Saagar Enjeti analyzes whether the presidential debates will be free and fair between President Trump and Joe Biden, as mainstream reporters fail to ask Biden tough questions.
Biden Should Not Debate Trump Unless …
Here are two conditions the Democrat should set.
I worry about Joe Biden debating Donald Trump. He should do it only under two conditions. Otherwise, he’s giving Trump unfair advantages.
First, Biden should declare that he will take part in a debate only if Trump releases his tax returns for 2016 through 2018. Biden has already done so, and they are on his website. Trump must, too. No more gifting Trump something he can attack while hiding his own questionable finances.
And second, Biden should insist that a real-time fact-checking team approved by both candidates be hired by the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates — and that 10 minutes before the scheduled conclusion of the debate this team report on any misleading statements, phony numbers or outright lies either candidate had uttered. That way no one in that massive television audience can go away easily misled.
Debates always have ground rules. Why can’t telling the truth and equal transparency on taxes be conditions for this one?
Yes, the fact that we have to make truth-telling an explicit condition is an incredibly sad statement about our time; normally such things are unspoken and understood. But if the past teaches us anything, Trump might very well lie and mislead for the entire debate, forcing Biden to have to spend a majority of his time correcting Trump before making his own points.
That is not a good way for Biden to reintroduce himself to the American people. And, let’s not kid ourselves, these debates will be his reintroduction to most Americans, who have neither seen nor heard from him for months if not years.
Because of Covid-19, Biden has been sticking close to home, wearing a mask and social distancing. And with the coronavirus now spreading further, and Biden being a responsible individual and role model, it’s likely that he won’t be able to engage with any large groups of voters before Election Day. Therefore, the three scheduled televised debates, which will garner huge audiences, will carry more weight for him than ever.
He should not go into such a high-stakes moment ceding any advantages to Trump. Trump is badly trailing in the polls, and he needs these debates much more than Biden does to win over undecided voters. So Biden needs to make Trump pay for them in the currency of transparency and fact-checking — universal principles that will level the playing field for him and illuminate and enrich the debates for all citizens.
Of course, Trump will stomp and protest and say, “No way.” Fine. Let Trump cancel. Let Trump look American voters in the eye and say: “There will be no debate, because I should be able to continue hiding my tax returns from you all, even though I promised that I wouldn’t and even though Biden has shown you his. And there will be no debate, because I should be able to make any statement I want without any independent fact-checking.”
If Trump says that, Biden can retort: “Well, that’s not a debate then, that’s a circus. If that’s what you want, why don’t we just arm wrestle or flip a coin to see who wins?”
I get why Republican senators and Fox News don’t press Trump on his taxes or call out his lies. They’re afraid of him and his base and unconcerned about the truth. But why should Biden, or the rest of us, play along?
After all, these issues around taxes and truth are more vital than ever for voters to make an informed choice.
Trump, you will recall, never sold his Trump Organization holdings or put them into a blind trust — as past presidents did with their investments — to avoid any conflicts of interest. Rather, his assets are in a revocable trust, whose trustees are his eldest son, Donald Jr., and Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer. Which is a joke.
Trump promised during the last campaign to release his tax returns after an I.R.S. “audit” was finished. Which turned out to have been another joke.
Once elected, Trump claimed that the American people were not interested in seeing his tax returns. Actually, we are now more interested than ever — and not just because it’s utterly unfair that Biden go into the debate with all his income exposed (he and his wife, Jill, earned more than $15 million in the two years after they left the Obama administration, largely from speaking engagements and books) while Trump doesn’t have to do the same.
There must be something in those tax returns that Trump really does not want the American public to see. It may be just silly — that he’s actually not all that rich. It may have to do with the fact that foreign delegations and domestic lobbyists, who want to curry favor with him, stay in his hotel in Washington or use it for corporate entertaining.
Or, more ominously, it may be related to Trump’s incomprehensible willingness to give Russian President Vladimir Putin the benefit of every doubt for the last three-plus years. Virtually every time there has been a major public dispute between Putin and U.S. intelligence agencies alleging Russian misdeeds — including, of late, that the Kremlin offered bounties for the killing of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan — Trump has sided with Putin.
The notion that Putin may have leverage over him is not crazy, given little previous hints by his sons.
