Death and Taxes
“This is not going to end well,” says Trump.
Welcome to The Experiment, the weekly newsletter where we’re finding our way through the Uncertain Now. This week, the debate forced me to stop thinking of Donald Trump as an aberration and to accept him as our reality. A former colleague, Thema Thomas, writes about what it was like for a queer Black woman to miss out on Pride and the George Floyd protests because of the pandemic in “When Worlds Collide.” Pollster Stefan Hankin explains how we ended up with an American Apartheid system in “Rule by Minority.” And in this week’s installment of Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone becomes a millionaire three times over, but there’s a catch, in “My First Million.”
And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to, including a well-named pop band called The Happy Fits who are out with a new album called What Could Be Better. I love their new single, “Moving.”
If you enjoy The Experiment, please share it online. The data shows that shares on Facebook and Twitter are the best ways to draw new people into The Experiment. (If you were forwarded this email, sign up to receive it each Saturday morning.)
But first, am I the only one? You saw it, too, right?
We thought we knew what we would get. We thought Trump would debate like he did against Hillary in 2016 in his petulant, funny-but-not-funny Drunk Uncle manner, that Uncle Joey B would get off a few “C’mon, man” riffs, and Chris Wallace would try to keep things from going off the rails on the road to nowhere. We watched from our friend’s condo on the 36th floor. The remarkable thing about an apartment on the 36th floor is that insects don’t fly that high. We brought snacks. He stocked the bar cart.
We thought we knew what we would see. We were wrong. Jill Biden, the doctor, wore a mask the whole time. Melania Trump, the model, took hers off, but you don’t really care, do you? Because right away we found out what happens when Chris Christie leads debate prep for a real estate developer with a taste for American carnage. The gates opened, and all at once, and at a scale that was like getting punched in the face while getting served with a subpoena and learning calculus at the same time you’re in a rap battle, we experienced a kind of hell on earth. We were trapped in that room with the man who looked like he wanted us to acquiesce to our own beatings because it was our fault.
Everything that follows is cut and pasted from the transcript. As much as your brain wants to put the words in the right order, it’s important to read things exactly as he said them, because he is who he says he is.
They start with the Supreme Court. Trump harasses Biden to answer whether he will pack the Supreme Court.
“Why wouldn’t you answer that question? You want to put a lot of new Supreme Court Justices. Radical left.”
“Will you shut up, man?”
“Listen, who is on your list, Joe? Who’s on your list?”
“Gentlemen, I think we’ve ended this…” says Chris Wallace.
“This is so un-Presidential,” says Biden.
“He’s going to pack the court. He is not going to give a list.”
“We have ended the segment. We’re going to move on to the second segment,” says Wallace.
“That was really a productive segment, wasn’t it? Keep yapping, man,” says Biden.
“The people understand, Joe.”
This could be true.
“This is so un-Presidential,” says Biden.
I look at the bar cart and wonder if there’s enough scotch for the night. The country is not better off than we were four minutes ago. I don’t know how we will make it through the next four weeks.
Time compresses into a black hole that my mom narrowly escapes.
“I turned it off,” she emails. “Can’t watch this. Going to Hallmark.”
“This is Hell,” I reply.
We watch other countries like children of alcoholic parents study happy families to learn how to do it. Widespread testing and contact tracing is still a thing in some countries. There are countries where they are going back to work. Here, politicians mansplain scientists, and the president insists he’s joking about injecting bleach while promising a vaccine before the election. Living through history isn’t as much fun as I thought it would be. When we think about living through history, we imagine raising the flag at Iowa Jima. We don’t imagine the hell they had to go through to get to the top of the mountain. We don’t imagine that everything would go wrong, all at once, and that when losing a 9/11 every week would become so ordinary that the President would say, “It is what it is.”
“Well, it is what it is because you are who you are. That’s why it is. The President has no plan,” says Biden, getting out a planned sound bite as if this were a normal debate in the Before Times. “He said he didn’t tell us or give people a warning of it because he didn’t want to panic the American people. You don’t panic. He panicked.”
“Oh really, go take a look,” says Trump. “The Governors said I did a phenomenal job. Most of them said that. In fact, people that would not be necessarily on my side said that, ‘President Trump did a phenomenal job.’”
Biden is laughing.
