A bitter, vainglorious fantasy of America
By Amy Davidson Sorkin
October 25, 2020
... Thursday night was almost certainly the last time that he will appear on a debate stage. He used the occasion to present a bitter, vainglorious fantasy of America, with triumphs invented and disasters ignored. As always, he added a dose of conspiracy theories—“All of the e-mails, the e-mails, the horrible e-mails!”—in an attempt to leave people perplexed about the truth ...
Biden’s challenge, which he navigated fairly well, was that Trump lies in a manner that is so unanchored to reality that it becomes disorienting ...
Trump’s falsehoods are always harmful, but distinctly so when it comes to the pandemic. The coronavirus, as it is often said, does not respect party or state lines, and because it is so highly infectious confronting it requires a unified community effort. Cases are rising in a majority of states; the official toll of dead Americans is approaching a quarter of a million, and will perhaps reach four hundred thousand by the end of the year—numbers that Biden said should, by themselves, disqualify Trump for the Presidency. Welker noted that the pandemic is entering “a dangerous new phase.” Not in Trump’s view. He insisted that any spikes will soon dissipate—“It’s going away”—and added that anyone who has doubts about his timeline for distributing a vaccine by the end of the year just doesn’t share his faith in the capabilities of the American military to get the job done ...
The brittleness that pervades America’s political culture comes, in part, from four years of Trump responding to every problem by deriding someone else ...
During the debate, Trump said of Biden, “If he’s elected, the stock market will crash!” But the polls don’t seem to have sparked any fall; Wall Street apparently doesn’t think that America will disappear ...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/trumps-bitter-vainglorious-fantasy-of-america-on-the-debate-stage
