Not the best scenario for Miami.Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
The Miami Heat have played better games. Their swaggering journey through the 2020 postseason hit its first real moment of doubt on Wednesday night, as they opened the NBA Finals with a 116-98 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers. The contest was well out of hand halfway through the third quarter, when they faced an 87-55 deficit. Then, in a moment of perverse cruelty, the NBA made them play the remaining quarter and a half. It was rough. Kelly Olynyk wound up playing 18 minutes.
Sadly for the Heat, the lopsided score wasn’t the worst part of their evening. Every player on the roster (save Kelly Olynyk) seemed to come down with a debilitating injury. Jimmy Butler rolled his ankle at the end of the first half. (He returned to action, though slightly hobbled.) Goran Dragic, who’s been playing like a Slovenian Steve Nash in these playoffs, missed the second half with a foot injury that is apparently quite severe.
And center Bam Adebayo, who gives Miami its only chance at keeping Anthony Davis in check, fell to the floor in the third quarter clutching his arm. He, too, would not return, with what’s being described as a left shoulder sprain.
Any one of those injuries could spell disaster for Miami in the Finals, but all three? Well, let’s not think about that right now. In times of trouble, it helps to take stock of the good things. Sure, when the Los Angeles Lakers are dunking all over you, that’s not really an applicable strategy. But we can do the next best thing, which is to consider all the ways Game 1 could have gone worse for Miami.
As the cliché goes, it’s a seven-game series, and this only counts as one loss for Miami. It would be much, much worse, obviously, if it was a three-game series and each loss counted twice. In that case, the series would already be over. Phew!
Also consider rookie Tyler Herro, who helped bury the Boston Celtics in the Eastern Conference Finals and danced the dirt down on their grave. Herro’s magic touch eluded him on Wednesday, as his plus-minus in the first half was a staggering minus-30 in 18 minutes of action. That means the Heat were outscored nearly 2-to-1 every minute he was on the court. Yowza! Nonetheless, it could have been much worse. He could have been a minus-60 in the first half, or even minus-120. Good thing he avoided that mathematical possibility.
And it’s worth noting that Heat weren’t losing the whole game. They actually started out on the front foot, jumping to a 23-10 lead. Their offense looked crisp, they were rebounding every miss, and their transition play was phenomenal. It was a joy to behold. Then, the Lakers went on a 55-25 run to close out the half. But Miami will always have those first seven minutes. Going forward, if they beat the Lakers by 13 points in each seven-minute segment of action, they’ll win each game by an average of 89 points. Not bad!
As for their matchup on the defensive end, it’s hard to ignore Anthony Davis’ monster night. He put up 34 points on 21 shots. The term “scoring with ease” comes to mind, but, to Miami’s credit, Davis did build up a visible sweat by the third quarter. He even looks a little out of breath here as he screams, “It’s over!” after throwing down an uncontested dunk.
And then there’s this sick reverse slam by LeBron. He did it after the whistle, so it didn’t count.
However, in the interest of full disclosure, this reverse slam did count.
But that’s neither here nor there. Miami can rest easy knowing that LeBron started his leap from inside the 3-point arc, meaning this particular dunk could only be worth 2 points. See? Things could always be worse.
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As telescopes around planet Earth watch, Mars is growing brighter in night skies, approaching its 2020 opposition on October 13. Mars looks like its watching too in this view of the Red Planet from September 22. Mars' disk is already near its maximum apparent size for earthbound telescopes, less than 1/80th the apparent diameter of a Full Moon. The seasonally shrinking south polar cap is at the bottom and hazy northern clouds are at the top. A circular, dark albedo feature, Solis Lacus (Lake of the Sun), is just below and left of disk center. Surrounded by a light area south of Valles Marineris, Solis Lacus looks like a planet-sized pupil, famously known as The Eye of Mars . Near the turn of the 20th century, astronomer and avid Mars watcher Percival Lowell associated the Eye of Mars with a conjunction of canals he charted in his drawings of the Red Planet. Broad, visible changes in the size and shape of the Eye of Mars are now understood from high resolution surface images to be due to dust transported by winds in the thin Martian atmosphere. via NASA https://ift.tt/33jtLUp
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Episode Notes
On the Gist, there were a great many missteps last night on the presidential debate stage, but despite the rhetorical slips, Biden stayed on his feet to glide past Trump.
In the interview, Mike and Slate’s national correspondent, Will Saletan, recap the first presidential debate. They dissect the prep and implemented strategies of both the Trump and Biden camps, the gratuitous exchanges between the two candidates, Chris Wallace’s performance as moderator, and how to curb the electoral nightmare scenarios looming on the horizon.
In the spiel, Donald Trump did not say, “Yes!” when asked if he repudiated white supremacy. But was it because he wouldn’t do it, or was it because he has the inability to articulate?
ICYMI NASA has 2 centers in Virginia - @NASA_Langley & @NASA_Wallops - & @NASA HQ, GSFC, IV&V employees (contractor & civil servants) live/work in VA. Why don't you promote the new #NASA Economic report citing 27,097 full/part time jobs & billions in funding that VA gets? pic.twitter.com/MfH8QI7NzM
Strange: @NASA_Marshall crows about this small business award on their home page but can't be bothered to mention the @NASA economic impact report showing the substantial benefit to Alabama & the rest of America. Guess that sort of stuff is not interesting to their stakeholders. https://t.co/kADHpLxnbW
President Donald Trump during the debate on Tuesday in Cleveland.Brian Snyder/Reuters
Donald Trump loves to fight. On Tuesday night, in his first 2020 debate, he constantly attacked Joe Biden. But Trump also attacked governors, reporters, previous political opponents, and his own officials. He’s headed for defeat in part because he can’t stop making enemies and alienating voters. Here are some of the dumb fights he picked on Tuesday night.
1. Impeachment. Halfway through the debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked, “Why should voters elect you president over your opponent?” This was Trump’s opportunity to brag about his achievements. Instead, he began the second sentence of his answer by fuming, “And that’s despite the impeachment hoax.” Up to that point, no one in the debate had mentioned Trump’s impeachment. By bringing it up, he reminded viewers of this embarrassment.
2. Hillary. After raging at his impeachment, Trump’s next words were: “And you saw what happened today with Hillary Clinton, where it was a whole big con job.” Later, when Wallace asked about possible voter fraud or voter suppression in 2020, the president again denounced “Crooked Hillary Clinton.” Trump seems to have forgotten that he’s no longer running against Clinton. In fact, he desperately needs to win over some of the people who voted for her. By lambasting her, he pointlessly antagonizes those voters.
3. Obama. Democrats “came after me trying to do a coup,” Trump ranted. “We’ve caught them all. We’ve got it all on tape.” He accused his predecessor, falsely, of masterminding surveillance of Trump’s campaign in the Russia investigation. “President Obama was sitting in the office,” said Trump. “He knew about it, too.” This smear makes no sense. To begin with, Obama, like Clinton, isn’t on the ballot this year. Second, Trump owes his Electoral College victory in 2016 to people who voted for him after having supported Obama in 2008 and 2012. By slandering Obama, he risks losing them. Third, Trump wasn’t sniping at Obama in the name of some policy voters might care about. He was doing it to promote a conspiracy theory about himself.
4. Pocahontas. “If Pocahontas would have left two days early, you would have lost every primary,” Trump told Biden. He was referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren—one of Biden’s rivals in the Democratic primaries—who had erroneously claimed Native American ancestry. But Warren also isn’t on the ballot. And voters tuning in to this debate with open minds—those who, until now, had paid little attention to the campaign—probably had no clue what Trump was talking about. It sounded like an ethnic slur out of nowhere.
