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**NOVEMBER 2, 2020**

Kuttner on TAP

The Plague and the Mad King

****

If Joe Biden does win decisively tomorrow and is able to take office,
historians will record that the pivotal moment when the election began
trending relentlessly toward the Democrats was Trump's catching the
virus. This was of course the logical consequence of his recklessness
toward himself and the rest of the citizenry.

Though Trump recovered, and tried to use his ordeal to proclaim himself
as bionic and COVID as no big deal, the fatal political damage was done.
The picture of the president sickened by his own arrogance and
ineptitude, and heedless of the harm to others, summed up everything
appalling about his presidency.

And it perfectly captured the impact on ordinary people otherwise
inclined to cut Trump some slack. Far from making America great, Trump
has made America sick. You can deny the science of climate change; you
can't deny over 200,000 deaths and 100,000 new cases a day.

No matter how Trump tries to waltz around the numbers, or keeps
insisting that COVID is no worse than flu, or blames Biden for deaths
that never happened in the case of H1N1 swine flu, or tries to rebrand
COVID as the Chinese Virus, this pandemic is irrevocably Trump's.
It's the Trump Virus.

Since Trump's recovery, the pandemic has only intensified-repeatedly
giving the lie to his preposterous claims, while keeping the surge of
COVID cases page-one news, with Trump as the personification. This is
poetic justice. But what is absolutely chilling is the fact that were it
not for COVID, Trump might well have had a path to re-election.

The timing of COVID was a fortuitous accident. The symbol and substance
of COVID as everything wrong with Trump is no accident.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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Unsanitized, Election Edition: The Most Important Races Other Than
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A look around the country on election eve. This is The Election 2020
Daily Report for November 2, 2020. BY DAVID DAYEN

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