“A lot of people died and a lot more are going to die unless he gets a lot smarter, a lot quicker…”
“Did you use the word smart? So you said you went to Delaware State, but you forgot the name of your college. You didn’t go to Delaware State. You graduated either the lowest or almost the lowest in your class. Don’t ever use the word smart with me. Don’t ever use that word.”
“Oh, give me a break.”
I have a favorite mask now. Met my friend Sam for drinks outside in the late afternoon sun. Ordering meant masks and sneeze guards and no-touch payments. This was all new to my friend. He had been confined to his house and backyards since March because he takes a medication that suppresses his immune system. His silver hair, normally worn short, has grown into something like a Dutch Boy. We talked about a book he’s writing about dirigibles. He was happy to be out.
“He doesn’t have a plan,” says Biden. “If I were running it, I’d know what the plan is. You’ve got to provide these businesses the ability to have the money to be able to reopen with the PPE, as well as with the sanitation they need. You have to provide them classic…”
“Tell that to Nancy Pelosi.”
“Will he just shush for a minute?”
No, he will not. All the pregame chatter was that Trump will take this fight to Biden. He will break Uncle Joey B like Drago did Apollo Creed. Joe will fold, the theory goes, because he’s old, infirm, and losing it. You and I know that Joe Biden is, for a dude his age, doing pretty OK. But if you really believed that Joe Biden is an old man in need of a nursing home, then a strategy to push him to a breaking point is simply elder abuse. Trump does exactly what his people said he’d do. He is who he says he is, even when he’s lying.
He is who he says he is, even when he’s lying.
“I don’t wear a mask like him. Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from him and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”
Biden laughs.
“We built the greatest economy in history. We closed it down because of the China plague.”
Biden laughs.
“They want to get back to their lives,” says Trump.
“People want to be safe,” says Biden.
“They’ll be careful, but they want their schools open.”
“People want to be safe.”
“I’m the one that brought back football. By the way, I brought back Big Ten football. It was me and I’m very happy to do it…”
Biden laughs.
“Show us your tax returns.”
“You’ll see it as soon as it’s finished, you’ll see it. You know, if you wanted to, go to the Board of Elections. There’s 118 page or so report that says everything I have, every bank I have, I’m totally under leveraged because the assets are extremely good, and I built a great company.”
This time, I laugh.
Nothing is funny, but everything is ridiculous. The bit of naked pink skin over his right ear where Trump didn’t apply bronzer keeps drawing my attention. That he puts up appearances and chose this one elevates the impression of true lunacy, as Biden would say, literally. The king rubs his hairy belly and slaps his naked butt and demands the suckers give his tailor a five-star review on Yelp. But the fact that the king is aware of his nudity frightens me. He is sentient. The cruelty is not a by-product of racism and incompetence. The cruelty is the point.
Nothing is funny, but everything is ridiculous.
“He’s going to be the first president of the United States to leave office having fewer jobs in his administration than when he became president,” says Biden. “Fewer jobs than when he became president. First one in American history.”
Trump looks reflective. An expression of comprehension settles on his face. I’ve never seen it before. He has listened and understood. He is sentient.
Only two things are certain in this election: death and taxes. Soon we will have lost more Americans to COVID-19 than we suffered casualties in World War II, and this time Hitler might win. But now Trump got infected as people are voting. It’s going to be hard to sell that the worst is behind us while he’s in quarantine, while markets are tanking, while we’re due for another rise in the curve.
In fact, if it had not been for the pandemic, it’s an open question as to whether Biden would even be in this fight, much less comfortably and steadily ahead, this despite Trump’s collaboration with Russian interference, putting kids in cages, despite both-sidesing white supremacy, despite making us endure a world in which someone on a street corner could look at his phone and say, “Oh god, what did he do now?” and everyone would know whom he was talking about. Despite making us all feel aggressively crazy for paying attention, he could have easily won re-election, partly because there were so many things to keep track of, any one of which would have gotten Barack Obama kicked out of office, but together overwhelm our attention. Remember when he let guests at Mar-A-Lago make decisions at Veterans Affairs? Me neither.
Only one scandal broke through. It was that he paid $750 in taxes one year. That broke through. Death and taxes are all anyone cares about.
In the debate, Trump disputes the story.
“And let me just tell you, there was a story in one of the papers that paid…”
“Show us your tax returns.”
“I paid $38 million one year, I paid $27 million one year.”
Biden makes a wry expression.
Trump asks Biden why he never repealed the Trump tax cuts when he was senator.
