President Donald Trump exits the Oval Office on October 1.Drew Angerer/Getty

Shortly after Hope Hicks, a senior aide to Donald Trump, was reported to have tested positive for COVID-19, the president announced that he and the first lady both had tested positive as well.

Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19. We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 2, 2020

The president’s doctor released the following statement confirming the diagnosis and saying he expects Trump will “continue carrying out his duties without disruption while recovering.” 

Memorandum from the President's Physician: pic.twitter.com/hMp5vxYoUt

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) October 2, 2020

 New York‘s Olivia Nuzzi sums up the situation:

Anyone could be unlucky and contract this virus, no matter how careful they are, but the entire world has observed Donald Trump flagrantly ignoring the advice of his own pandemic experts. He’s traveled needlessly, he’s socialized in large groups, he has neglected to wear a mask.

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) October 2, 2020

At an event earlier in the evening, Trump declared, “I just want to say that the end of the pandemic is in sight.”

This post has been updated.

Matt Smith/Shutterstock

Over at New York magazine, Gabriel Debenedetti has a long article on what President Biden would do about the filibuster if Democrats take the Senate. One of the people Debenedetti spoke to is Sen. Chris Coons, who represents Delaware in a seat once held by Biden himself. He says this:

“When we get to January 21, the day after the inauguration, there will be a simple choice Republicans and their leader will need to make. Will they be determined to keep Joe Biden from getting anything done? If that’s the case, we’ll need to make some very hard choices about how we’re going to get anything done.” But, he added, “I doubt that’s going to happen.”

To which Jonathan Chait responds: “The actual chance that will happen is roughly in the neighborhood of 100 percent.”

If Biden wins and the Democrats take the Senate, the question of filibuster reform will take on new urgency. “Virtually everything Democrats have sworn to do,” Ezra Klein writes, “honoring John Lewis’s legacy by strengthening the right to vote, preserving the climate for future generations by decarbonizing America, ensuring no gun is sold without a background check, raising the minimum wage, implementing universal pre-K, ending dark money in politics, guaranteeing paid family leave, offering statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, reinvigorating unions, passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — hinges on this question.”

Klein’s article walks through the many arguments against abolishing the filibuster, and it’s a thorough debunking you should read in its entirety. But I found this part particularly striking. When Senators discuss whether to abolish the filibuster, they tend to talk about it in terms of how it affects their individual power, and that of their caucus. But that isn’t actually the right way to view it. Senators after all are merely an instrument of a representative democracy. We need to think about the filibuster in terms of the voters who elect them:

“How, from a voter’s perspective, is American politics supposed to work? In theory, something like this: Parties propose agendas during elections. Voters choose the agenda — and thus the party — they like most. The newly elected party passes a substantial portion of their agenda into law. Voters judge the results and choose whether to return that party to power in the next election or give the opposition a turn at the wheel.

This is, of course, not how American politics works. Even in the absence of the filibuster, the American political system is thick with veto points and clashing institutions. It is also deeply undemocratic, with Republicans currently holding the White House and Senate despite winning fewer votes in the relevant elections. And then, layered atop all that, is the filibuster, which imposes a 60-vote supermajority requirement.”

Read the whole thing.

This post was brought to you by the Mother Jones Daily newsletter, which hits inboxes every weekday and is written by Ben Dreyfuss and Abigail Weinberg, and regularly features guest contributions by our much smarter colleagues. Sign up for it here. 

Julio Cortez/AP

During Tuesday’s night’s chaotic schoolyard brawl of a debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked both Joe Biden and President Donald Trump why the nation should trust them on issues of race. Biden opened up by leaning on the tropes of equality and decency and attacking Trump for his use of racial “dog whistle[s].” Then, he magnified the persistent, devastating truth about the coronavirus pandemic: Communities of color, particularly Black Americans, are disproportionately getting sick and dying from COVID-19.  

“You talk about helping African Americans,” Biden said to Trump. “1 in 1,000 African Americans has been killed because of the coronavirus. If he doesn’t do something quickly, by the end of the year, 1 in 500 will have been killed. 1 in 500 African Americans. This man is as a savior of African-Americans? This man cares at all? This man’s done virtually nothing.”

Biden made some missteps when he talked about race during the night. He painted a misleading portrait of contemporary suburban life, claiming that America’s suburbs are “by and large integrated.” He called for “law and order with justice, where people get treated fairly,” pointing to a few “bad apples” in police departments who needed to be held accountable. Still, Biden was correct about the disparate toll the pandemic has had on Black Americans. But the magnitude of the devastation in communities of color is even worse than he let on.