As Michael Hirsh recalled in a 2018 article in Foreign Policy about how Russian money helped to save the Trump empire from bankruptcy: “In September 2008, at the ‘Bridging U.S. and Emerging Markets Real Estate’ conference in New York, the president’s eldest son, Donald Jr., said:
‘In terms of high-end product influx into the United States, Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. Say, in Dubai, and certainly with our project in SoHo, and anywhere in New York. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.’”
The American people need to know if Trump is in debt in any way to Russian banks and financiers who might be close to Putin. Because if Trump is re-elected, and unconstrained from needing to run again, he will most likely act even more slavishly toward Putin, and that is a national security threat.
At the same time, debating Trump is unlike debating any other human being. Trump literally lies as he breathes, and because he has absolutely no shame, there are no guardrails. According to the Fact Checker team at The Washington Post, between Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017, and May 29, 2020, he made 19,127 false or misleading claims.
Biden has been dogged by bone-headed issues of plagiarism in his career, but nothing compared to Trump’s daily fire hose of dishonesty, which has no rival in U.S. presidential history. That’s why it’s so important to insist that the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates hire independent fact-checkers who, after the two candidates give their closing arguments — but before the debate goes off the air — would present a rundown of any statements that were false or only partly true.
Only if leading into the debate, American voters have a clear picture of Trump’s tax returns alongside Biden’s, and only if, coming out of the debate, they have a clear picture of who was telling the truth and who was not, will they be able to make a fair judgment between the two candidates.
That kind of debate and only that kind of debate would be worthy of voters’ consideration and Biden’s participation.
Otherwise, Joe, stay in your basement.
Who is that guy? Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign draws crowds, money and an expected spot on the Democratic debate stage.
A two-hour podcast interview in February with Joe Rogan, a stand-up comedian, television host and mixed martial arts commentator, put Yang on the map. Rogan boasts an audience of millions — particularly young men — and has a devoted following on Twitter and Reddit, where some fans have half-jokingly referred to his show as “Oprah for Dudes.”
After the Rogan podcast, Yang’s Twitter followers jumped eightfold — going from roughly 34,000 to 287,000 in a little over a month. Online fans started creating thousands of memes and videos on Facebook, Instagram and other social media, spreading his campaign further.
.. In substance and in style, Yang presents himself as a candidate relentlessly of the future. He warns that the United States is on the brink of a major job apocalypse, spurred by an increasing use of robots and artificial intelligence in the workplace that ultimately will eliminate the need for human employees.
“What we did to the manufacturing workers we are now going to do to the retail workers, the call center workers, the fast-food workers, the truck drivers, and on and on through the economy,” Yang declared at a rally in Chicago in March. “This is a crisis.”
.. Yang has particularly fixated on the plight of truckers. Speaking at a recent rural issues forum in Stuart, a tiny town in western Iowa, a state where the trucking industry employs an estimated 98,000 drivers, Yang pointed to an incident in February in which scores of truck drivers snarled traffic on Indianapolis-area highways in protest of mandated electronic monitoring devices that track their hours.
“What are the truck drivers going to do when the robot trucks come and start driving themselves?” Yang asked.
A murmur went through the audience of about 200 people. An older man in jeans and a trucker cap shook his head at the thought. “Chaos,” the man said.
This is where Yang’s “Freedom Dividend” comes in. The $12,000 given annually to every U.S. adult up to age 64 would be funded in part by a 10 percent “value added tax” on technology companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, which he estimates would generate roughly $800 billion a year. (Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)
.. “You could call this the tech check,” Yang said. He has dismissed critics who say the money, paid out regardless of an individual’s income or employment status, would encourage people not to work. He argues that the added financial security will spur people to create businesses or go back to school, or take risks they might not otherwise take. “This isn’t about people being lazy,” he said.
He has also pitched the concept, for which he has not stipulated an overall cost, as a pro-business, pro-economic development idea that could potentially revive dying small towns.
“Some of [that money] would float up to Amazon. You’d buy an extra toaster or something, but most of it would stay right here because you would be investing in car repairs you had put off, and then tutoring for your kids, the occasional night out, trips to the hardware store,” Yang said in Iowa.
To prove his point, Yang decided to use his own money to give $1,000 a month to two people for a year — someone in New Hampshire, the other in Iowa, the first voting states. In late December, Yang began sending a monthly check to the Fassi family in Goffstown, N.H.
In 2017, just as his daughter Janelle was beginning her freshman year at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., Charles Fassi was laid off from his job as a manager at a small chemical services company. Fassi, 49, said he felt suicidal, wondering how he could support his family.