“Because you weren’t president and screwing things up. You’re the worst president America has ever had. Come on,” says Biden.
Soon we will have lost more Americans to COVID-19 than we suffered casualties in World War II, and this time Hitler might win.
“Hey, Joe, let me just tell you, Joe. In 47 months, I’ve done more than you’ve done in 47 years, Joe. We’ve done things that you never even thought of doing.”
This might be truest thing Trump has ever said. No one had ever thought about buying Greenland before. He’s beginning to tell the truth, even about things that are not true. He’s telling us who he is.
“Let me tell you about the stock market. When the stock market goes up, that means jobs,” says Trump.
Biden looks shocked, as if he’s recognizing the depth of the president’s lack of understanding of how the economy works for most people. Trump really is that stupid.
Understanding what has been right in front of our face is hard when you’re blinded by golden toilets, when you’re mocking a fake billionaire for getting caught in dumb lies. The guy who hires people off the streets to cheer as he descends on a golden escalator does not care if he breaks the rules of a game he is not playing, and just because he’s running a scam does not mean he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s telling us what he’s doing. What he likes, is true. What he does not, is a lie. That this mutates truth into a Hunter S. Thompson trip to Vegas does not change the fact that he is telling us how he sees the world and what he will do.
Trump picks a fight about Hunter Biden that sounds like it was plagiarized from a QAnon subreddit. Biden gamely counterpunches before Wallace tries to move on.
“Chris, can I be honest? It’s a very important question…”
“Try to be honest,” says Biden.
Trump tries, but he’s speaking to his base while keeping his feet in this world, and his logic gets tangled up in reality. He waves the 1994 crime bill as evidence that Biden is too tough on crime before saying he’s too soft on crime to even say the words “law and order.”
He calls anti-racism training racist.
“We have to go back to the core values of this country. They were teaching people that our country is a horrible place. It’s a racist place. And they were teaching people to hate our country,” says Trump.
Biden looks down at the floor.
“Nobody’s doing that. He’s the racist,” says Biden.
He calls anti-racism training racist.
Biden appeals to our better natures, if they’re still watching.
“There’s nothing we cannot do, if we do it together. We can take this on and we can defeat racism in America.”
Trump blames Obama for Ferguson, for Oakland, for Baltimore.
“Frankly, it was more violent than what I’m even seeing now.”
“Oh my Lord.”
“But the reason…”
“This is ridiculous.”
“…is that the Democrats that run these cities..”
“Absolutely ridiculous.”
“… don’t want to talk, like you, about law and order.”
My wife walks by me on the way to the bar cart. Her glass is empty.
“I’ve seen Thanksgiving dinners that were better organized than this,” she says. “I don’t know if we have enough Jameson.”
She isn’t the only one to compare this to Thanksgiving dinner, which occupies a place in our minds as where we go to swallow our true selves lest we offend loved ones. We see each other abusively. If I’m queer, you see me as outside of God’s grace. If you voted for Trump, I see you as complicit in the sneering devolution of the American experiment. We called it Thanksgiving because they taught us to grow corn so we didn’t starve. We had not yet committed genocide against them and all other indigenous tribes, yet. We do this every year.
“We have now the lowest carbon…”
Biden looks skyward.
“We’ve already fixed it to an extent. Obamacare, as you might know but probably don’t, Obamacare is no good.”
Biden laughs.
Asked why he repealed fuel economy standards, Trump says, “What’s happening is the car is much less expensive and it’s a much safer car and you talk it about a tiny difference.”
Biden looks at him in disbelief, but Trump is who he is.
“If you look at crooked Hillary Clinton, if you look at all of the different people, there was no transition, because they came after me trying to do a coup.”
Biden shakes his head sadly.
This is not and has never been about whether Trump is right. It’s about whether he’s sentient or an exposed nerve looking for stimulation. At first we thought he was so laughable that there was no chance of Hillary losing. Then, as President, his voice sounded wrong on the news. We thought we knew what we would see when we looked at the news, and Trump was there, threatening crude violence against his enemies. He ran for re-election against Americans, and our reaction is, “That’s not the way this works.” He is who he says he is.
This is not and has never been about whether Trump is right.
The epitaphs for democracy come in real time when Wallace puts it to Trump straight: “Now that millions of mail-in ballots have gone out, what are you going to do about it? And are you counting on the Supreme Court, including a Justice Barrett, to settle any dispute?”