As my colleague Sinduja Rangarajan and I pointed out in April, the pandemic has disproportionately afflicted Black and Latinx communities from the start. Months later, the trend has grown even more pronounced. American Public Media’s Research Lab has found that Black Americans have suffered 21 percent of the nation’s COVID-19 death toll, even though they make up 12 percent of the nation’s population. Their coronavirus death rate is nearly 98 in 100,000, more than twice that of white and Asian people. The numbers are also especially devastating for Indigenous people, Pacific Islanders, and Latinx Americans. 

An analysis by the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies released in June found that, when adjusted for age, the disparity is even starker. Among people between the ages of 25 and 34 years old, Black Americans were seven times more likely to die from COVID-19 than white Americans. Latinx Americans in that same age category died at more than five times the rate of white Americans. The disparities worsen for people in the prime of life: Latinx and Black Americans between the ages of 35 and 44 died at eight and nine times the rate of white Americans, respectively.

“People of color are disadvantaged with respect to whites,” Mary Bassett, the director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights and the lead author of the study paper, told me. “They’re more likely to be poor, more likely to live in a segregated community which lacks many services including access to healthy foods, more likely to live in crowded housing, more likely to work a low-wage job, less likely to have health insurance. All of these contribute both to the risk of getting COVID and the risk of dying from it.” 

The imbalance is evident throughout the Midwest and South, two regions where Biden is vying for support while Trump’s struggles to hold onto his. An analysis by Mother Jones using data from the Atlantic‘s COVID Racial Data Tracker found that as of September, Black people are dying at alarmingly disproportionate rates not just in Republican strongholds but in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

A disturbing trend unravels beneath all this data: Despite the fact that Black and Latinx Americans make up just 12 and 18 percent of the US population, respectively, the absolute years lost from lives cut far too short in both these communities represents a debilitating generational affliction that will be felt for some time. In her study, Bassett calculated that between February and May, COVID-19 had wiped out nearly 46,000 years of potential life among its Black victims and more than 48,000 years of life among its Latinx victims. In contrast, White Americans lost just over 33,400 years. 

I’m reminded what Bassett told me back in June: these disparities in COVID-19 deaths are not due to biological traits or differences, but rather “because of the social consequences of race in our society, which has been reinforced by decades, centuries of bad practices and policies.” This, at least, is something the next president has some sway over. It’s one thing to spot the problem and care about it, as Biden did Tuesday night. It’s another to act on it.

President Trump speaks during the first of three scheduled 90 minute presidential debates with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on Tuesday. Kevin Dietsch/Pool/CNP via ZUMA Wire

“It’s not on the ballot; there is nothing happening there,” blustered President Donald Trump Tuesday night during the first presidential debate of 2020. “You don’t know her view on Roe v. Wade.” 

He’s simultaneously talking about the precarity of the right to abortion in the United States following his nomination of conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, while insisting, of course, that it’s not precarious at all. It’s fine! Everything is totally fine! 

Just a day earlier, in Iowa, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst offered a similar assurance, that we shouldn’t worry about reproductive autonomy, insisting during a debate against her Democratic challenger that the likelihood Roe will be overturned is “very minimal.” In a way, she’s probably right—even with the addition of Barrett to the court, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Roe is overturned outright. An arguably worse or just-as-bad reality is more probable, as states will continue to offer up opportunities to chip away at the right to abortion care and the majority-conservative bench will try to maintain some semblance of precedent-respecting decorum in the process of ruling on those cases.

This sort of evasion from Republicans seems to be new, and it is deeply patronizing at best, bold-faced lying at worst. It has a certain “don’t you worry your pretty little head” tone to it, especially since the loss of abortion rights at the federal level will, of course, primarily affect people with uteruses. But it’s also extremely contradictory coming from a man who has enjoyed calling himself “the most pro-life president” in American history and has pledged over and over again to do whatever he can to overturn Roe. In a 2016 debate against Hillary Clinton, he said that as president, he would appoint judges to the Supreme Court with the explicit goal of decimating Roe. Just on Sunday, he mused to “Fox and Friends Weekend” that it is “possible” Barrett would overturn Roe as a Supreme Court Justice. 

While we’re not quite yet at a trend, I bet we see more of this. After all, it’s not altogether surprising that Republicans who desperately want to see Barrett confirmed to the bench, come what may in November, are waffling on this particular point now that Election Day is creeping ever closer. Both Trump and Ernst are certainly feeling the heat in their own races. And polling has consistently shown that the majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal. The most recent major poll on the subject from the Pew Research Center last year showed 61 percent of Americans continue to say that abortion should be legal in all (27 percent) or most (34 percent) cases. A major policy change on this front could mobilize Democrats in a significant way—and really, it already has to some degree—and it could spark a backlash that would cause Republicans to lose their grip on the Senate and further reduce their numbers in the House come November.

