After watching a tedious day of Senate Judiciary Committee hearings over the Supreme Court confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, I wrote about it at New York:

Perhaps someday we will look back on this week as a momentous turning point, as the substantive constitutional questions Barrett is largely refusing to answer are weighty and consequential and her expected confirmation will shift the Supreme Court sharply to the right. But at the moment, the temperature is far lower than it was two years ago during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings.

Now, obviously, the Kavanaugh confirmation battle came to revolve around Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault against the nominee, and his angry counterattacks on Democrats for unveiling and considering them. It is extremely unlikely anything equally controversial and dramatic will arise during this week’s proceedings. But that isn’t the only reason the current proceedings feel much different. The dynamics at play in the Barrett hearings are fundamentally different in ways that benefit the nominee and her backers. Here’s why the “rush to judgement” on Barrett less than a month before a presidential election doesn’t feel like a bigger scandal:

This Time the Nominee’s Character and Personal Background Are Assets, Not Handicaps

Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett’s résumés are similar in some respects. Both are observant Roman Catholics of a traditionalist bent; longtime members of the conservative Federalist Society; and beneficiaries of past appointments from Republican presidents. But Barrett’s background has served as both shield and sword for her proponents in a way that Kavanaugh’s did not. Even before President Trump nominated Barrett to the Supreme Court, Republicans cleverly alleged that Democrats would expose anti-Catholic (or even anti-Christian) animus in an examination of her worldview. Republicans claim, unfairly, that the opposing party already did this during the 2017 hearings that preceded Barrett’s confirmation to the Seventh Circuit, so in recent days Democrats have given her belief system a wide berth.

During a less rushed confirmation process, Barrett’s longtime membership in People of Praise, a secretive charismatic Christian group characterized by private oaths and an allegedly patriarchal leadership structure, might have sparked controversy — and it’s likely progressive investigators are looking into it all. But Senate Democrats won’t go there on their own.

In the meantime, Barrett’s unusual personal and professional career has lent itself to hagiographical treatment in a way that Brett Kavanaugh’s conventional climb to the Court couldn’t support even if he hadn’t been accused of sexual assault. As Christine Cauterucci notes at Slate, she’s become an odd sort of symbol of ersatz feminism for anti-feminists:

“In a crude way, [Barrett’s] lived example supports their argument that women’s choices, not the systemic restriction of those choices, is the only thing holding women back. It’s this belief that allows anti-choice activists to call themselves feminists and argue that abortion restrictions are not sexist — that assaults on a woman’s right to govern her own medical care, control what happens to her body, and choose when and whether to have children do not hold a woman back from achieving everything she wants in life.”

And on the first day of the hearings, Republican paeans to Barrett’s large and diverse family were ubiquitous, as Robin Givhan observed:

“Rare was the Republican on the committee who was able to deliver an opening statement without referring to the seven children in the Barrett family. This feat of parenting seemed to leave them gobsmacked with admiration and utterly mystified as to how a two-parent household with significant financial resources was capable of wrangling such a large brood without the missus showing up with oatmeal on her clothes.”

Republicans Have Just Enough Breathing Room in the Senate

Since Democrats had a very successful 2018 midterm election, it is sometimes forgotten that Republicans achieved a net gain of two Senate seats that year. Trump and others have propagated the theory that the Kavanaugh hearings “saved” the Republican Senate by energizing the party’s conservative base, and it may have made a slight difference on the margins in this or that close race. But the reality is that the 2018 Senate landscape was wildly slanted in the GOP’s direction, as I noted at the time:

“[A]’“split decision’ narrative driven by the GOP’s Senate gains was promoted by Republicans and media outlets alike. This was understandable since “Republicans retained the Senate because of the most insanely pro-GOP landscape ever” is not an interpretation that fits well into a headline or a tweet.”

In any event, the 51-49 margin by which the Republicans controlled the Senate in 2018 is 53-47 now, and that has made an enormous difference in the dynamics. The defection of Democrat Joe Manchin in Kavanaugh’s favor gave the GOP a two-vote cushion in 2018; it’s three now without any Democratic votes. So Republicans can afford to lose the electorally endangered Susan Collins (as they already have), the other pro-choice Republican senator, Lisa Murkowski, and a random third senator, without consequences. Democrats know that, which is why they seem resigned to her confirmation.