5. Governors. Trump thinks some Democratic governors, in the name of COVID prevention, have restricted schools and businesses more than is necessary. Many people agree with him. But instead of focusing on that policy dispute, Trump impugns the governors’ motives. He accuses them of deliberately strangling their state economies in order to cost him the election. “They think they’re hurting us by keeping them closed,” he said. By twisting the dispute into a self-absorbed conspiracy theory, Trump turns a potentially winning argument into a loser.
6. The media. Early in the debate, Wallace said Trump had “never come up with a comprehensive plan to replace Obamacare” and had signed a “symbolic executive order to protect people with pre-existing conditions five days before this debate.” He asked the president, “What is the Trump health care plan?” Trump could have responded by outlining a plan. Instead, he went after Wallace. “First of all, I guess I’m debating you, not him,” Trump snapped. “But that’s OK. I’m not surprised.” Rather than reassure voters about a life-and-death concern, he pursued his personal grievance against the “fake news.”
7. Vaccines. Wallace noted that on the question of when vaccines would be available, Trump had “contradicted or been at odds with some of your government’s own top scientists.” He mentioned Moncef Slaoui, the director of Trump’s vaccine development program, and Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The smart political response would have been to assure viewers that the president and his scientists agreed. Trump did the opposite. In fact, he picked not one fight, but two. “I disagree with both of them,” he said.
8. Masks. Later, Wallace asked Trump, “Are you questioning the efficacy of masks?” That would be a foolish position to take—63 percent of voters say they always wear masks when they go out near other people—but Trump took it. “I don’t wear a mask like him,” Trump sneered at Biden. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask.” When Biden pointed out that Redfield and other health officials had endorsed the use of masks, Trump escalated the fight. He accused Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of having said that “masks are not good.” The accusation was false and foolish. It pitted Trump not just against Biden, but against the electorate and all the administration’s health officials.
9. The FBI. Wallace challenged Trump to “condemn white supremacists” involved in violence over race and policing. Trump hedged, advising racist gangs to “stand back and stand by.” But seconds later, Trump quarreled with his handpicked FBI director, Christopher Wray, over whether Antifa was an organization or just an ideology. “He’s wrong,” said Trump. This bizarre sequence signaled that the president was more willing to confront the FBI than to confront racists.
10. Stupidity. Even when Trump targeted Biden, he often did it in a self-destructive way. First he called Biden a bad student—“Don’t ever use the word smart with me,” Trump seethed—and falsely accused Biden of claiming to have attended Delaware State University. Trump was wrong: Biden never claimed to have been a student at the historically Black university. But by reminding viewers that Biden went to a state school (the University of Delaware), Trump played into Biden’s anti-elitist message. Later, when Trump was asked about having paid almost no income taxes, he scoffed that everyone exploits tax loopholes, such as “privileges for depreciation,” “unless they’re stupid.” That remark reinforced Biden’s argument that Trump despises ordinary people who follow ordinary rules.
Tuesday’s debate didn’t end the election. Trump could gain ground in the next five weeks, and he’ll get two more chances to make a better impression. But a candidate who couldn’t restrain himself in the first debate probably won’t do it in the second or third, either. He is who he is.
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Payloads Radi-N2 Retrieve: The crew retrieved the eight Radi-N2 bubble detectors from their deployed location near windows 3 and 4 in the Cupola, and handed over the Russian crew for processing. The detectors had been deployed in this location for one week. The objective of this Canadian Space Agency investigation is to better characterize the …
September 30, 2020 at 12:00AM
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“What in the name of Paypal and/or Palantir did you just say about me, you filthy degenerate? I’ll have you know I’m the Crown Prince of Silicon Valley, and I’ve been involved in numerous successful tech startups, and I have over $1B in liquid funds. I’ve used that money to promote heterodox positions on human enhancement, control political arenas, and am experimenting with mind uploading. I’m also trained in classical philosophy and was recently ranked the most influential libertarian in the world by Google. You are nothing to me but just another alternative future. I will wipe you out with a precision of simulation the likes of which has never been seen before, mark my words.”
That’s not the latest ill-advised Elon Musk tweet, nor is it one of his devoted fans roleplaying on Reddit. And it’s not quite Navy Seal copypasta—an over-the-top, comically written attack paragraph that parodies the voice of a “tough guy”—which spread, copied-and-pasted (that’s the “copypasta” part) around the internet.
Instead, it’s a parody of Navy Seal copypasta—notably, one that was written by a computer. Independent researcher and writer Gwern Branwen fed the language model GPT-3 a few examples of parodies of Navy Seal copypasta (such as minimalist—“I’m navy seal. I have 300 kills. You’re dead, kid.”—or pirate—”What in Davy Jones’ locker did ye just bark at me, ye scurvy bilgerat …”) and then asked it to use those examples to generate new parodies. (Branwen’s many experiments with GPT-3 can be found here.) For this parody, Branwen prompted GPT-3 with the input, “Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.”
GPT-3 is the work of A.I. lab OpenAI, which describes its mission as “discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence.” OpenAI has been the source of controversy, especially related to its decision to transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit corporation, which was followed by a $1 billion investment by Microsoft. (Microsoft now has the exclusive license to GPT-3.) OpenAI has been accused of fueling the A.I. hype cycle and was criticized for withholding the release of its previous language model, GPT-2, because it feared releasing the model would be too dangerous. Similarly, the recent release of GPT-3 (in a private beta) has sparked a lotofdiscussion. Some are heralding it as a leap forward in A.I., citing impressive examples of its abilities to generate code, answer medical queries, and solve language and syntax puzzles. Others are morewary, concerned about the potential for misuse or believing the hype is unfounded. Either way, it’s clear that sophisticated language models are making significant advances in their ability to generate convincing text. And in a world where social media platforms have disrupted the traditional gatekeepers to speech and reach (e.g. newspapers) convincing text-generating A.I. poses challenges to free speech and a free press. Namely, it could enable what sociologist Zeynep Tufekci calls “modern censorship”—information campaigns that harass, confuse, and sow mistrust with the goal of undermining individual agency and political action.
Online harassment is used to intimidate and punish people—often journalists and activists, disproportionately women and minorities—for their speech. Though much of the harassment online is the product of individuals, some is the result of organized campaigns. The Russian government pioneered the organized harassment campaign in the early 2000s, establishing a troll army that targets journalists, activists, and critics who threaten Russian interests.
Sophisticated language models could enable more effective automated harassment.
For example, a sophisticated language model could target harassment to specific speakers, making it more threatening and convincing. There have already been examples of GPT-3 creating mock obituaries that include accurate references to people’s past employers and current family members, which suggests it could be used to generate harassment that’s just as personal. Activists and journalists targeted by harassment often say they can tell the difference between “real” harassment and bot harassment, citing differentiators such as the frequency of posts and the coherence of the content. Models like GPT-3 could make it more difficult to tell the difference, making automated harassment more believable and thus more chilling.
In addition to targeted harassment, those looking to control public debate use a technique called “flooding” to drown out speech they object to and distort the information environment. Flooding involves producing a significant amount of content to distract, confuse, and discredit. Take the creation and dissemination of “fake news” in the United States—people both abroad and at home churn out stories that combine fact and fiction, undermining mainstream news organizations while distracting and confusing the public. By automating much of the writing process, sophisticated language models such as GPT-3 could significantly increase the effectiveness of flooding operations.
OpenAI’s paper about GPT-3 (currently a preprint) provides important evidence that supports this. The authors ran an experiment testing whether people could tell the difference between real news articles written by a human and articles written by GPT-3. They found that testers were barely able to distinguish between real and GPT-3 generated articles, averaging an accuracy of 52 percent—only slightly better than flipping a coin. This result has been borne out in the real world as well. It was recently revealed that a GPT-3-generated blog reached the No. 1 spot on the tech-focused news aggregator Hacker News. A student at the University of California, Berkeley set up the blog as an experiment to see whether people could tell that it was written by GPT-3. Tens of thousands of Hacker News readers didn’t suspect a thing, and the few who did were downvoted.