“Yeah. I think I’m counting on them to look at the ballots, definitely.”
Biden looks up, perhaps in prayer, perhaps in desperation.
Trump is who he says he is, even when he lies. He says ballots are “being dumped in rivers. This is a horrible thing for our country.”
“There is no evidence of that,” says Biden, irrelevantly, about the absence of any factual basis supporting Trump’s nightmare scenario, as if the fact that there is not a monster under the bed disproves the scream that woke you up. He’s jamming through Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s replacement as a failsafe to get re-elected. He is who he says he is, even when he’s lying. He’s the unreliable narrator of this timeline.
“This is not going to end well,” says Trump. “These people aren’t equipped to handle it, number one. Number two, they cheat. They cheat.”
“He has no idea what he’s talking about,” says Biden, but doesn’t he? He’s got the Proud Boys on standby to defend himself against the hoards of mail in ballots already on the way. He’s already declared the election invalid. Warren Zevon died too soon to appreciate his prophesy. Because of the institutional meltdown in 2016, how were we to know he was with the Russians, too?
I used to take false pride in remaining optimistic, in refusing to follow events to logical conclusions. But to not see what is in front of my face, to explain away what Trump is saying as a joke, as the rantings of an idiot, or as intemperate belching of mangled syntax is self deceit. He is who he says he is, even when he’s lying. And that means we are where all the signs say.
This is what a failing state looks like.
Shortly after the 2016 election, I let my thoughts follow the trail of breadcrumbs he left during the campaign and frightened myself with the thought that he could choose not to recognize the 2020 elections and simply stay put. I felt crazy, so I retreated into my faith in our democratic institutions. I shut up even as Trump started musing publicly about delegitimizing the 2020 election, saying in 2019 that he might remain in the White House for “at least for 10 or 14 years.” Marc Maron even made my nightmare part of his comedy special, End Times Fun. It was so on the nose, I felt punched in the face. When we saw him in Austin, we walked out. Saying aloud what the president was saying himself was too scary.
Now I have to accept that the arrow pointing to our current location on the map places us in a scary situation. There’s a word for countries ruled by strongmen unchecked by institutional guardrails. The police are so aggrieved and compromised that they have picked sides, and it’s with the armed vigilantes ready to help overturn an election. Scientists are being censored during a pandemic that exposed our country’s inability to deal with clear and present dangers. This has put tens of millions out of work, and we might not have seen the worst of the recession yet. Wall Street is warning investors about the “increased expectations for a contested election result.” Human rights leaders say we are “retreating from America’s bipartisan role as a leader in the fight against global corruption.” Humanitarian aid workers, diplomats, and national security experts have been warning us we were headed in this direction. The first debate showed we’re pulling into the station.
This is what a failing state looks like, and what he is describing is a coup. Send lawyers, guns, and money. The shit has hit the fan.
Next week we’re talking about what we’re going to do about it. It’s OK. I’ve got a plan. Yes, the president is telling us he will not accept losing at the ballot box and call out domestic terrorists against his own citizens. But that is not the end of this story. Remember, I was a Russian major. I got my college degree in revolutions and dictators. Those jackwagons are always scared of poetry, and we’re the poets of our own democracy. You’re going to want to stick around to the end of this story, because we get to be our own heroes.
When Worlds Collide
by Thema Thomas
Thema and I used to work together. She started in February in our DC office. In March, thanks to ubiquitous video calls, I spent many hours looking at her face hiding under her ball cap in her bedroom. She would listen to her team members talk, and I began to notice her expert side eye. She is queer, and she stayed indoors for her first Pride as a college graduate. She is Black, and she stayed in that room during the protests. I asked her to write about what it was like to start her career and have to spend it in isolation, cut off not only from her co-workers but from historical and cultural milestones taking place right outside.
What she turned in was a revelatory gift, and I’m so happy to introduce you to my friend Thema and “When Worlds Collide.”
“We thought you were out there.”
“Out where?”
“Turn on the news.”
Rule by Minority
by Stefan Hankin
Pollster Stefan Hankin, who subbed for me when I was away on the book project with “The Day Data Died,” is back to explain the history of how we have come to be ruled by a minority of our population with “Rule by Minority.”