The Senate margin also helps explain the Republican rush to get the confirmation done before Election Day; the Arizona Senate contest is a special election to complete the term of the late John McCain; Republican Martha McSally was appointed to the McCain seat until November 3. If, as currently seems likely, Democrat Mark Kelly defeats her, the Republican margin in the Senate instantly drops to two votes.

Democrats Have Decided to Use the Hearings to Reinforce Their 2020 Health-Care Talking Points

It’s impossible to know what line of attack Democrats might have taken in 2018 had Brett Kavanaugh not been facing sexual-assault allegations. But they might well have sought to reinforce their very effective midterm messaging on health-care policy thanks to pending Obamacare litigation.

That litigation is now on the Supreme Court’s doorstep, with oral arguments in California v. Texas scheduled to take place on November 10. The connection between the Supreme Court and a popular health-care law embodying protections for people with preexisting conditions is now very, very proximate, which also makes the acutely embarrassing Republican inability to design (or even describe) an Obamacare replacement more relevant than ever.

Since Barrett can’t say anything reassuring about her views on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act (which are clear and discomforting, if not exactly on the point raised in California v. Texas), her hearings provide a risk-free opportunity for the Donkey Party to hold every elephant’s feet to the fire on a subject voters care about a great deal. They are going to take it, and that keeps the heat off Barrett herself.

It’s 2020!

The political environment surrounding the Kavanaugh confirmation process was scorching hot, but not like 2020’s. Barrett’s confirmation hearing is being overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic — particularly the fact that the president and several Senate Judiciary Committee members have contracted COVID-19, with some infections quite likely having been spread at a White House reception honoring Barrett.

But ultimately the strangest thing about this confirmation remains its proximity to a high-stakes election in which control of both the presidency and the Senate could very well change. That Barrett is being asked how she’d feel about deciding a presidential election that Trump has clearly already decided to contest if he loses is a reminder that another conservative justice isn’t the only present threat to the Constitution as we know it. Barrett’s confirmation, important as it is, cannot stand out starkly against a background so lurid and consequential as today’s.

The sort of ho-hum reaction to Mike Pence’s evasions during the veep debate really annoyed me when it came to one subject, so I wrote about it at New York:

In public appearances, politicians often avoid discussion of their more unpopular positions. When they are at or near the top of a party ticket, moreover, they tend to downplay policy stances that divide their own team or that are under internal discussion. That’s why Joe Biden and Kamala Harris didn’t directly answer questions about hypothetical “court-packing” schemes that Democrats might or might not pursue if Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed as Trump’s third Supreme Court justice. And it’s why Donald Trump and Mike Pence evade blunt questions about the administration’s Cheshire cat of a health-care plan.

But lumping all the evasions together as functionally equivalent isn’t right. One particular Pence side step in Wednesday’s vice-presidential debate is astonishing if you know anything about the man’s long history as a crusader against legalized abortion. Asked by moderator Susan Page what he’d want his own state of Indiana to do if Roe v. Wade is reversed and states could outlaw abortion, Pence would not answer other than a vague reference to himself as “pro-life,” a term that means different things to different people. That Pence has any doubt whatsoever on exactly what he’d want Indiana to do in this suddenly very plausible hypothetical situation is preposterous, unless he’s been lying to us for his entire public career.

You don’t have to go very far to find out what Pence’s attitude toward the abortion laws of Indiana might be: As governor of the state from 2013 to 2016, he signed eight bills aimed at testing the willingness of federal courts to accept an erosion of reproductive rights while harassing abortion providers and the women who rely on them.

Before that, during his six terms in the House, Pence established the crusading identity on this subject that led Marjorie Dannenfelser of the hard-line anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List to praise him as a “pro-life trailblazer” and the best of all possible choices as Trump’s 2016 running mate. He was best known for launching the relentless attacks on public funding for Planned Parenthood that soon became part of the anti-abortion movement’s playbook at every level of government. The “defund Planned Parenthood” campaign he began nearly led to a government shutdown in 2011 and again in 2015, and was a symbolic expression of the grip the ban-abortion cause had on the Republican Party.