With A.I.-generated writing able to fool many readers, disinformation-as-a-service will become possible, eliminating the need for human-staffed “troll farms” and enabling organizations large and small to shape public debate with the low costs, high efficiency, and scalability of software.
This has the potential to make flooding frictionless and pervasive.
Some people are skeptical of GPT-3’s eventual impact, commenting that it writes like a first-year student. This may be true, but have you read any misinformation? A first-year student could easily produce higher quality misinformation than the status quo. GPT-3 doesn’t need to be writing a weekly column for the Atlantic to be effective. It just has to be able to not raise alarms among readers of less credentialed online content such as tweets, blogs, Facebook posts, and “fake news.” This type of content is a significant amount of what is created and shared online, and it is clear that it could be automated convincingly by GPT-3 and models like it.
Mitigating the harmful effects of sophisticated language models will require addressing information campaigns more generally. This means approaches that span the technical (textfake/bot detection and new socialmedia), social (model release norms and digital literacy), and political (anti-trust and regulatory changes). GPT-3 doesn’t change the problem, it just further entrenches it. As we have seen, our institutions have largely failed in the face of the challenges posed by the internet. GPT-3 and language models like it will only make safeguarding healthy public discourse online more difficult—and more important.
"Military troops in the Space Force will someday deploy to orbit, one of the service's top operations officials said Sept. 29. "At some point, yes, we will be putting humans into space," Maj. Gen. John E. Shaw, head of the Space Force's Space Operations Command and part of U.S. Space Command leadership, said during a conference organized by the AFWERX innovation group. "They may be operating command centers somewhere in the lunar environment or someplace else." Space Force officials, wary of being confused with NASA, usually shy away from questions about whether military personnel will go to the Final Frontier themselves. Experts have split on whether a Space Force astronaut corps is a good idea in the next couple of decades, if at all."
The digital focus group conducted by GOP pollster Frank Luntz following Tuesday’s presidential debate.Screenshot Youtube
There will be many, many real polls and opinions about what happened Tuesday night when, for the first time, President Donald Trump and Vice President Joe Biden shared the same stage. But for now, let’s enjoy the responses of veteran GOP pollster Frank Luntz’s Zoom focus group of 15 undecided voters in swing states. Immediately after the debate came to a close, Luntz sprung to action conducting digitally (this year) what is normally done in a blank room in a business park somewhere in the suburbs of an anodyne American city.
By Luntz’s count, the most [insert adjective] debate in American history left nine (nine!) focus group participants still undecided. One, who did not remain undecided was nouveau American icon “Ruthie from Pennsylvania,” who unleashed a real corker of the internet age, describing Trump’s debate performance as trying to “win an argument with a crackhead.” When the rest of the undecideds—nine of which were men and six women—were asked to use actual words to describe the two candidates and their performance Tuesday night, this is what they had to say (via Politico):
Despite their indecisiveness, most described Trump in a negative light, including one of the participants who was leaning toward voting for the president. The voters characterized Trump as “unhinged,” “arrogant,” “forceful,” a “bully,” “chaotic” and “un-American.”
When asked to describe Biden they offered: “better than expected,” “politician,” “compassion,” “coherent,” and a “nice guy lacking vision.”
Coherent! Nice guy lacking vision! Not exactly a slam dunk endorsement, but better than the alternative. Slap it on a bumper sticker and let’s get voting!
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Episode Notes
Prudence is joined this week by Jennifer M. Buck, an assistant professor of practical theology at Azusa Pacific University. Her books and research explore themes of global Christianity, Quakerism, gender, race, and popular culture. She also is a licensed minister and helps pastor a church in Pasadena, California, where she lives with her husband and foster son.
Prudie and Buck tackle letters about what to do when your husband reveals that he’s competitive with you about weight loss, should you feel guilty about thinking about future partners while taking care of your wife who has cancer, what to do when your partner’s mom furnishes your home with lots of homemade quilts, how to protect your grandniece from her abusive father, and what to consider when your boyfriend refuses to marry you, even for the purpose of sharing health care.
Get $5 off Danny’s latest book, Something That May Shock and Discredit You, at Slate.com/danny.
Got a question for Prudie? Send it toprudence@slate.comor leave a voicemail message at 401-371-DEAR (3327), and you may hear your question answered on a future episode of the show.
Production by Phil Surkis.
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Federal officers guard the front gate of the ICE detention center during a protest on Sept. 18, 2020 in Portland, Oregon.Nathan Howard/Getty Images
President Donald Trump, in need of another dose of fear to keep his sputtering reelection bid afloat, is now, officially, throwing the kitchen sink of chauvinism at American voters: casually rehashing racist tropes directed at suburban women, a nod to white supremacists, tough guy law and order calls from the cheap seats for whoever that works for, and… what else? … ICE raids! We’re talking too much about the deadly pandemic that flourished under Trump’s leadership; let’s get the wall back in play. To make that happen, the Trump administration is going to use American taxpayer dollars and is planning a series of immigration enforcement operations in so-called sanctuary cities, the Washington Post reports, with such “sanctuary ops” starting as soon as this week in California. The publicity stunt would then move to swing states, Denver and Philadelphia, officials told the Post, with the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf slated to tag along on the ground to help focus the spotlight on the stunt. Of those three American cities, you can bet Wolf will pop up in the one located in Pennsylvania.
Upping the pressure on sanctuary cities ahead of the election has been floated around the Trump administration, but the idea was put on hold in the spring due to the coronavirus, which resulted in far fewer ICE raids and arrests. But that could be about to change. “Trump has inveighed against sanctuary jurisdictions throughout his presidency, and he has expanded those attacks to include Democratic mayors in cities convulsed by racial justice demonstrations and sporadic rioting after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis,” the Post notes. “The immigration operation would sync with two themes of Trump’s reelection campaign: his crackdown on immigration and his push to vilify cities led by Democrats, whom he blames for crime and violence.”
While extraordinary in its cravenness, it doesn’t seem that unusual for a president that held his party convention at the White House, contrary to American political norms and literal laws. Even the Trump administration admitted the operation is, essentially, a last-minute political play. “Two officials with knowledge of plans for the sanctuary op described it as more of a political messaging campaign than a major ICE operation, noting that the agency already concentrates on immigration violators with criminal records and routinely arrests them without much fanfare,” the Post reports. Expect a sudden surge of fanfare.
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When the Kardashian-Jenners announced that Keeping Up With the Kardashians would end after 14 years and 20 seasons, the news prompted a bunch of meditations about the impact on the show—elegiacreflections on the ways the Kardashians transformed reality TV and the culture more generally. But over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself thinking about why I stopped keeping up with the Kardashians a long time ago.
I tripped into an investment in the Kardashians around 2011, during the sixth season, advertised around Kim’s engagement and eventual short-lived marriage to Kris Humphries. Like everyone else, I mostly knew about Kardashian from her dad’s role in the O.J. Simpson trial and her notorious sex tape. Voyeurism got the best of me and I tuned in to a midnight marathon of back-to-back episodes.
I starting watching the Kardashians out of morbid curiosity; I think I wanted to observe how not-Black the showwas.
The series’ unabashed focus on the upper-class white experience felt at once foreign from my own life and familiar from the rest of the reality TV landscape at the time. Keeping Up With the Kardashians premiered in 2007; the first Real Housewives season, Orange County, aired in 2006, and the “Black” Housewives of Atlanta debuted in 2008. Keeping Up With the Kardashians, like many other celeb-reality shows at the time, was an amalgamation of the syndicated series Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, which began in 1984, and MTV’s The Real World.