In some ways, while odious, I at least prefer the honesty on this from someone like Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who apparently did not get the party memo. A few hours before the presidential debate, the senator, who has in the past pledged to only support anti-Roe SCOTUS nominees, called Barrett’s judicial record “awfully clear” regarding abortion. “I think that’s one where she meets my standard of having evidence in the record, out there in public, on the record that indicates that she understands Roe was really an act of judicial imperialism and wrongly decided,” Hawley said. At least he’s consistent?

For now, voters will have to try and not lose their grip on reality amid all the gaslighting and backpedaling to see the stakes clearly. 

Screenshot/@BoKnowsNews/CBSNews

Last night there was a presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It was a real circus because Trump refused to follow the rules and ranted and raved like an unmedicated lunatic. Thanks to his chaotic rampage, the conversation was hard to follow. Very few issues were debated in a way that happens in The West Wing. And the second it was over, everyone on television proclaimed it a mess. “Who was the winner? No one,” was a regular refrain. “The only thing I know is America lost,” I heard someone say on Fox. This morning, several newspapers led coverage with a bit of both-siderism.

This is nonsense. It was clear in the debate that there was a winner, and that winner’s name is Joe Biden. Donald Trump did what Donald Trump does: He bullied and hectored and rambled and ceaselessly interrupted. Liberals don’t trust their own senses sometimes: There is a nagging suspicion that although we see a volcano erupting and feel the heat on our face as the lava flows toward us, it might not “play that way” to the other villagers around this mountain. Too many times before, we think, this volcano erupted but our screams were dismissed. And so everyone watched last night and many people thought “no one won.” But that’s not true, and it was immediately born out by polls that showed Trump had disappointed even his supporters and that Biden gained in all demographics on all issues. 

People are very bad at guessing what other people think when they stop thinking they’re like other people. Don’t go too far with it. Don’t think everyone has your exact taste or ideology, but you can assume other people also don’t like lava. There are some who do like lava. Pyromaniacs and other lava-fetishists. But they’re not a majority. Far from it.

And so Trump, the lava, he flows, as he does, and people panic that everyone will jump into the lava, but Trump has never been popular. His most popular is when he’s shut his mouth and let people forget that he is his irrepressible self.

Maggie Haberman of the New York Times observed last night that Trump’s rambling was reminiscent of his daily coronavirus briefings in the spring. Absolutely! I had flashbacks to those briefings. But the interesting thing about them is they were a disaster for Trump politically. People do not like his ranting. They do not like it on a train, they do like it in the rain. Some people do! Some people go to the rallies and love it! But not many. And not enough to save him.

I can’t stop thinking about the conventional wisdom that the debate was a “disaster.” I don’t think that’s true. Both candidates showed up and were exactly who they are. They didn’t paper themselves over in rehearsed speeches. They were there for the world to see. Is that not more informative than if Trump had taken, say, Ritalin and, for the first time in his life, kept himself in control? What would that say about the man who’d be president for four more years? Not much. There are people who watched and think “This Trump guy is for me!” And those voters should vote for him. There are also people, I suspect in far greater numbers, who did not feel that way, but instead felt, as one focus group participant told Frank Luntz, that Trump acted like “a crackhead.”

“But polls showed Hillary won the debates against Trump too, and she still lost!” This is true! If James Comey sends a letter opening an investigation into Joe Biden, all bets will be off. 

That doesn’t mean Biden won the election last night. Of course it doesn’t. Time moves forward and things happen and they change the course of everything. Last night doesn’t mean everyone should pop champagne and forget to vote. Nothing will or could mean that, but it does mean Biden won the debate and Trump fell further behind, squandering one of his final opportunities for a comeback. More opportunities will come, but never again as many as there were before those two walked onstage last night and showed us exactly who they are.

This post was brought to you by the Mother Jones Daily newsletter, which hits inboxes every weekday and is written by Ben Dreyfuss and Abigail Weinberg, and regularly features guest contributions by our much smarter colleagues. Sign up for it here. 

Julio Cortez/AP

The first presidential debate of the 2020 election this was a night of headache-inducing Trumpian nihilism, as our colleague Clara Jeffery wrote last night. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was visibly trying to stay calm, focus on the camera, and speak as directly as possible to the American people—while President Donald Trump attacked, interrupted, and talked over everyone, moderator Chris Wallace included, whose 11th hour recommitment to the rules of the debate came far too late to somehow contain the wreckage.