And speaking of that grip, Pence’s GOP has for many, many years been united in insisting that Roe v. Wade be replaced not by some sort of live-and-let-live states’ rights position on abortion policy but with a constitutional amendment banning abortion nationwide permanently. (This Human Life Amendment has been in every Republican platform since 1980.) There have been occasional attempts (by presidential nominees in particular) to insist on exceptions for pregnancies that are the product of rape and incest, or that threaten the life of the woman being ordered to carry the pregnancy to term. But the basic principal of making abortion illegal has been sacrosanct, as Michael Kinsley explained in 2012:

“Ever since [1984], with various rhetorical flourishes, the platform has contained the same four elements: 1) the unborn child has a ‘fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed’; 2) endorsement of a ‘human life’ constitutional amendment; 3) a call for judges who ‘respect human life’; and 4) new laws to ‘make clear’ that the fetus is a ‘person’ under the 14th Amendment. Paul Ryan has co-sponsored such legislation, declaring that the fetus is a ‘person.'”

An even more visible proponent of “personhood” legislation has been — you guessed it — Mike Pence. Brian Tashman explained the significance of this position when Pence joined Trump’s ticket in 2016:

“Advocates of federal personhood bills believe that if Congress passes legislation defining ‘personhood’ as beginning at conception, they can bypass and nullify Roe v. Wade, criminalizing abortion nationwide with no exceptions. While the personhood movement has traditionally sat on the far-right fringes of the anti-abortion movement, in recent years Republican politicians like Pence have brought the extremist cause into the GOP mainstream. Unlike more established abortion rights opponents that seek to cut off access to abortion and gradually outlaw the procedure, personhood activists want the government to immediately end abortion in all cases.”

Dubious as it is as a legal theory for circumventing the Constitution, the “personhood” movement is also too radical for the taste of many abortion opponents, suggesting as it does that certain forms of contraception might be banned as interfering with the development of a fertilized ovum. Personhood ballot initiatives have lost badly in Colorado, North Dakota, and (most recently) Mississippi. That Pence is inclined to go that far is another indication, should you need one, that he has not an ounce of doubt about the righteousness of taking control of reproductive systems from sea to shining sea.

On top of his single-issue devotion to the anti-abortion cause, pursuing that cause to its logical end of outlawing all abortions is Job One for a Christian right religiopolitical movement that regards Pence as its indispensable champion in the court of our erratic president. Here’s how I described Pence’s importance to Trump’s “faithful believers” in a review of a recent book about Trump’s relationship with conservative evangelicals:

“You can sense the authors’ nagging doubts, though, perhaps nourished by the new president’s nasty Twitter language and other forms of thuggish behavior toward critics. Near the very end of the book they bring in their star witness for Trump’s inner transformation: Vice-President Mike Pence, the Christian-right warhorse who constantly attests to the president’s reliance on both prayer and the prayer warriors (like Trump’s all-Evangelical Faith Advisory Committee) for whom Pence runs interference.”

All in all, it’s as likely that Pence would stop short of a total abortion ban in a world where the Supreme Court didn’t stand in his way as it is that Bernie Sanders will become a hedge-fund manager or Donald Trump a soup-kitchen cook. It’s the one thing about him that is most certain. And it’s precisely why he and his allies are so excited about Barrett’s potential advent to the Supreme Court.

So Pence’s evasions say a lot about the dishonesty of the anti-abortion movement and its doubts that its cause is winning the hearts and minds of the American people. All the efforts to distract attention from their fundamental radicalism with hand-wringing over a tiny number of late-term abortions can’t disguise that basic fact.