In the past, the reality shows I’d been drawn to always mostly revolved around Black women. But I watched that season of the Kardashians out of morbid curiosity; I think I wanted to observe how not-Black the show was. Part of the appeal was to watch—and yes, judge—the opulence of white wealth. I was curious (read: nosy) about how and why someone would spend $10 million on a wedding for a marriage that would eventually last 72 days, since, by the time I got around to watching the wedding episodes, Kim had already filed for divorce.
At that point, Real Housewives of Atlanta was in its fourth season, and I was fascinated by the ways upper-classness seemingly magnified those women’s performances of Blackness. I remember watching that Kardashian wedding and thinking about how Keeping Up With the Kardashians was on a different level of wealth altogether (which probably helped explain the scarcity of Black people). I think this is one of the reasons their co-optation of Black womanhood was so interesting and frustrating to me—they literally had everything, and still came to take the shine away from Black women.
Though of course the Kardashians never went as far as Rachel Dolezal or Jessica Krug in claiming “transracialism” or Black identification, they still capitalized on the working-class Black aesthetic. Blackfishing is a term coined by cultural critic Wanna Thompson to refer to cultural co-optation, including cosmetic or physical manipulation to a white person’s appearance to imply Blackness, biraciality, or racial ambiguity. On Keeping Up With the Kardashians, I saw Blackfishing everywhere: in their Fulani braids, Bantu knots, and cornrows, in their do-rags and surgically enhanced full lips and big asses. Their Blackfishing raised their profile as influencers, to the detriment of actual Black women. Their adoption of a racial aesthetic, without the inconvenience or penalties of Blackness, has reiterated the ways cultural Blackness is celebrated while embodied Blackness is denigrated.
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As a Black woman in her then 30s, now 40s, I am aware I was not the target demographic for Keeping Up With the Kardashians. But the more I watched the rising popularity of the reality stars, the more I saw how the Kardashian-Jenner sisters accumulated fame and wealth by borrowing Blackness and mimicking Black womanhood. While the main characters and protagonists were white women (of Armenian descent), their popularity and cultural relevance often came at the expense of Black women and Black culture.
This was a show where Black women were either strategically placed (as, say, Black best friends) or altogether absent—a show that relied on a Black-woman aesthetic without Black women, and working-class style without working-class realities. If it weren’t for money, fame, and whiteness, the show would have been read as a ghettoized trope. The show always featured an array of Black boyfriends/baby daddies/husbands, but the presence of Black men never compensated for the glaring absence of Black women except as accessories. Even Black women in the Kardashian orbit, like Jordyn Woods and Malika Haqq, were so visibly affluent that it didn’t even seem to me like they represented the kind of Black womanhood that the Kardashian-Jenners were trying to emulate.
I don’t think I realized just how extreme the Kardashian-Jenners’ racialization and commercialization of Black culture was until after I’d stopped watching the show. There was the time in 2014 when Khloe posted a meme on social media: a picture of herself, Kim, and Kourtney that read, “The only KKK to ever let Black men in.” The tone-deafness of the post, which was later deleted, emphasizes what a luxury it is to joke lightly about racial oppression without having ever experienced it. Later that same year, Kylie thanked Kim for teaching her “how to turn from good girl to ghetto.” Ghetto is a term often used as a character description of working-class Black women and girls who are stereotyped as ill-mannered, uncouth, and cool. And here, the notion of Black female identity as a performative opposite to the “good girl” situates the good girl (read: white girl) persona on one end of a racial, social, and economic spectrum with the ghetto girl (read: Black girl) on the other. By occupying the privilege of whiteness while Columbusing Black cultural cool, the Kardashians have attempted to move back and forth on a continuum that doesn’t allow Black women the same mobility.
I stopped keeping up with the Kardashians because of their monetization of Blackness within a cultural context of anti-Blackness. I stopped keeping up with the Kardashians because the exploitation and embodiment of Black women’s features (curvy bodies, full lips, kinky hair, dark skin) were being celebrated on white women after being long used by the culture and media to render Black women undesirable. I stopped keeping up with the Kardashians because I saw the influence of Black women everywhere—but none of that influence was ever attributed to its source.
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Dick Johnson, “dead,“ in Dick Johnson Is Dead.Netflix
When I asked my wife if she’d like to watch the new Netflix documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead with me, she asked what it was about. As I explained it to her, I realized that the movie I was describing sounded a little bit disturbing. When I finished, my wife looked horrified and said, “No, no thanks.” I’m still working on her, but I’m here to tell you that despite all this, the movie is amazing and you should absolutely watch it.
In Dick Johnson Is Dead, the documentary cameraperson (and director of Cameraperson) Kirsten Johnson is faced with her father’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Nearly a decade before, her mother had died of the same disease, and the experience was excruciating: She felt she lost her mom, abandoned her, and had nothing left to remember her by. This time, she wants to handle things differently. She asks her father if he’ll make a movie with her. In the movie, they’ll talk about his upcoming death, but they’ll also, puckishly, enact it—using the magic of cinema to kill him off in a half-dozen staged accidents. They’ll even send him up to heaven so he can see what it’s like. In this way, daughter can capture her father before his decline; father can, in an odd way, face his own mortality; and father and daughter can have a project to work on together now that he’s moving into her New York City apartment.
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And so we see retired psychiatrist Dick Johnson smashed by a falling air conditioner, contorted on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, driving head-on into another car in a tunnel, and pierced by construction debris. (“I’m bleeding!” Dick says as fake blood squirts out of his neck. “I’m bleeding to death.”) We also see the business surrounding this odd family project: the prop guy and his styrofoam air conditioner, the makeup artist who teaches Dick how the blood pump will work, the soundwoman who doesn’t like watching Dick fake his own death. “That really hurt!” Dick says with delight, watching a stuntman taking a particularly nasty fall.
Through it all, Dick Johnson is sweet, funny, a little weird. He’s clearly having a ball, helping his daughter in her work, participating in his own demise. In the movie’s version of Heaven, his ailing body is cured, popcorn falls from the sky, and he is greeted by his wife, Bruce Lee, and Farrah Fawcett. On the Heaven soundstage, a crew member brings Dick a chair to sit and watch the proceedings; later we see him napping in that chair as the grips bustle around him. The more we watch Dick, the more we love him, seeing in him the kindness and curiosity that has made his daughter love him so much.
We know that this story must end with Dick Johnson’s actual death. But I found that as I watched Dick Johnson Is Dead, I came to dread the immense sadness of his end—of all of our ends—much less. The result is a movie that’s sad, but not at all unbearable—in fact, that’s oddly inspiring. What a gift Kirsten Johnson gave her father and herself. (And her kids, who helped brainstorm ways to kill off Grandpa.) Dick Johnson Is Dead is a testament to the power of talking forthrightly about death with those you love. It shows how death may never lose its power, exactly, but you can make yourselves partners in the process, not victims of it.
As I watched Dick Johnson Is Dead, I came to dread the immense sadness of his end—of all of our ends—muchless.
My dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a few years ago. We’ve been lucky, comparatively, in that his memory loss has not proceeded as quickly as Dick Johnson’s does. But I’ve struggled to talk about the disease with him, and have barely broached the reality of his likely end. Dick Johnson Is Dead avoids, for the most part, the typical artistic clichés of memory loss: There’s no fading away, no disappearance. Instead, the movie makes clear that Dick Johnson with Alzheimer’s is not some watered-down version of the man he used to be. He’s a person, with his own quirks, his own creativity, and a kind and winning personality that if anything comes into sharper focus as his memory falters. (Late at night, he wakes his daughter up, convinced that there’s a patient outside who needs his help.) The movie is as much his creation as his daughter’s, a testament to the power of what the MacArthur-winning gerontologist Anne Basting—who devises theater in nursing homes with dementia patients—calls “creative care.”