But, in the end, was this debate a good thing for voters? Trump’s careening performance rendered a debasing spectacle of American democracy, making the usual post-debate analysis feel practically pointless. Typically we ask: who won and who lost? But today, that question seems less relevant: This was about a stark choice, laid bare. “I understand why people wanted to rush to the shower afterwards. It was ugly. It was brutal. It was indeed debasing, but it was Trump revealing Trump,” says Washington D.C. Bureau Chief David Corn, on a new episode of the Mother Jones Podcast. And in that sense, Corn argues, “this was a great night for America.”

Trump, in essence, proved Biden’s point, Corn argues: “It’s out in the open. He sees saying the quiet part aloud. And when a political opponent does that, it makes your work—if you’re a Democrat, if you’re someone who wants to see Trump gone—easier.” (Check out his debate-night essay here.)

Podcast host Jamilah King also interviews DC-based reporter Nathalie Baptiste about her experience of the debate, and her main takeaways. They get into the mind-boggling  contrast between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on the debate stage, the racism embedded in the debate topics, and whether voters might have any reason at all to feel hopeful as November 3 approaches.

Listen to their full conversations on the latest episode of the Mother Jones Podcast:

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on September 12, 2016.

There’s seemingly nothing more important to Donald Trump than his net worth. The tycoon’s image is based on having over-the-top wealth, so he often pads his net worth by as much as billions of dollars—and sued a journalist who caught him in the act.

In fact, Trump has been doing this ever since he first started appearing in the press as a fledgling developer. His front-page debut came in 1973, thanks to a landmark housing discrimination suit the Justice Department filed against Trump and his father for trying to bar black applicants from their buildings and offering black renters worse terms. (The Trumps settled, agreeing to take steps to combat discrimination in exchange for not having to admit any wrongdoing.) Three years later, the New York Times made him the subject of a gushing profile that sexed up the 30-year-old developer—”he looks ever so much like Robert Redford”—and parroted his claim that he was worth “more than $200 million.”

As Washington Post reporters Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher charitably put it in their new book, Trump Revealed, the source of that figure was “unclear.” The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, which later investigated Trump when he sought a casino license, found that Trump’s income in 1976 was a grand total of “$24,594, in addition to some payments from family trusts and other assets,” as Kranish and Fisher wrote. A year earlier, while Trump was trying to buy the Commodore Hotel from the bankrupt Penn Central railroad, “Penn Central negotiators had estimated the Trump family holdings at about $25 million, all of it under [his father] Fred’s control,” Kranish and Fisher wrote.

Trump did finally make it to the big time in 1982, when he was featured in Forbes‘ list of the 400 richest Americans. Forbes‘ estimate of his worth? $100 million.

Paul Kitagaki Jr./ZUMA

Who expected a fairly substantive climate discussion in the first presidential debate, moderated by none other than a Fox News anchor? 

President Donald Trump too did not seem prepared. Asked point blank whether he believes in man-made climate change, Trump equivocated, glossing over a record where he in fact has insisted it’s a hoax.

“I think a lot of things do” contribute to climate change, he said. “But I think to an extent, yes. I think to an extent, yes.”

Trump then immediately pivoted to a topic he’s more comfortable with, but way off on: forest fire management. Trump also insisted “we have to do everything we can to have immaculate water and do everything else we can to plant a billion trees.” This is a dodge. Despite Trump claiming he’s helped clean the air and water, his point doesn’t stand up to facts. More Americans now live in counties with unhealthier air than when Trump took office. The disparity is even starker in communities of color. 

Joe Biden, meanwhile, reiterated the points of his climate platform, such as weatherizing 4 million buildings and installing 100,000 new charging stations. 

Climate change wasn’t on the pre-debate list of topics for Fox News’ Chris Wallace, so the fact that it was a focus of first debate shows how far it’s climbed as a substantive issue for the electorate. It also drives home how vulnerable the president remains on the issue. Recent polling by Climate Power 2020 shows battleground voters prefer Biden’s stance by a whopping 27 points.

Biden was challenged to say he supports “law & order.” He said it.

Trump was challenged to denounce white supremacy. He did not say it. pic.twitter.com/nUysqkzKMA

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) September 30, 2020

Matt Slocum/AP

In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency of the United States and—according to a bombshell report Sunday night from the New York Times—paid $750 in taxes. In 2017, he paid $750. Other years, he paid $0.

This bill is way, way smaller than that of many Americans with much less wealth (and much less proficiency and seeming delight at playing financial hide-and-seek). It is, as my colleague Inae Oh wrote, enraging.

