off a fundraiser hosted by Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Joe Biden from his home studio, which bagged $2.5 million. “He sang. He talked,” said Acker-Lyons of the New Jersey rocker. “He still has it.”   REALITY CHECK? Last week's U.N. General Assembly had experts wondering whether the feud between China and the United States is coming at the expense of the global influence of each world superpower. Join the conversation and gain expert insight from informed and influential voices in government, business, law, and tech. China Watcher is as much of a platform as it is a newsletter. Subscribe today.     Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam   FOLLOW US

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