The President has been doing everything he can to make Election Night and the days and weeks afterwards a dangerous and potentially violent juncture. But as I noted at New York, there are real and powerful differences at work as well:

In the wake of the beer-hall ambience of this week’s first presidential debate, it’s probably no surprise that a new study suggests a coarsening of political attitudes among Americans. But researchers want to make it clear that it’s not just crude talk or combative rhetoric that’s on the rise: it’s a bipartisan trend toward condoning potential violence after the election. It’s unclear whether, or how, the president’s COVID-19 infection will affect the atmosphere — it could be sobering, or it could increase tensions even more — but as a symbol of perpetually unsettling times, it’s just more of the new normal.

The violence study was authored by an unusually distinguished and bipartisan group of researchers whose work involves studying Americans’ political attitudes. As they explain in Politico, “Late last year, we noticed an uptick in the number of respondents saying they would condone violence by their own political party, and we decided to combine our data sets to get as much information as possible on this worrisome trend.” What they found was indeed disturbing:

“Among Americans who identify as Democrat or Republican, 1 in 3 now believe that violence could be justified to advance their parties’ political goals—a substantial increase over the last three years.

“In September, 44 percent of Republicans and 41 percent of Democrats said there would be at least ‘a little’ justification for violence if the other party’s nominee wins the election. Those figures are both up from June, when 35 percent of Republicans and 37 percent of Democrats expressed the same sentiment.”

Perhaps more important, there’s a hard kernel of politically engaged Americans who might be the first in the streets if things go really bad:

“There has been an even larger increase in the share of both Democrats and Republicans who believe there would be either ‘a lot’ or ‘a great deal’ of justification for violence if their party were to lose in November. The share of Republicans seeing substantial justification for violence if their side loses jumped from 15 percent in June to 20 percent in September, while the share of Democrats jumped from 16 percent to 19 percent.”

The numbers almost certainly reflect a steadily increasing bipartisan belief that the other side is preparing to seize the presidency by illegitimate means. Most of that is attributable to the president, who has been alleging over and over that Democrats plan to “rig” the election via manipulation of mail ballots. Trump’s subsequent refusal to say anything reassuring about his willingness to accept an election loss has produced a countervailing conviction among left-of-center observers that he is planning to contest the results if he loses, perhaps by a premature victory declaration on Election Night, or maybe by preventing the full counting of votes in the courts or even by force.

And even among those who don’t necessarily suspect the other side of plans to steal the election, there is a growing awareness that resolution of this election could drag on for an unprecedented length of time as the parties battle in court over a bumper crop of slowly counted mail ballots. If the presidential contest is as close as most expect, this period of post-election uncertainty could violently spill over into the streets. While the roughly one-in-five voters in the new study who think violence might well be justified may not themselves take to the barricades, there will clearly be a large enough pool of sympathizers to make large-scale conflicts possible. Even peaceful protests could turn ugly.

What can be done to turn down the temperature? The study’s authors clearly think it’s a leadership issue:

“Recent research on the United States reaffirms this timeless truth: Leaders play an essential role in fueling the fire or extinguishing the flames of violence among their followers. Preliminary studies show that messages from Biden or Trump denouncing all violence can reduce mass approval of violence.”

Biden has already done that, and it seems unlikely that after having spent months and months relentlessly undermining the legitimacy of the election Trump is going to say “Just kidding!” or even “Yes, the election is rigged, but nobody should get too upset over it!” Calming the waters really isn’t his style.

But while Trump is clearly the arsonist striking matches in a bone-dry forest, let’s not pretend that partisan and ideological polarization in this country is all artificial or cynically manufactured. Trump is a master of exploiting Americans’ existing divisions, which reflect significant disagreements on values and priorities. I won’t go through an exhaustive list, but a moment’s thought conjures up many. Many millions of Americans believe legalized abortion is an American holocaust, while many millions more view revocation of reproductive rights as a barbaric relic of ancient patriarchy that reduces women to brood mares under state supervision. There is a growing conviction on the left that climate change is an imminent threat to the survival of civilization, and a growing conviction on the right that the discussion of climate change is a ruse to justify the introduction of socialism. One large segment of the population thinks systemic racism against Blacks and other minority groups is a cancer eating at American society, breeding inequity and injustice. Another thinks that this is tantamount to the destruction of white people, aided by “political correctness” and “cancel culture” wiping out free speech.