For comparison, take the American Joe Biden—former vice president and opponent of Trump in this year’s election. In 2016, Biden and his wife paid $1.5 million in taxes. That is 2,000 times more than what Trump paid in 2016. In 2017, they paid about $3.7 million. That is over 4,900 times more than Trump paid in 2017. You get the idea.

Biden released more returns before today’s debate, as did his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris. They also revealed that Biden paid $300,000 in taxes in 2019. And you demand consistency, so: That is 400 times more than Trump paid in 2016.

Want to see just how tiny Trump’s $750 tax payment really is? Watch this video. pic.twitter.com/mvKlF4r3TR

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) September 29, 2020

Trump broke norms in not releasing his taxes during his initial campaign and over the past few years. Our own David Corn has been asking for their release for years. But Biden’s information was all easy to find. The Biden campaign makes his financial disclosures public on his website. Here is the 2016 federal tax release. And here is the same from 2017. Unlike with Trump, it’s not a bombshell to see his finances.

Mother Jones illustration; Sarah Silbiger/CNP via Zuma

The revelation shouldn’t really be that much of a surprise: The man who proudly crows on national television that not paying taxes makes him “smart” has paid little-to-no federal income tax for quite some time. But it still felt like a gut punch—particularly that one very specific detail, that the president paid exactly $750 two years in a row. As my colleague Inae Oh wrote:

Amid the avalanche of takeaways, somehow the $750 figure has gained special power as a convenient shorthand for exactly how corrupt this president is. For many, including myself, it landed sharply after endless exposure to the scandals and abominations that flow daily from Trump’s White House. The precision of this number was strangely even more appalling than the investigation’s other striking revelation that Trump paid no federal income taxes at all in ten of the previous 15 years.

That’s because average Americans simply know what $750 looks like. Maybe it’s substantially less than what you’ve been paying in taxes as an entry-level journalist fresh out of college with significant loans. It might be the exact amount you’re shelling out for a tax adviser to correct a mistake made during the same year you earned a $31,000 salary. It’s certainly cheaper than the cheapest rent I ever paid to live in New York—$800—and that was while still attending college and racking up student debt in 2009.

I mean, $750 seems an impossibly small tax bill for someone who claims hundreds of millions of dollars in yearly income. But just how small?

In the past several months, we’ve made animations to visualize wildly large and hard-to-comprehend numbers that crop up in the news. But this time, we’re flipping that around to show you exactly how tiny Trump’s 2016 federal income tax payment is. How does it compare to an average American household in 2016? Or the previous occupant of the White House? Watch our animated guide:

Want to see just how tiny Trump’s $750 tax payment really is? Watch this video. pic.twitter.com/mvKlF4r3TR

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) September 29, 2020

Mother Jones Illustration/Shuttershock

This post was originally published as part of “The Trump Files“—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on June 23, 2016.

Donald Trump has a well-documented tendency to file lawsuits when someone hurts his feelings. In 2013, the guilty party was Bill Maher, the late-night HBO talk show host known for his liberal leanings and biting commentary.

After Trump had insisted in 2012 that President Barack Obama release his college transcripts and passport records, Maher pushed back on the mogul’s request with a demand of his own: that Trump show proof that he is not “the spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.” Maher, interviewed on Jay Leno’s The Tonight Show, cited the similarity in color between Trump’s coif and an orange orangutan’s fur, as split-screen images of Trump next to the animal were displayed. If Trump complied with the request and proved him wrong, Maher promised he would give Trump $5 million for the charity of his choice. The charities Maher suggested? “Hair Club for Men” or the “Institute for Incorrigible Douchebaggery.”

Trump took the jab personally. He filed a $5 million lawsuit against Maher for breach of contract, alleging that when he provided his birth certificate to Maher proving he is not, in fact, the son of an orangutan, Maher never came up with the $5 million. Alas, the lawsuit didn’t get very far. Trump wound up dropping it, but the threat to Maher remained.

Michael Cohen, an attorney for Trump, insisted that although the suit had been withdrawn temporarily, it could resurface in the future. “The lawsuit was temporarily withdrawn to be amended and refiled at a later date,” Cohen said.

Caroline Brehman/Congressional Quarterly/Zuma

Senate Judiciary Chair Lindsey Graham said during a Fox News appearance on Thursday that he plans to get a ninth Supreme Court justice through the committee process before November 3 so that the court would be able to weigh in on the results of a contested presidential election.