Perhaps when I have lost my own father as my wife has hers, I’ll regard a project like Dick Johnson Is Dead with as much apprehension as she did. Perhaps there’s something about my geographic distance from him that creates dispassion akin to the documentarian’s camera, that allows me to see this film’s conceit as fascinating but not upsetting. I don’t know. But I watched the movie with mounting delight, thrilled for Kirsten and Dick that in their final years together they have been able to make something splendid and surprising, something that reflects their shared interests, their shared genius, and their shared love. Though Kirsten Johnson never loses her precise cameraperson’s eye, there’s nothing unfeeling about Dick Johnson Is Dead. I hope I can find a way to talk with my father as frankly as Kirsten talks to Dick. And I hope that when I’m on my way out, my daughters take me as seriously, and treat me as kindly, as this beautiful movie does its hero.
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Episode Notes
Donald Trump has spent the last four years refusing to release his tax returns. When the New York Times published 20 years worth of them, it revealed a possible reason why. The president’s balance sheet listed huge losses, which he used to dramatically cut down what he owed in taxes.
Were these the dealings of a savvy businessman, or an unscrupulous swindler? And what does it mean for the election to have a candidate who still has a stake in their business and an alarming amount of debt?
Guest: Andrea Bernstein, co-host of the Trump, Inc. podcast and the author of “American Oligarchs: the Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power.”
Slate Plus members get bonus segments and ad-free podcast feeds. Sign up now.
Podcast production by Mary Wilson, Jayson De Leon, Danielle Hewitt, and Elena Schwartz.
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Just an interruption bonanza.Jim Watson and Saul Loeb/Getty Images
Tuesday night’s presidential debate was not the first one featuring Trump to feel more like a schoolyard taunting contest than an actual debate. But even so, it stood out for one key metric: the sheer number of interruptions.
By my count, Trump interrupted former Vice President Joe Biden or debate moderator Chris Wallace at least 128 times. This number dwarfed the 51 times Trump interrupted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during the first presidential debate in 2016. For his part, Biden interrupted dozens of times—at various points either trying to get a word in edgewise or correct flat lies by the president—but his interruptions were no match for Trump’s.
Wallace’s efforts to control the debate were valiant, but ultimately futile. Trump interrupted both men during both questions and answers. He muttered snide remarks under his breath. He talked over the moderator and his opponent. And he just plain cut them off over and over again. Wallace asked the president at least 25 times to stop interrupting and obey the debate rules: “Sir, you’re debating him not me, let me ask my question.” “Please let the vice president talk.” “You’ve made your point, please let him answer.” “You’ve agreed to two minutes, please let him have it.” “No, no, no Mr. President.” “Mr.—President Trump, President Trump, the interruptions.” When Wallace said, “Mr. President, can you let him finish, sir?” and Biden replied, “He doesn’t know how to do that,” Trump interrupted in response to being asked to stop interrupting: “You’d be surprised, you’d be surprised. Go ahead, talk, Joe, talk.”
At one point, Wallace noted that Trump’s campaign had agreed to a rule that allowed each candidate two minutes to answer a question before an open debate period, and that Trump was flagrantly violating that rule. At another point, there was this surreal exchange:
Ultimately, Wallace did manage to ensure that Biden received something close to equal time, with CNN tabulating that the former vice president spoke for 38 minutes to Trump’s 39 minutes. Unfortunately, much of the time that both Biden and Wallace were speaking was spent being interrupted.
This spree of interruptions is hardly surprising given Trump’s mounting desperation, his complete lack of interest in actual debate, and his long history as a practiced interrupter. But still: 128 times in 90 minutes sure seems like a personal record.
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Ivanka Trump watches her back at the presidential debate.Scott Olson/Getty Images
The first presidential debate featured a number of COVID-19 precautions. Donald Trump and Joe Biden didn’t shake hands. There were fewer than 100 people in the live audience. Masks were required. Look, here are people wearing masks:
Hmm, actually, that video also shows Ivanka Trump sit down with a mask on and then … take it off. In fact, many of the Trump folks—about half, according to a Bloomberg News reporter who was tweeting from inside the debate hall—are seated, and maskless:
Also those chairs—they’re pretty close together. Some of them are right up against each other. Others are spaced … a few feet apart? I wasn’t in Cleveland with a tape measurer, and camera angles are tricky, but it certainly does not look like there is six feet of space between Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle. Could an adult man of average height fit between them? And what about the guy behind them? The chair setup looks like the “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you” of COVID precautions.
But perhaps they were sitting a full six feet away from each other, and this is all a trick of the camera. Sitting indoors for an extended period of time without a mask happens to be a great way to spread a virus that travels from one person to another through invisible breath-droplets. This is why some experts recommend that you stay even further away from other people, if possible, when indoors. If the virus is cigarette smoke, as the metaphor goes … would you want to be seated maybe six feet away from a maskless Trump child? It’s true that everyone who entered the arena was supposed to be tested ahead of time, and hey—maybe the Trumps and all their friends are in one carefully managed quarantine bubble. That isn’t an excuse to shed the most obvious measure of protection while setting an example on national television.
The debates took place in a 27,000-square-foot atrium (spacious!) that, according to the Associated Press, was previously on standby as a makeshift hospital, with hundreds of beds at the ready for potential COVID-19 patients. The would-be hospital wasn’t needed because of “aggressive public health measures.” I’m sorry to say, at least on Trump’s half of the crowd, the lesson clearly wasn’t learned.
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Ivanka Trump watches her back at the presidential debate.Scott Olson/Getty Images
The first presidential debate featured a number of COVID-19 precautions. Donald Trump and Joe Biden didn’t shake hands. There were fewer than 100 people in the live audience. Masks were required. Look, here are people wearing masks:
Hmm, actually, that video also shows Ivanka Trump sit down with a mask on and then … take it off. In fact, many of the Trump folks—about half, according to a Bloomberg News reporter who was tweeting from inside the debate hall—are seated, and maskless:
Also those chairs—they’re pretty close together. Some of them are right up against each other. Others are spaced … a few feet apart? I wasn’t in Cleveland with a tape measurer, and camera angles are tricky, but it certainly does not look like there is six feet of space between Lara Trump and Kimberly Guilfoyle. Could an adult man of average height fit between them? And what about the guy behind them? The chair setup looks like the “I’m not touching you, I’m not touching you” of COVID precautions.
But perhaps they were sitting a full six feet away from each other, and this is all a trick of the camera. Sitting indoors for an extended period of time without a mask happens to be a great way to spread a virus that travels from one person to another through invisible breath-droplets. This is why some experts recommend that you stay even further away from other people, if possible, when indoors. If the virus is cigarette smoke, as the metaphor goes … would you want to be seated maybe six feet away from a maskless Trump child? It’s true that everyone who entered the arena was supposed to be tested ahead of time, and hey—maybe the Trumps and all their friends are in one carefully managed quarantine bubble. That isn’t an excuse to shed the most obvious measure of protection while setting an example on national television.
The debates took place in a 27,000-square-foot atrium (spacious!) that, according to the Associated Press, was previously on standby as a makeshift hospital, with hundreds of beds at the ready for potential COVID-19 patients. The would-be hospital wasn’t needed because of “aggressive public health measures.” I’m sorry to say, at least on Trump’s half of the crowd, the lesson clearly wasn’t learned.
