US Election Notebook: as Donald Trump said, "this is not going to end well"

US presidential elections are marathons. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have, in effect, been campaigning for the Oval Office since 1988, when Ronald Reagan was president and Timothy Dalton was James Bond. “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”, the first chapter of a Richard Nixon biography, is perhaps the adage for all presidential candidates.

If this election weren’t controversial enough already, this most important of weeks began with the news of Donald Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy, something that was only made possible by the sudden passing of Justice Ginsburg the week before.

Trump proceeded to nominate Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative lawyer described variously as a “white coloniser” (for adopting Haitian children) and “the ultimate Walmart soccer mom”, as his choice for Ginsburg’s successor. In doing so, he has made this Sarah Palin in robes his de facto running mate. For her nomination to be confirmed before election day it would have to be one of the fastest in the history of the US Supreme Court.

Then came the news that Trump has avoided federal taxes for decades, including his first year in office. The news was unearthed by Trump’s friends at the New York Times, who also revealed that Trump is in hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of debt. The publication of his financials (which he has long fought to keep private) so close to election day, is not altogether surprising considering the long-running animosity between the White House and the NYT; nor was his dismissal of it as “fake news”.

The stage was set, therefore, for an explosive presidential debate on Tuesday night, the first time in which Hiden’ Biden and Tax Dodgin’ Trump have truly gone mano a mano. There couldn’t have been a better setting for it: a medical clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, the state which has elected every winning president since 1964.

And explosive it was. Highlights, for the want of a better word, included the former vice president telling the sitting president to “shut up, man”, and the sitting president inciting armed violence. You know the rest — 73 million Americans tuned in to watch their president interrupt his challenger 73 times, and his challenger, even when not interpreted, struggle to construct a coherent sentence. The host Chris Wallace called the debate a “missed opportunity”. That’s putting it mildly.

While a recreation of the Lincoln-Douglas debates was never on the cards, it’s still quite something for a TV anchor to call a presidential debate a “train wreck”, or a voter to compare the President of the United States to a “crackhead”. The debate was so bad it inspired a widespread sense that the US is doomed. No wonder the Commission on Presidential Debates is changing the rules.

And what was it all for? Pundits and sampled voters agreed that neither candidate really won; the ultimate loser was the American people. The before and after survey conducted by FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos showed that the levels of support for both candidates altered only marginally.

But on balance, Biden has emerged stronger than his opponent. His campaign raised a one-hour record in donations and his tweet that Trump is “the worst president we’ve ever had” has racked up nearly two million likes, far above the average for both candidates. According to the first national post-debate poll, Biden has widened his lead among likely voters and he is also the beneficiary of the biggest swing in the betting markets for six months.

In fairness to Trump, it’s certainly not unusual for sitting presidents to be beaten in the first debate. Both Reagan and Obama performed poorly in theirs, only to land winning blows in subsequent encounters. And there is also the question of whether Biden can go the distance for two more rounds — he certainly cuts a more presidential figure in edited clips than in real time.

So long as there is a next time. Overnight came the news that the world’s “worst offender” for spreading misinformation about coronavirus, President Trump, has himself caught it — from someone called “Hope” no less. He will now be in quarantine, joining fellow strongmen Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson in having to take to his bed. The impact this will have on an already chaotic election is hard to gauge, but TheArticle’s Daniel Johnson has provided a useful guide. Remember, however, that Americans do love a Comeback Kid: after surviving an assassination attempt, Reagan received a standing ovation from Congress and his highest approval ratings.

Either way, all eyes will be on Joe Biden, for whom Trump’s projectile in Cleveland might have been fatal after all, as well as Vice President Mike Pence, who would automatically become president in the event of Trump’s incapacitation, resignation, or death. He is set to debate Kamala Harris next week. Between this, the Supreme Court battle, the controversy surrounding mail-in ballots and the spectre of civil unrest, it seems that Donald Trump was right about one thing: “this is not going to end well”.