“A 4–4 Supreme Court is not a good deal for America,” Graham said. “Now, we may have litigation about who won the election, but the court will decide, and if the Republicans lose, we will accept that result.” Graham suggests that a deadlocked court would harm America, but the ideological split is already a 5–3 conservative majority. If Graham were to have his way, in the case of a contested election, a third of the people deciding the next president would owe their seats to Donald Trump—not exactly a model of impartiality.

Lindsey Graham: "People wonder about the peaceful transfer of power. I can assure you it will be peaceful. Now we may have litigation about who won the election, but the court will decide, and if Republicans lose, we'll accept that result. But we need a full court." pic.twitter.com/mVBGtMXiBF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 24, 2020

In an interview with CNN, Graham refused to acknowledge Democrats’ concerns that a ninth justice could unfairly sway the results of a contested election in favor of Trump:

Graham: “If there’s a court challenge to the election, it will be decided in court. And the loser of the challenge will accept the results.” When asked about Dem concerns they are pushing a SCOTUS nominee now to help tilt outcome of any election dispute: “We need a full court.”

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 24, 2020

Lest we forget Graham’s justification for refusing to hold confirmation hearings of Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016: “If there’s a Republican president in 2016 and a vacancy occurs in the last year of the first time, you can say, ‘Lindsey Graham said let’s let the next president, whoever it might me, make that nomination.’ And you could use my words against me, and you’d be absolutely right.” Plus, the Senate’s refusal to hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland in 2016 left the Supreme Court with exactly the 4–4 split Graham now says he fears—and an even divide of liberal and conservative judges.

Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Zuma

At President Trump’s Wednesday evening news conference, a reporter asked the president, “Will you commit to making sure that there is a peaceful transferral of power after the election?”

In normal times, the answer would be obvious. But under Trump, such questions are seemingly designed to elicit an authoritarian response.

“Well, we’re gonna have to see what happens,” Trump replied, echoing his previous unwillingness to state definitively that he would accept the results of the 2020 election. This reply immediately got attention online.

But Trump’s refusal to answer the question wasn’t nearly as scary as what came after.

“Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly,” Trump continued. “There’ll be a continuation.”

Q: Will you commit to a peaceful transfer of power after the election?

TRUMP: “We’re gonna have to see what happens.” pic.twitter.com/Dzj7Q9ZJqv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 23, 2020

By alluding to mail-in ballots, which the president has repeatedly, falsely argued are linked to voter fraud, Trump raised the specter of his deliberately manipulating the election to ensure that he is not voted out of office. He’s long toyed with the idea of refusing election results by playing the “we’ll have to see” tactic. Now, he’s talking about getting rid of ballots too.

“The ballots are out of control,” he said. “You know it, and you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”

As we recently wrote, Trump sees one path to victory: Trash the Constitution.

Voters wait in long lines at an Atlanta-area elementary school on Tuesday, June 9, 2020. The lines around lunchtime were taking two and a half hours.TNS via ZUMA Wire

It’s practially a given that any major election will produce images of voters waiting in hours-long lines. It’s already happening in the run up to November, as waits have piled up outside of early voting sites.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has an idea to help keep waits to under 30 minutes: force states where it takes longer to make direct financial restitution to voters. 

The People Over Long Lines (POLL) Act, co-sponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkly (D-Ore.), would also allow voters to collect $50 for waiting longer than 30 minutes, with an additional $50 for each hour after that. If a court determines that the long lines were somehow intentional on the part of election officials, or caused by wreckless disregard of wait times, the payments ballon to $650 per voter after the first half hour, with $150 more each additional hour.

While such payments are unlikely to become a reality, voting delays have very real consequences, including people who are forced to leave before they can cast a ballot. In 2012, between 500,000 and 700,000 votes were lost to long lines, according to an estimate prepared for the federal Election Assistance Commission. Long lines tend to disproportionately impact minority communities; the same study showed Black voters waited twice the time as whites. The reasons behind long lines vary—reduced polling locations, staff shortages, equipment breakdowns, poll workers not showing up due to COVID-19 fears—but the net result is, to some, blatant voter suppression. 

“Voting shouldn’t be a war of attrition,” Wyden said in a statement releasing his bill Wednesday. “It is a national disgrace that millions of working Americans, seniors, and parents are forced to stand in line for hours just to exercise their God-given right to vote.”

The bill would provide $500 million in federal funding to local election administrators to help them speed voting, and establish Election Assistance Commission audits of state performances. It would also mandate that voting locations have sufficient emergency ballots on hand to allow people to vote even if equipment fails, as happened in several places across the country during the 2018 midterms. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has blocked nearly all federal election-related legislation, arguing that elections are primarily state-run and that the  federal government has little role in protecting them from foreign interference or ensuring they are administered fairly.