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The presidential debate in Cleveland on Tuesday night.Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
The first ten minutes of the Tuesday night presidential debate were, frankly, some of the worst stuff anyone has ever seen. Donald Trump kept interrupting Joe Biden and moderator Chris Wallace. Biden looked stunned and was mostly unable to finish a sentence. The silence of the small, Covid-era audience made everything weird. Trump just kept interrupting—taunting, really—and it was horrible!
After that, well, it didn’t get that much better. It wasn’t a civil, detailed exchange about plans and values. CNN’s Dana Bash, in her post-debate summing-up, called the whole thing a “shitshow.” But there were at moments when Biden got to speak for more than a minute without being jabbered over and through, and moments when Wallace got Trump to answer a direct question. Here, based on these intelligible sections of the broadcast, is one unfailingly accurate pundit’s assessment of which candidates helped reach the voters they needed to reach and which did not.
Candidates who, at the very least, tried to reach undecided and otherwise wavering voters: Joe Biden. Biden, as he did during the primary debates, occasionally fumbled over his answers and tossed in half-phrased allusions that probably didn’t land with people who didn’t already know what, for example, methane regulations are all about. As mentioned, he initially looked taken aback and unable to concentrate because of the frequency with which Trump was interrupting him.
But Biden had one trick up his sleeve, and it was a good one: turning to face the stage-right camera (rather than looking toward Wallace or at Trump), and making a show of ignoring whatever Trump was saying in order to give an assessment, straight onto America’s TV screens, of the big-picture condition of the country, often one that incorporated second-person “your family” or “people at home” language. It was the classic posture of a politician addressing a message to the entire public—supporters, undecided voters, and even the opposing side, if they care to listen.
Biden repeatedly, for example, turned to the viewers at home as he steered the discussion back to Trump’s culpability for the COVID-19 pandemic, which polls consistently say is the number-one issue in the election. “How many of you got up this morning and had an empty chair at the kitchen table because someone died of Covid?” he asked. “How many were in a situation where you lost your mom or dad or couldn’t even speak to them and had a nurse holding the phone so you could, in fact, say goodbye?” He tied the pandemic to the economy—obvious, but fair—and observed that “millionaires and billionaires” like Trump are still doing fine while “you folks at home living in Scranton and all these small and working class towns” are generally not. Later, he conveyed the scope of the crisis in stark terms, noting that Trump “will be the first president of the United States to leave office having fewer jobs in his administration than when he became president.” He talked about the paradox of “reopening” the economy before COVID is contained: “The idea that he is insisting that we go forward and open when you have almost half the states in America with a significant increase in COVID deaths and cases, in the United States of America, and he wants to open it more?” Again: obvious stuff. But reflective of the views of the majority of people who are going to vote in the election!
When the subject turned to race relations and civil rights, Biden had a more strategically narrow line to walk: A significant chunk of the people in his party, particularly younger ones, believe that radical change is necessary to address racial oppression. But a perhaps equally significant chunk of older white Democrats and independents say they place a greater value on concepts like “stability.” Biden had to talk to both groups.
He did so by emphasizing that he recognizes that the current situation is not tenable—but doing it in terms of values rather than specifics. A majority of potential voters may not agree on whether the police should be abolished, but they agree that Joe Biden’s beliefs about racial progress are more in line with theirs than Donald Trump’s are. Said Biden about the summer’s protests and Trump’s response to them: “Equity. Equality. It’s about decency, the Constitution. We have never walked away from trying to acquire equity for everyone and all of America. But we have never stopped before it’s accomplished. We’ve never walked away from it like he’s done.” He defended the “racial sensitivity” office trainings that Trump has forbidden the federal government from conducting: “The fact is that there is racial insensitivity, and people have to be made aware of what other people feel like, and what insults them and what is demeaning to them. It is important that people know.” At one point, he mocked Trump for living in “1950” and not realizing that Black and Hispanic people have moved to “the suburbs” too.
Biden concluded, in discussing Wallace’s loaded closing topic of “election integrity,” with a reassuring note about the stable transition of the presidency. “If we get the votes, it is all over. He will go. He cannot stay in power. It won’t happen. It won’t happen. Vote. Make sure you understand you have in your control for the country will look like the next four years. Will it be a change, or four more years of these lies?”
Biden was exasperated and exhausted, and that came through. But he was also compassionate and level-headed.
On the other hand:
Candidates who seemingly had no strategy except ignoring the debate format to make constant condescending, belittling remarks about Biden that were essentially incomprehensible to anyone who is not already heavily invested in the sealed-off semantics and mythology of Fox News primetime shows and MAGA Facebook memes: Donald Trump.
You can read here about the moment that Trump told a white nationalist street gang, the Proud Boys, to “stand by.” But there was so much more! Picture yourself as a suburban Arizona voter concerned about the country’s future, listening to the president of the U.S. make the following choices about what subjects to bring up to a bipartisan national TV audience with an election a month away:
• “You said you went to Delaware State but you forgot the name of your college.” This is a reference to a debunked claim that has bounced around right-wing sites such as the Murdoch-owned New York Post and the Washington Times about Biden not knowing where he went to school.
• About Biden and masks: “Every time you see him, he is wearing one. He could be speaking 200 feet away and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.” Most of the public favors mask-wearing; the idea that someone would be wearing a mask too much is alien outside the section of the Venn diagram where anti-vaccine conspiracists meet the president’s most fervent loyalists.
• “The mayor of Moscow’s wife gave your son $3.5 million. What did he do to deserve that?” Trump’s ultimate source here appears to be a “confidential document” cited in a Republican Senate report, also recently written up in the New York Post, that is said to document a payment to a company Biden’s son Hunter co-founded. Trump brought up the $3.5 million twice more.
• “It’s all on tape, by the way—you gave the idea for the Logan Act against General Flynn.” This is a “Deep State” conspiracy theory outlined on the notoriously unreliable website of The Hill. You can read about in the Washington Post here; it’s based on some ambiguously worded notes involving the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who admitted to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.
• “You saw what happened today with Hillary Clinton where it was a whole big con job.” A reference to Tuesday’s decision by John Ratcliffe, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, to release an anti-Clinton Russian intelligence assessment that was widely understood to be bogus and created as disinformation.
• “They are sending millions of ballots all over the country. They have found them in creeks.” The Washington Post notes tastefully that it is “unclear what the creek reference alluded to.”
Then there was this interjection, when Wallace wasn’t even talking to Trump at all:
WALLACE: Vice president Biden, you are holding much smaller events—
TRUMP: Nobody will show up. Nobody shows up to his rallies.
Great; thanks for adding that, president of the United States! When Biden was talking about his son Beau, who is dead, having served in Iraq, Trump interrupted to note that “Hunter Biden was thrown out [of the military] because of cocaine use.”
In contrast to Biden, Trump concluded his thoughts about election integrity by declaring that the United States is not capable of counting ballots and holding an election. “You know that it cannot be done,” the president said to Chris Wallace, about the orderly transition of democratic power.
Our government is a disaster is a tricky message for an incumbent president to try to win with. And having just seen Trump blast his way through the floorboards and sub-basement of the debate “expectations game,” ending up gurgling and hollering in the sewers, it was not very reassuring to hear him predict that the election itself will go even worse.
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The moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, had cornered Trump, forcing him to answer for what the New York Times found in his tax returns. Trump lied about how much he paid in federal taxes for 2016 and 2017, and said he’ll release his taxes eventually.
Biden and Trump were talking at the same time, and then it sounded like Biden said: “When? Inshallah?”
Arabic Twitter lit up immediately. Enough of us tilted our heads, unsure if we heard him say one of our most common phrases. Nobody could say for sure that he said it, but they wanted to believe.