And much more fundamentally, American conservatism is dominated by those who believe that the “inalienable rights” that make the country what it is include property rights, religious rights, gun rights, parental rights, and of course a fetal “right to life” — all based on divine will, natural law, and the wisdom of the Founders — that no majority, however large, should ever be allowed to traduce. And an increasingly alarmed and dominant faction of American progressives believe a coalition of economic and cultural reactionaries are successfully mastering the tools of institutional and economic power to frustrate the popular will and entrench their own power perpetually.

These are not beliefs and fears that you can talk away or resolve with a blue-ribbon commission, although that is what, predictably, the authors of the violence report suggested:

“The best hope now to tamp down support for this potential political violence is to establish an independent, bipartisan third force—a broad commission of distinguished leaders and democratic elders of both parties and of civil society. Its mission would be to reaffirm and defend our democratic norms, especially the critical principles that every valid vote should be counted and that political violence is never justified in the United States. Congress should immediately appoint such a commission.”

This is not the sort of thing that a deeply divided Congress is likely to do, and while harmless, the suggestion is based on the idea that there is general acceptance of what “democratic norms” mean at a time when the president and his party argue that “every valid vote” excludes many millions of mail ballots. But more basically, papering over partisan and ideological differences misses the essential point of why they exist.

Minimizing their significance is actually an insult to the very idea of principled activism. Conservatives are not wrong to recognize that massive demographic, technological, and cultural trends threaten a way of life they desperately want to preserve, and progressives are not wrong to recognize the old institutional arrangements that kept politics ostensibly “peaceful” were intended to maintain a deeply unjust status quo.

If the president has his way, we may find out this very year how rickety the old institutional arrangements for presidential elections are, and how violently large numbers of people care about the outcome. I pray we can avoid pitched battles in the streets, and if we are lucky, avoid a contested election. But let’s not pretend people are ready to take matters into their own hands because of a frivolous partisanship that has no place in America. If we’ve learned anything in this plague year, it should be that politics matter, and that (as Trump rightly said in the first debate) elections have consequences. Violence can indeed set our country on fire, but the kindling is all around us.

After pondering the first presidential candidate debate, I noticed a telling habit of Trump’s and wrote about it at New York:

Viewers who endured to the end of the first Biden-Trump presidential debate in Cleveland did not come away with the impression that either candidate was a modern-day Demosthenes; indeed, there were long stretches in which a complete sentence was not uttered. But unlike Joe Biden, who was as intelligible as most people his age when forced to stay up late, President Trump exhibited an increasingly visible habit of speaking in a sort of shorthand or code. National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty explains it very well:

“By far Trump’s most self-defeating habit in these debates is to refer to stories rather than tell them. He speaks as if he’s talking to people who, like himself, spend hours a day watching Fox News and have a shared folklore of scandal stories that can be referred to in shorthand. He refers to events, like ballots found in a wastepaper basket, but doesn’t tell the story of where they happened, or why they matter.”

Sometimes Trump adopts characterizations from conservative media that are axiomatic to their audiences, but not to puzzled undecided voters. A good example from the debate was the follow-up to Trump’s charge that Biden wants to eliminate private health insurance, which he hotly denied (unsurprisingly to anyone who watched the interminable discussions of Medicare for All in the Democratic primary debates). Trump’s riposte was not entirely in the English language:

“Joe, you agreed with Bernie Sanders, who’s far left, on the manifesto, we call it. And that gives you socialized medicine.”

Trump is alluding to the policy recommendations of the “unity task force” set up by Biden and Sanders in the wake of their primary fight. In a Wall Street Journal column someone must have clipped for Trump, former Republican senator Phil Gramm called the agreement a “manifesto,” and claimed that Biden was accepting Medicare for All “on an installment plan.” In fact, the “unity task force” recommendations and his own campaign’s plans don’t go in that direction at all, which produced some bitter disappointment among single-payer health-care fans at the time

But Trump wouldn’t let go of it during the debate:

President Donald J. Trump:

Listen, you agreed with Bernie Sanders and the manifesto.