“Senator McConnell has been crystal clear that he opposes any bill that makes it easier or safer for Americans to vote,” Wyden told Mother Jones. “I’m not holding my breath that he’ll change his mind this time around. But any American who is stuck in line, waiting for hours to cast a ballot, needs to know that it doesn’t have to be that way.”

Mother Jones Illustration/Shuttershock

This post was originally published as part of The Trump Files—a collection of telling episodes, strange but true stories, and curious scenes from the life of our current president—on September 26, 2016.

Donald Trump’s career was built on help from his father, Fred, whether it was the years Trump spent managing his dad’s apartment building or the political connections and multimillion-dollar loan guarantee that made cash-strapped Donald’s first deals possible. So it’s no surprise that Fred tried to bail his son out of trouble when Donald’s Trump Castle casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey, was about to miss an interest payment in December 1990.

By then, Trump had already defaulted on the debt from his Taj Mahal casino. If Fred simply wrote Donald a check, the money would be used to pay off that debt. So, as the Washington Post‘s Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher describe in their new book, Trump Revealed, the elder Trump sent a lawyer to the Trump Castle to sneak money straight into the ailing casino’s coffers.

The lawyer, Howard Snyder, approached the casino cage and handed over a certified check for $3.35 million, drawn on Fred’s account. Snyder then walked over to a blackjack table, where a dealer paid out the entire amount in 670 gray $5,000 chips. The next day, the bank wired another $150,000 into Fred’s account at the Castle. Once again, Snyder arrived at the casino and collected the full amount in 30 more chips.

That let Trump use the de facto loan in whatever way he needed. “Sure enough, the Castle made its bond payment the day Fred’s lawyer bought the first batch of chips,” Kranish and Fisher wrote. The tactic also had a nice financial benefit. “Not only did he avoid default on the bonds—and the risk of losing control of Trump Castle as a result—but patrons who hold gaming chips normally are not paid interest,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time.

New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission investigated the chip purchase the following year and said it was an illegal loan that broke the state’s rules about casinos receiving cash from approved financial sources. The Inquirer wrote that a casino lawyer told the paper that “Fred Trump is ineligible for licensing, and Trump Castle should be required to return the money, a move that would almost certainly force it into bankruptcy court.” In the end, the casino kept the money and the commission fined the casino the relatively small amount of $65,000. But it didn’t save Trump. A year later, the Trump Castle went into bankruptcy, and Donald gave up half the casino to his creditors.

President Donald Trump speaks to supporters during a rally at the Bemidji Regional Airport on September 18, 2020 in Bemidji, Minnesota.Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

While the whole country was processing the breaking news that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died—and was trying to figure out just what her death would mean given how close we are to the election—President Trump was seemingly unaware of her death. Trump, in fact, spoke at his Minnesota campaign rally for almost two hours Friday night, making his typical jokes about political opponents.

After Ginsburg’s death was made public, I started watching the rally (which had already started before the news broke) to see what the president would say about her death. Instead, I saw a typical Trump off-script speech. He made fun of Democrats, talked how tough he was with Boeing, downplayed the “China virus,” and polled the crowd on which nickname they preferred for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden: “Sleepy Joe? or Slow Joe?”

Time went on and Trump remained on stage uninterrupted. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell put out a statement asserting whoever the president’s nominee is will get a vote on the Senate floor. Lawmakers from both parties took to social media. Even when the rally was over, Trump continued to dance on stage and wave at the crowd of supporters on his way to Air Force One, apparently without his staff alerting him of the news. 

Trump finally made his way to a group of reporters who seemed to break the news to him. “She just died?” Trump asked a reporter. “Wow, I didn’t know that, you’re telling me now for the first time.” Trump then took a second and said: “She lead an amazing life, what else can you say, she was an amazing woman whether you agreed or not, she was an amazing woman who lead an amazing life. I’m actually sad to hear that, I am sad to hear that.” 

President Trump on death of Justice Ginsburg: "She just died? Wow. I didn't know that…She led an amazing life. What else can you say? She was an amazing woman, whether you agree or not. She was an amazing woman who led an amazing life. I'm actually sad to hear that." pic.twitter.com/6oKuL671qO

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 19, 2020

Perhaps what was even weirder than this complete shift in tone was that at the beginning of the rally, before most of us knew of Ginsburg’s death, Trump joked that if given the chance, he would nominate Ted Cruz to the Supreme Court because Cruz was “the only one [he] can think of” who would get full support from Congress. “They’ll do anything to get him out of the Senate, but I joke when I say that to Ted, but I say that to him all the time.” 