If he did say it, he used it perfectly. Inshallah is an Arabic phrase that means “God willing.” A Muslim would say this as often as a typical white American might say “I hope,” but Arab Christians are known to use it too. If you grew up Muslim, Arabic speaking or not, you’d know it best as the thing your parents say like a gentle-sneaky no. You’d ask your parents to buy you skateboard or a guitar, and not taking you seriously, they’d say Inshallah. They’re telling you eventually or, in most cases, never. It’s amorphous in this way, and really changes in meaning the way you say it. I’d say it fits pretty well in Biden’s purported use.
Could Biden have said something else? Yes. I saw multiple possibilities from naysayers. Did it seem likely he said something else? Maybe. But Muslims on Twitter chose to believe it because it was funny to. He tacked it on to the end of his dig at Trump the same way my parents would if I asked about that guitar: “When? Inshallah?”
Far-right media also seems to have believed it, for what it’s worth. Breitbart immediately blogged Biden’s supposed turn of phrase, quoting one writer saying there’s no reason “fear” the term. The top comment on the site’s post when I checked it said Biden was “pandering to Islam.” I wish.
I reached out to the Biden camp to ask whether or not he really said it. Not too long after, I saw Asma Khalid of NPR had the scoop:
This raises only more questions—who taught him!? But as terrible as this debate night was, at least a few of us had this moment.
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Even a “disgrace” and a “shitshow” can be an informative debate.Scott Olson/Getty Images
The first debate between Donald Trump and Joseph Biden did not get good reviews. ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos called it the worst debate he’d ever seen. Others openly questioned whether we should bother having any more debates this cycle, given how bad this one was. “The American people lost. That was horrific,” Jake Tapper said on CNN. “We’re on cable, so I can say this: That was a shitshow,” agreed Dana Bash.
A shitshow it certainly was! The first presidential debate of the 2020 general election was an exhausting and dispiriting affair. For 90 minutes, Trump kept on interrupting and belittling Biden and moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News. When he wasn’t heckling the other two men on stage, he was working hard to lock up the ignorant-maniac vote. He refused to condemn white supremacy. He spouted discredited conspiracy theories. He took credit for things he didn’t do, and lied about things he did. He literally encouraged his supporters to go to the polls to keep tabs on election fraud. The president conclusively exposed who he really is to a national audience—and while I get why one might not want to witness two more of these, that’s why this one was a good debate.
For almost four years, Donald Trump has successfully avoided dissenting opinion, admitting little outside light into his cloister of morons. He has met the media on his own terms, in venues where he filibusters over hard questions and elicits softballs from friendly reporters. He has cultivated the credulous lickspittles of Fox News’ opinion division and used them as conduits for his inaccurate, self-serving messages. But since becoming president he has not once been challenged for an extended period by a hostile opponent and a competent moderator. And in the face of both of those things, he melted down.
Moderator Chris Wallace did superhuman work trying to keep Trump on task and honest. Though he didn’t succeed at either of those things, he never stopped trying, and for that he deserves applause and sympathy. At one point he all but threw up his hands and yelled at Trump for not respecting the ground rules of the debate:
Wallace (to Trump): I think the country would be better served if we allowed both people to speak with fewer interruptions. I’m appealing to you, sir, to do that.
Trump: And him, too.
Wallace: Well, frankly, you’ve been doing more interrupting than he has.
Trump: That’s all right. But he does plenty.
Wallace: No, less than you have.
Trump’s loopiest supporters will cite this exchange as evidence that Wallace was in the tank for Biden. Everyone else who watched it will remember it as evidence that Trump is a real jerk.
I confess that I wasn’t expecting much from Wallace—whose work I generally respect and admire—as we went into the debate. On Tuesday afternoon, I rewatched the debate he moderated in 2016, between Trump and Hillary Clinton. He didn’t do a great job. Though he was ready with pointed questions for both Trump and Clinton, he was consistently sidetracked by the unruly Trump, who spent the entire debate steamrolling both Wallace and Clinton—and Wallace let him do it.
The Fox News Sunday host came better prepared for Trump’s tactics this year. Before the debate, Wallace had said that he didn’t see it as his job to be a fact-checker. And he didn’t do much fact-checking in the “well, actually” sense. Instead, Wallace put the fact-checks in the premises of his questions. “You have not come up with a comprehensive plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. So my question, sir, is what is the Trump health care plan?” Wallace asked early. “You have repeatedly contradicted and been at odds with some of your top scientists in your own government,” he said during the COVID-19 section of the debate. “What is radical about racial-sensitivity training, sir?” Wallace asked at one point after Trump went off on a rant on that topic.
Wallace wasn’t always able to pin Trump down, but he kept trying. “Sir, I’m asking you a specific question. No, Mr. President, I’m asking you a question. Will you tell us how much you paid in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017?” he pressed at one point. (“Millions of dollars,” Trump insisted, contradicting the New York Times’ reporting that it was just $750.) Later, Wallace countered Trump’s insistence that this summer’s rising crime rates are exclusive to Democratic-run cities by noting that “there have been equivalent spikes in Republican-led cities, like Tulsa. Is this actually a partisan issue?” In these moments, with these sorts of questions and observations, Wallace offered clarity and necessary context to viewers.
Trump’s inability to offer coherent answers to these simple questions was evident, and to me, at least, it effectively showcased the extent to which Trump has absolutely nothing substantive to say. He covers his shallowness with jeers and bombast, and usually he is able to get away with it, often because the people with whom he’s speaking ultimately decide that pushing back isn’t worth the hassle. But both Wallace and Biden pushed back, and kept pushing back, and the back-and-forth said something meaningful about the choice voters are facing in November. Sure, it was a nightmare to watch, but it still said something indelible about who the president actually is.
But I already knew who the president was, you say? Well, this debate wasn’t for you. This debate was for the 17 people who went into it unsure about these Trump and Biden fellows—about who they are and what they stand for. Tuesday night certainly clarified that question, and it also laid bare the choice that these voters are facing in November. On one hand, you’ve got chaos, cynicism, and calumny. On the other hand, you’ve got Joe Biden, who sometimes stutters. The difference is clear now. Every swing voter can see it.
Most presidential debates are horrible. It’s in their DNA. The rapid-fire format is more like a game show than anything else, and candidates are apt to revert to stump speeches and canned applause lines. That happened on Tuesday night, too, but in a way that was revealing instead of obfuscatory. I’m sorry, cable news pundits lamenting Tuesday’s night’s “disgrace”: More debates like this one, please!
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Joe Biden and Donald Trump speaking during the first presidential debate at the Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic on September 29, 2020.Jim Watson/Getty Images
Jordan Weissmann: Jim, we just watched a debate where two septugenarian candidates for the American presidency sniped at each other relentlessly for an hour and 30 minutes. The Grumpy Old Men gifs have been flying all night on Twitter. Trump yet again declined an opportunity to condemn generic white supremacists and maybe gave a shout out to the Proud Boys. Jake Tapper just described the whole thing as a “hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck.”
And yet, I’m weirdly feeling hopeful for our country after all that, because for most of the night, Trump seemed like a bellicose asshole, and Biden appeared generally together, on message, and empathetic, which is all he really needs to maintain his lead. Am I being too optimistic?
Jim Newell: I guess I’d take issue with the idea that they sniped relentlessly at each other for an hour and 30 minutes. Trump sniped relentlessly at Biden for that long, Chris Wallace sniped at Trump, and Biden was able to complete about 62 percent of each talking point he started. It made me think about the first Republican presidential debate Trump participated in in 2015, and how wildly funny it seemed at the time that he was being the way he was. Memories!
There was nothing funny about anything tonight and it wouldn’t surprise me if Biden pulls out of the next two debates.