Vice President Joe Biden:

There is no manifesto, number one.

Chris Wallace:

Please let him speak, Mr. President.

Vice President Joe Biden:

Number two.

President Donald J. Trump:

He just lost the left.

Vice President Joe Biden:

Number two.

President Donald J. Trump:

You just lost the left. You agreed with Bernie Sanders on a plan that you absolutely agreed to and under that plan … they call it socialized medicine.

Convinced that he had nailed Biden for abandoning an imaginary deal with “the left” that conservative media invented, Trump seemed very pleased with himself.

At another juncture, the president showed an impressive ability to telescope multiple conservative myths about crime policy:

President Donald J. Trump:

You did a crime bill, 1994, where you call them super-predators. African-Americans are super-predators and they’ve never forgotten it. They’ve never forgotten it.

Vice President Joe Biden:

I’ve never said …

Chris Wallace:

No, no, sir. It’s his two minutes.

President Donald J. Trump:

So you did that and they call you a super-predator and I’m letting people out of jail now, that you have treated the African-American population community, you have treated the black community about as bad as anybody in this country.

Conservative media have gleefully seized upon progressive criticism of Biden and the Clinton administration’s sponsorship of a 1994 comprehensive crime measure that, among many other things, toughened mandatory federal sentencing for drug offenders. The bill at the time was attacked by Republicans as weak and loaded with liberal social spending (e.g., “midnight basketball” programs), not to mention gun control. Biden indeed never referred to anyone as “super-predators” (a term actually devised by crime policy maven John DiIulio, who later worked in the Bush White House), and Hillary Clinton’s single use of the term for members of gangs working for drug cartels came two years later.

The idea that Biden locked up Black voters while Trump is “letting people out of jail” comes from the claim by Trump and his fans that his single step toward criminal-justice reform, his signature on the First Step Act, executed reluctantly after he stalled more substantial legislation for years, was of revolutionary significance. Indeed, the idea that Trump single-handedly opened prison doors has been reinforced by some conservative attacks on “his” legislation.

It’s hard to imagine anyone who wasn’t familiar with this elaborate backstory understanding that exchange between Trump and Biden. But it was crystal clear compared to what the president did when the subject of election integrity came up at the very end of the debate, when Wallace asked the candidates: “What are you prepared to do to reassure the American people that the next president will be the legitimate winner of this election?”

Biden went first and assured viewers that he’d accept an election loss once all votes were counted, and that Trump would have no choice but to do the same. Here’s how Trump responded:

“So when I listen to Joe talking about a transition [he really didn’t], there has been no transition from when I won. I won that election. And 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. They came after me spying on my campaign. They started from the day I won, and even before I won. From the day I came down the escalator with our First Lady, they were a disaster. They were a disgrace to our country, and we’ve caught them. We’ve caught them all. We’ve got it all on tape. We’ve caught them all. And by the way, you gave the idea for the Logan Act against General Flynn. You better take a look at that, because we caught you in a sense, and President Obama was sitting in the office.”

This is an elaborate reference to the conspiracy theory known as “Obamagate,” the claim that the former president — along with his Justice Department, law-enforcement leaders, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden — conspired to persecute the Trump campaign and administration (and notably former national security adviser Michael Flynn) with fake charges of collusion with Russia, partly to cover up their own treasonous interactions with shadowy foreign powers. It’s been the go-to conservative counterpunch in response to the many investigations of the president in Congress and elsewhere, but it’s really not something you can even begin to grok unless you watch a lot of conservative media, as the Guardian noted earlier this year:

“According to research compiled by the Internet Archive, analysed by GDELT and released on Wednesday, since last week Fox News and Fox Business have mentioned Flynn, the FBI and Obama far more often than the coronavirus.

“Nor has such coverage just been pursued by opinion hosts like Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson. Hosts of supposedly straight news content have happily followed suit.

“Critics and other media outlets have been quick to call out the supposed scandal, which the former Obama adviser David Plouffe called a ‘sideshow to distract from the shitshow.’”