Trump is already making jokes about how Ted Cruz is his nominee to replace RBG pic.twitter.com/Hj9i6JlhIP

— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) September 18, 2020

Stefani Reynolds/AP

Not two hours after Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died on February 13, 2016, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had already thrown down a gauntlet: The Senate would not confirm a replacement for Scalia before a new president had taken office. McConnell sneeringly called the principle the “Biden rule,” referring to remarks in 1992 from then-Sen. Joe Biden, who urged the Senate president to delay a hypothetical confirmation until after the election if a vacancy did appear, following the contentious confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas.

We all know how this story ended in 2016: McConnell got his way. President Barack Obama’s nominee, Judge Merrick Garland, was never given a vote, and Trump nominee Justice Neil Gorsuch was confirmed on April 7, 2017. 

There’s little hope that McConnell will actually stick to the principle he laid out when Scalia died four years ago (342 days before the next president took office). “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate,” McConnell said in a statement Friday night. But following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg earlier today (124 days before inauguration day 2021), it’s worth holding him to his words anyway.

They include:

February 13, 2016: “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice,” McConnell said in a statement released after Scalia’s death. “Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”

Full statement from Senate Majority Leader McConnell on Scalia: pic.twitter.com/27VmyVMOy4

— John McCormack (@McCormackJohn) February 13, 2016

February 23, 2016: “I can now confidently say the view shared by virtually everybody in my conference, is that the nomination should be made by the president the people elect in the election that’s underway right now,” McConnell told reporters following Senate Republicans’ first closed-door meeting after Scalia’s death. “I believe the overwhelming view of the Republican Conference in the Senate is that this nomination should not be filled, this vacancy should not be filled by this lame duck president…The American people are perfectly capable of having their say on this issue, so let’s give them a voice. Let’s let the American people decide. The Senate will appropriately revisit the matter when it considers the qualifications of the nominee the next president nominates, whoever that might be.”

March 16, 2016: “The Senate will continue to observe the ‘Biden rule’ so that the American people have a voice in this momentous decision on who to name to the court,” McConnell said in a floor speech the day Obama nominated Garland.

May 18, 2016: Reacting to a forum called by Senate Democrats to discuss the lingering nomination of Garland, a statement from McConnell’s office called it a “sham hearing” and claimed Democrats were being hypocritical about the need to confirm Garland in an election year: “It seems the more we hear from Democrats about the Supreme Court the more we’re reminded by comparison of how reasonable and common-sense the Republican position is today.”

August 6, 2016: “One of my proudest moments was when I looked at Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill this Supreme Court vacancy,'” McConnell told supporters at a political event in his home state of Kentucky.

Then, three year later, McConnell confirmed what everyone already knew: The principle he’d touted so regularly in 2016 was nothing but a matter of pure partisanship.

May 28, 2019: An attendee at a Chamber of Commerce event in Kentucky asks McConnell, “Should a Supreme Court justice die next year, what will your position be on filling that spot?”

“Oh, we’d fill it,” McConnell replied, grinning.

Morning Joe put together a montage documenting Mitch McConnell's shameless flip-flop about the appropriateness of filling a SCOTUS seat in a presidential election year pic.twitter.com/Czc6dmPGbS

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 29, 2019

Oh my God:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the demure firebrand who in her 80s became a legal, cultural, and feminist icon has died. The Supreme Court announced her death, saying the cause was complications from cancer.

Buckle up.

Another former member of President Donald Trump’s administration has denounced him and endorsed his Democratic opponent. This time it’s Oliva Troye—a former adviser to Vice President Mike Pence on homeland security and counter-terrorism and member of the White House’s coronavirus task force—who told the Washington Post she made her decision because of the president’s “flat out disregard for human life.” Troye left her position in August.

Coinciding with the announcement, the group Republican Voters Against Trump released a two-minute video with Troye in which she elaborates on that charge, detailing a meeting with the president in which, she claims, he suggested that the pandemic was a “good thing” because he’d no longer have to shake hands with “disgusting people”:

“Towards the middle of February we knew it wasn’t a matter of if Covid would become a big pandemic here in the United States, it was a matter of when,” Troye says in the video. “But the president didn’t want to hear that, because his biggest concern was that we were in an election year, and how was this going to effect what he considered to be his record of his success? It was shocking to see the president saying that the virus was a hoax, saying that everything was going to be okay when we know that it’s not.”

Troye describes herself as a supporter of George W. Bush and John McCain who simply can’t take another term of Trump. Her video is an echo, in some ways, of RVAT’s first big testimonial, in which Miles Taylor, former chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, called his experience working in the administration “terrifying.” In fact, Troye uses that exact word.