I didn’t think Biden was at his best. He seemed too caught up in remembering his prepared answers, or useless stats that he could just paraphrase. Trump trying to throw him off his train of thought was the right strategy. But Trump was absolutely out of his mind. We’ll see what polls say but my interpretation is: This fires up his base and worsens his problems among those who were drifting away of him specifically because he is a priceless asshole.
Does any Memorable Highlight Moment stand out for you, or is it all a blur of arguments about the time clock?
Jordan Weissmann: I, in turn, would take issue with the idea that there was nothing funny about tonight. I actually belly-laughed early on when Biden finally cracked and said “Will you shut up man?” And when I got done laughing, I realized that I had just experienced a very cathartic moment of Democratic wish fulfillment. A lot of liberals have been waiting for someone to talk back directly like that to Trump since he became president, which isn’t an uncommon feeling among members of an opposition party. (Remember Clint Eastwood and that Obama-empty chair?) And when Biden did it, he actually seemed to snap out a bit from his slow early start, where he was mostly fumbling his way quietly through talking points.
It didn’t help Trump that his attempts to be vicious in return often sounded way off-key, like when he basically called Biden an idiot (“there’s nothing smart about you”) and reminded everyone that the well-liked ex-VP attended a state school. He was trying to point out that Biden couldn’t remember its name properly, but it came off as classist, and kind of reinforced the whole Scranton vs. Park Ave. theme Biden’s been hitting on lately.
I also expect that Trump’s surreal failure to condemn white supremacists and militias, literally the easiest thing you can do in politics, is going to live on, just because it plays into the criticisms of him that already exist. What did you even make of that?
Jim Newell: What did he say, “stand down, stand by,” in a very sarcastic, wink-wink voice? Of course he did that, it’s what he does. What made it chilling was the way he complemented that later in the debate by talking about the need for his poll watchers to challenge voters in Philadelphia, and elsewhere, and his refusal to urge his supporters to resist street violence when mail votes are going to be counted in the days after the election. It’s not just the failure to condemn, it’s the failure to condemn because strategically he’s planning on unrest during the counting of mail votes.
Jordan Weissmann: Right. Trump literally told the Proud Boys—and actual group of white racist hooligans—to “stand down and stand by.”
Jim Newell: On the Trump-couldn’t-stop-interrupting front, I just heard Jake Tapper faulting Chris Wallace for losing control of the debate early and not taking the reins until too late. I always love one TV man sticking it to a rival. But I don’t really know what else Chris Wallace was supposed to do? I thought he was pretty forceful throughout the debate, in every conceivable way short of turning off a mic, that Trump needed to shut the fuck up. What did you make of Wallace’s inability to keep control? Was there anything else he could do?
Jordan Weissmann: He did what he could, and what he could do was spend the evening quarreling with the president. I think much of the right wing media—though maybe not Fox, since Wallace works there—is going to accuse him of being biased, and perhaps try to pre-emptively bully the next moderator to go easy on Trump. And at points, he really did let his evident frustration with Trump slip, such as toward the end when he chuckled and agreed with Biden that it was hard to remember what Trump had even just said. To be honest, if I were a dedicated Republican, I would probably be pissed that the moderator spent most of the night coming to Biden’s aid. But then again, Trump could have kept quieter and been more effective, especially since Biden tends to trip on his words when he goes on for a full paragraph. For a guy who Republicans claim has lost a step, Biden was much better in their back and forth duels.
Do you think there was anything that happened during this debate that would have actually changed someone’s mind about a candidate, though?
Jim Newell: It felt like, if you were still a swing voter at this point—all 70 of you out there—this just reinforces the cross-pressures. Say you like or are OK with the administration’s policies but also think he’s a total asshole who shouldn’t be in charge of anything. This reaffirmed all of that.
I thought, if Trump had message with some juice tonight, it was—and I can’t remember the exact words, and it is actually impossible to transcribe this debate—look at all the shit that’s been thrown my way on a daily basis, but I just put it aside and built a strong economy and will rebuild one after COVID, too. Then, to name just one example, while Biden is talking about his son Beau dying of cancer, Trump interrupts to talk about cokehead Hunter. It’s just so… cruel. Eventually those remaining swing voters will have to make a choice but I don’t see how tonight makes it easier. I don’t see why anyone already committed to a candidate would change based on tonight.
I mean, I’m looking at this first CBS instapoll after the debate about who won it and… Biden +7. Almost exactly the national polling margin.
Jordan Weissmann: I mean, Donald Trump fought with the press, praised himself because 2 million Americans haven’t die of the coronavirus, seemed to once again disagree with his own scientific team, called his opponent an idiot, declined to say a bad word about racists, and suggested he would only lose the election if it was rigged—all of which are pretty much par for the course. Biden basically looked at the camera and said “Can you believe this clown?” (I’m paraphrasing, but only sort of.)
Jim Newell: In that way, maybe Wallace didn’t fail, and the debate served its purpose: Showing us what kind of people the two people running for president are.
Jordan Weissmann: And voters were unmoved. According to CNN’s poll, 60 percent of viewers think Biden won, but 57 percent said the debate didn’t make them more likely to vote for one or the other. It appears that most voters knows it knows what there is to know about these men.
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How many people wish they, too, could tell Trump to “just shut up, man”?Photo by Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden repeatedly devolved into a cacophony—mostly due to Trump’s apparent strategy to interrupt and browbeat Biden as much as possible. The former vice president, meanwhile, seemed to borrow his strategy from Jim Halpert from The Office, often looking straight to the camera in exasperation as Trump yelled. In some of the most chaotic moments, a frustrated Biden snapped at Trump, to his face, in a way the president has rarely experienced in public for the past four years.
Here are the best Biden one-liners of the night, in no particular order:
“Just Shut Up, Man”
Biden told Trump twice to zip it. The first instance occurred when Trump tried pressuring Biden into divulging whether he’d support ending the filibuster or packing the court. The second time came when Trump interjected “tell that to Nancy Pelosi,” as Biden was outlining his reopening plan for businesses. (#JustShutUpMan quickly, inevitably, became a hashtag.)
“It’s hard to get any word in with this clown.”
While Biden was criticizing Trump’s record on trade deficits, the president again derailed the debate by bringing up Hunter Biden’s foreign business activities. Biden, whom moderator Chris Wallace had given the last word on the issue, got fed up at yet another interruption.
“You’re the worst president America has ever had, come on.”
While the two candidates were litigating each other’s records in office, Biden cut right to the chase.
“‘It is what it is’ because you are who you are.”
Biden turned Trump’s own line against him in an exchange during the COVID-19 segment of the debate. In an August interview with Axios reporter Jonathan Swan, Trump seemed to shrug off the mounting death toll, saying “It is what it is.” Biden rattled off a list of statistics as an indictment of Trump’s response to the pandemic: 200,000 deaths total in the U.S.; 40,000 infections a day; and between 750 and 1000 people passing away every day. Biden then dropped this line:
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Yes, but have you ever experienced the Eagle Nebula with your ears ? The famous nebula, M16, is best known for the feast it gives your eyes, highlighting bright young stars forming deep inside dark towering structures. These light-years long columns of cold gas and dust are some 6,500 light-years distant toward the constellation of the Serpent (Serpens). Sculpted and eroded by the energetic ultraviolet light and powerful winds from M16's cluster of massive stars, the cosmic pillars themselves are destined for destruction. But the turbulent environment of star formation within M16, whose spectacular details are captured in this combined Hubble (visible) and Chandra (X-ray) image, is likely similar to the environment that formed our own Sun. In the featured video, listen for stars and dust sounding off as the line of sonification moves left to right, with vertical position determining pitch. via NASA https://ift.tt/2EOq2Vw