After his Obamagate digression, Trump dealt with Wallace’s request (to which Biden responded positively) about reassuring viewers that the election results would be accepted by both candidates by saying: “It’s a disaster … this is going to be fraud like you’ve never seen.” And he then related an assortment of anecdotal claims about alleged mail-ballot fraud along with the big lie that Democratic-controlled states are sending out ballots “all over the place” in order to manufacture fake votes for Biden after Election Day.

Trump has himself been the trendsetter in this area of conspiracy-mongering, but what he is alluding to was laid out starkly in the reliably Trumpy journal The Federalist (among many, many examples):

“[W]hen you go to your local precinct to vote this fall, remember that coming behind in many states will be bags full of ballots from unseen persons. There will be no guarantee they’ll arrive on time. No, we will be told that the new system takes a little longer, with some likely tallied long after election day. And if the margin is narrow, is there any question as to which way the vote count will drift?

“More than this year’s election contests will be at stake. We may be witnesses to the end of election integrity.”

Trump and his acolytes have been discussing such lurid (if completely fabricated) scenarios for so long that it’s no wonder he feels little need to explain it methodically. And that’s his biggest problem, not just as a debater, but as a presidential candidate behind in the polls and struggling to deal with a dubious record. He seems incapable of talking to anyone who isn’t already a member of his base, familiar with its rituals, its catchphrases, and its eccentric view of history and current events. It’s likely far too late in this election cycle for him to change.

I was ready to write a muddy assessment of the first Biden-Trump debate, until the last question, which got my attention, as I wrote about at New York:

Viewers fatigued by the first Trump-Biden debate and the endless cross-talking punctuated by fights between debate moderator Chris Wallace and the president may have missed the final topic and its significance. But it was potentially a bigger deal than anything else discussed. Directly challenged to forswear an early victory claim based on his plenary dismissal of the legitimacy of slow-to-be-counted mail ballots, Trump refused, instead suggesting that the U.S. Supreme Court (buttressed by his nominee Amy Coney Barrett) resolve the election, after tossing a word salad of nearly incoherent complaints about voting by mail.

CNN reports the critical exchange:

“’Will you urge supporters to stay calm during this extended period not to engage in any civil unrest and pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified,’ asked moderator Chris Wallace.

“’I’m urging supporters to go into the poll and watch very carefully,’ Trump said tonight, beginning to slam vote by mail. ‘If it’s a fair election, I’m 100% on board. But If I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that.’”

Earlier today, I noted that Trump has been repeating several ludicrous arguments against voting by mail. In this one debate segment, he hit nearly all of them. He mentioned delays in counting mail ballots that his party is fighting in court to maintain, and that actually reflects an excessive focus on fraud. He touted a Pennsylvania incident of discarded military ballots that affected a grand total of nine votes. And he repeatedly suggested that random people are being sent mail ballots “without solicitation,” which isn’t true anywhere and isn’t even remotely accurate when it comes to any of the the battleground states.

Both candidates were asked by Wallace how they would reassure voters of the integrity of the election. Trump replied: “It’s a disaster … this is going to be fraud like you’ve never seen.” So much for reassurance.

Biden, by contrast, vowed to accept the results once all the ballots are counted, encouraged his supporters to vote in person if they can, and made this veiled threat to fight against any preemptive victory claim by Trump: “He cannot stop you from being able to determine the outcome of this election.”

Deliberately or not, Trump raised the stakes in the Barrett confirmation fight by admitting he’s counting on the Supreme Court to look at mail ballots, as the Washington Post reports:

“Noting that early voting has begun in many states, Wallace asked Trump: ‘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 in any dispute?’

“Trump answered: ‘I’m counting on them to look at the ballots, definitely. I don’t think we’ll — I hope we don’t need them in terms of the election itself. But for the ballots, I think so.’”

This represents more or less a presidential guarantee of a post–Election Day legal challenge to the legitimacy of mail ballots, which he expects the Supreme Court, to which he has appointed three members (assuming Barrett is confirmed by then), to address.

If you weren’t alarmed by Trump’s threats to fight against a full count of ballots before, it’s time to get worried.