While Fassi is now back at work, the family still struggled financially. Janelle met Yang at a Young Democrats of New Hampshire event and submitted an application for her family to be a test case for the monthly payments. After interviewing the family, Yang presented the first $1,000 check on New Year’s Eve. Fassi said the money has been mainly used to help pay for Janelle’s tuition, but Fassi said he and his wife are thinking of starting their own business.
“One thing I like about Andrew is that throughout all of this, he’s never asked us to vote for him. He’s never asked us to do anything for his campaign. He’s never tried to tell us what we can tell the media or anybody about this,” Fassi said. “When he came to our house, he said he was just trying to start a conversation. It wasn’t about him becoming president.”
That was enough to land Yang in the “top tier” of 2020 candidates that Fassi is considering voting for, though he is wary of the idea that people might think Yang is trying to buy his support. “I want to see how far he can go,” Fassi said, adding that he wasn’t comfortable backing a “fringe candidate.” He added that he likes Sen. Elizabeth Warren of neighboring Massachusetts, and soon he and his family will house a staffer working for another Democratic candidate, Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California. “I was like, ‘Why not? I like Kamala Harris,’ ” he said.
Yang has yet to pick the Iowa recipient — his campaign is taking applications — but after the Des Moines Register questioned the legality of his spending, Yang’s campaign told the paper he would amend his Federal Election Commission report to list the $4,000 in checks he had written so far as gifts.
A native of Schenectady, N.Y., Yang is the son of Taiwanese immigrants who came to America in the 1960s. Yang recalled that he and his older brother were two of the only Asian American students at the local public school and were picked on. Later, as a student at Phillips Exeter Academy, the prestigious boarding school in New Hampshire, he was a self-described nerd and goth kid.
He studied political science and economics at Brown University before graduating from Columbia Law School. After briefly working at a big law firm, Yang joined a test-prep start-up, which was later sold and earned him “some number in the millions” that gave him enough to quit his job and launch his White House bid.
The fact that Yang is unabashedly noting his Asian ancestry makes it all the more strange that his candidacy has found fans in the alt-right, many of whom have reframed his pitch on universal basic income as a quest to save white America. White nationalist Richard Spencer has tweeted approvingly of Yang, describing him as “the most grounded presidential candidate of my lifetime.”
Yang has repeatedly disavowed the support, even as his campaign has found it difficult to eradicate the racist memes spread by some of his fringe backers in chat rooms where Yang’s campaign has tried to mobilize supporters. “I honestly don’t get it,” Yang said. “I don’t look like a white nationalist, so I am sort of surprised that anyone who’s in that camp would be like, ‘Ooh, that’s my candidate.’ ”
Indeed, Yang’s crowds are notable for their diversity. Darrin Lowery, a 51-year-old social worker from Chicago, turned out after hearing Yang make his pitch to black voters on “The Breakfast Club” radio show. His warning about the dangers of automation had hit home with Lowery.
“The Kmart is closed, the Sears is closed. All these different businesses are closing, and I wonder what these people who don’t have advanced degrees are going to do?” said Lowery, who is black. “I do think he’s a long shot, but the more people hear him, I wonder.”
Angie Shindelar, a 53-year-old math teacher from Greenfield, Iowa, came to hear Yang speak in Stuart at the behest of her children. “Everything feels like it’s about bashing Trump or reacting to Trump instead offering some vision looking forward,” Shindelar said. “He’s the first person I’ve really heard that is looking forward and has vision in a way that can maybe overcome some of that division.”
Andy Stern, a former president of the Service Employees International Union who is friendly with Yang, cautioned that Yang needs “a breakout moment.”
“I don’t think people are looking at Andrew yet and say he’s someone who can win,” said Stern, who, like Yang, is an evangelist for a universal basic income.
Yang believes his moment could be the debates, and he’s already thinking of how much time he’ll have to make an impression.
“I’ve done the math, and I’ll have approximately 12 minutes of airtime . . . 10 to 12 minutes to introduce myself to the American people,” Yang said, probably exaggerating the time any candidate onstage is likely to have. “They are going to say, ‘Who’s that person standing next to Joe Biden?’ And hundreds of thousands of people are going to go Google ‘Andrew Yang’ or ‘Asian presidential candidate’ or whatever. . . . And then they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s Andrew Yang.’ ”