The strength of minority power in the Legislative Branch is arguably even more egregious. Indeed, in the 2018 midterm elections, 18 million more people cast votes for Democratic Senators than Republican Senators and yet the Democrats came away two seats less than they started with.
Red Ticket: My First Million
by Robin Whetstone
This weekend in Red Ticket, Robin becomes a millionaire three times over. There’s a catch.
“Julia,” I whispered, “What is this building?”
“This is rest home for retired truck drivers,” she whispered back.
What was Julia seeing that I wasn’t? A logo? An inscription? But there was only that sign. Profilaktika #4. “How do you know?” I whispered.
She leaned her head toward me again and whispered her response. “I don’t know,” she said.
RIP
A nineteen-year-old North Carolina university student in ‘tremendous shape’”
Esther Bryant Kyles and Pastor Edwin Kyles Jr.
How we’re getting through it
Not crying (you are)
Internalizing these rules
And then re-learning these rules
Reliving “the Curse” with Robert Andino
Making gochujang chicken and roasted vegetables
What I’m reading
Bishop Garrison: “Everything is Not a Rabbit”
Michelle Goldberg: “Trump Wants You to Think You Can’t Get Rid of Him: His strongman threats are scary. But don’t forget that he’s weak.”
Harvard Business Review: “The Next Big Breakthrough in AI Will Be Around Language”
Monica Hesse: “Another woman says the president assaulted her. Is anyone listening?”
Ryan Holiday: “If You’re Not Seeking Out Challenges, How Are You Going to Get Better?”
Ann Hornaday: “Trump has turned disaster flicks into real life. And this one just took a dire turn.”
Kiese Makeba Laymon: “Mississippi: A Poem, in Days”
Yehudah Mirsky: “On Yom Kippur, what if we can’t forgive our enemies?”
Simon Owen: “Should media companies be afraid of Substack?”
Joe Pompeo: “‘Connect the Dots’: Marty Baron Warns Washington Post Staff About Covering Hacked Materials”
Smithsonian: “The Unsuccessful WWII Plot to Fight the Japanese With Radioactive Foxes: An outlandish idea codenamed ‘Operation Fantasia’ aimed to demoralize the Axis power by mimicking legendary spirits”
Wired: “The Cheating Scandal That Ripped the Poker World Apart: Mike Postle was on an epic winning streak at a California casino. Veronica Brill thought he had to be playing dirty. Let the chips fall where they may.”
Dan Zak: “November may be the darkest month Americans have seen in a long time”
What I’m watching
My wife Sonia Van Meter, who at one time was an aspiring Martian, did an Instagram Live to talk about Netflix’s Away.
Why We March from the National Museum of African American History & Culture does an elegant job of linking today’s marches to the ‘60s.
It’s important to know that Coastal Elites on HBO is funny, or at least has funny elements, because if you don’t include humor when giving voice to the so-called coastal elites delivering these monologues then it would just be one long primal scream. Jay Roach (Austin Powers movies, The Campaign, Bombshell) directs the Paul Rudnick (Addams Family Values, In & Out, and The Stepford Wives) script and stars Bette Midler, Kaitlyn Dever, Dan Levy, Sarah Paulson, and Issa Rae, each of whom carried considerable weight. This is the equivalent to The New York Times endlessly interviewing people in diners in Pennsylvania, but more honest. If you wonder why liberals seem a little worked up these days, watch this. It’s honest.
What I’m listening to
“Wander” by Kevin Morby makes me want to get back out on the road.
Kevin Tucker’s review of The Happy Fits’ What Could Be Better turned me onto the pop trio that includes a guitarist, a drummer, and a lead singer playing cello. It’s some happy, poppy stuff people.
Many reviews of The Happy Fits over the past few years have compared their music to bands such as the Violent Femmes, Vampire Weekend and The Killers. But I hear their music echoing much further back to pop acts like The Turtles, Paul Revere & The Raiders and, in the case of this song called "Moving," the early Beatles.
After listening to “Moving,” I’m pretty sure Tucker means the comparison to the Beatles to be a positive thing.
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The latest Real Clear Politics polling average has Trump’s lead in Texas at 3.5%. Texas is a swing state. Let’s act like it.
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Want a way to send gifts and support local restaurants? Goldbelly’s got you hooked up.
I now offer personal career coaching sessions through Need Hop.
The extent of my political work this election cycle is as the treasurer to a Super PAC with one mission: helping Joe Biden win Texas. If you want to help, here’s how:
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