The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Weekend Special #29 -- "A Race Next Door #9 Special"

Episode Date: October 2, 2020

With Trump suffering from Covid and in hospital, Bruce joins for a special.

on here. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here with the latest episode of the Bridge Daily. It is Friday and that means normally, that means the weekend special, in this case for number 29, week number 29. Your letters, your thoughts, your comments, your questions. But, hey, I'm sure you've been watching the news on Friday and you've seen things have happened. So instead, we're going to have a special edition of the race next door because it's just too interesting a topic

now. We can't miss it it i'll hold on to your letters keep them through until next week and i'm sure we'll get the best ones on next week in the meantime stand by for you know what and what in this case means this. That's right, our Hail to the Chief music, which is our theme music for the race next door. So here are the facts as of this moment, and they are not going to change over the next few days. The facts are the President of the United States, Donald Trump,

has a virus of which there is no cure. And there have been so far about 210,000 Americans who have died from that same virus. Donald Trump finds out he's got it on a Thursday night. By Friday evening, he's in the Walter Reed Hospital, the medical center in Washington. They say for a few days to recover. Well, who knows? We don't know the real medical situation

other than the fact he has the virus. It's barely 30 days away from the November 3rd election. It's been a tumultuous week already. There was the debate. You watched it or you heard it. You heard us on Wednesday night talking about it 24 hours after the fact, it has been an incredible week. And clearly yet another week that has been disastrous for Donald Trump on a lot of fronts. But at this point, it's his health that is the concern of the nation. People wishing the Trumps well with this latest challenge. However, there is an election campaign going on,

and that's why we've got Bruce Anderson joining us again from Ottawa. Bruce, good to have you with us. Let's talk about this because you've got to wonder, we'll try and get in our helicopter and look at this in terms of the strategic political view of what's happening because we're not doctors there's no point talking about that end of things strategically the dynamic in terms of the two campaigns what happens now at this point let's deal with the republicans first what do you take yeah, obviously, I think the first thing that's going on in terms of the Trump campaign, Peter, is they're anxious to know what's the health condition of the president.

And it seems from what we've been hearing this afternoon that his condition has not been getting better, that it's been getting worse. And I think that they'll be pressing medical authorities to give them some idea of just how long they can expect if all goes well and his body responds well to either the treatment or just its own ability to fight off this infection, how long it will be before he can be back campaigning again. And so let's bear in mind a couple of numbers. It is, I think, 32 days exactly to the election day. The normal incubation and the extent of illness for somebody who is infected with COVID, it can be from 16 days if you have a mild case that you deal with fairly easily to up to 10 weeks. And it can go obviously longer than that if people are struck with a case so serious that it threatens their life. So if we think about those timeframes and you're trying to think about it from a campaign planning standpoint, you're desperate to know, will the president potentially going to be the person who becomes president if Trump wins the election, but loses his life or can't continue in office because of

the extent of the damage that this disease causes to him. So those will be giant unknowns. And in the meantime, I think what they've got to be struggling with is whether or not to, I don't want to sound too cynical saying this, but try to at least harvest some of the empathy that people have for the president as he deals with this illness and the illness with the First Lady, which really means acknowledging that he is sick, that he is suffering, that he's going through something that's quite torturous. Or on the other hand, are they going to try to maintain that he's been right all along, that you can get this, and you can fight it off, and you can be back in fighting trim very soon? I think it's obviously too early for them to decide which of those approaches might make the most sense until they have a little bit more information,

but they'll need to make some sort of call about that in the next two to three days, I would think. And that sounds overly cynical because somebody's health is at stake here, but these campaigns, let's remember, are multi-billion dollar enterprises and they only have 32 days left to run. And so the decisions that all of the people involved in them make have to be really carefully thought out, and not only because of the president's campaign, but because there are many, many other Republican candidates whose fortunes hang somewhat in the balance as well. Well, going into this week, going into this weekend, actually, even after the debate,

they were 10 points down in most national polls, and they were in trouble in most battleground states. So, I mean, it's hard to see them going down any lower, even as a result of this. And you kind of hinted at it, that there is the potential for their numbers to actually go up. I mean, there is a tendency on the part of Americans to rally around their president at times of conflict, at times of war, and in times of certain degrees of sickness. Now, this is different. This president's different than any other. This disease is different than anything else we've watched. And his attitude towards this disease over the last six months has not been one that would endear him to those who were concerned about the disease.

So it's hard to gauge whether there will be some kind of sympathy push towards him. I think most people, most reasonable people, hope that he and his family are going to come out of this okay um but whether that translates into more people voting for him than would have two days ago yeah i'm not sure i'm not sure either i kind of feel like this uh this has a greater potential if you had to sort of pick which of the balance which of those two scenarios more likely on balance, that people will want him to be better, but they won't want him to come back as president. And in part, I say that because even if Biden downs tools from a campaigning standpoint, which I think he probably will in terms of any criticism of the president. He doesn't need to say what everybody can see, which is this

president has been cavalier about the disease. He even made a joke or tried to make a joke, tried to mock Joe Biden at the debate the other night by saying Biden wore a mask even when he didn't need to, and I wear a mask when I need to. And there are so many examples of Trump trying to minimize the severity of this situation, that there couldn't have been a more effective intervention in this campaign to say, he's been wrong about this pandemic all along. And so you can want him to get better, but you might not want him back. Because really this, I think, was coming down to an election that on the one hand was about somebody

whose kind of principal product was chaos compared to somebody who basically was offering decency and stability. Now, there's all kinds of other things at play here, but if I think about one word to describe the Tuesday that we saw with the debate, it would have been chaos. And it would have been impossible for me to imagine that things would have seemed more chaotic by the end of the week. But here we are. And chaos is really the sense that you have about this political situation

where the president is stricken with this disease that might make it impossible for him to campaign for the rest of this election period. You mentioned a moment ago Mike Pence, the vice president, and I want to get to that issue, the whole vice presidential thing, because there is a debate next week between the vice presidents, the vice president. And I want to get to that issue, the whole vice presidential thing, because there is a debate next week between the vice presidents and the vice presidential candidates. And there's every indication that he's going to go ahead. But I want to set that aside for a moment. We'll come back to that. Let me swing over to the Democrats in terms of

Joe Biden, because this is, you've got to be awfully careful how you play this in terms of what you say, how you say it, what you talk about. He gave a speech this afternoon, a pretty good one. He was very sympathetic to the Trumps, wishing them the best. He did make the point that this just underlines how serious this virus is.

And then he moved on. He was in Michigan. He moved on to a discussion about the Rust Belt states and what needs to happen there. But it's a very delicate balance, even to the point of how he campaigns and if he campaigns during this period, especially until we have a better sense of what's really happening inside that hospital room with the president. It's a tricky one. And how do you find that balance? Well, I think that one of the things that Biden has going for him in terms of the skill set that you need to try to manage a situation like this is he's got a lot of empathy.

You know, he's almost kind of known for, as some politicians, they might be tempted to. But to try to, you know, to try to find that zone where he doesn't say what doesn't need to be said. that this is a situation where Donald Trump ran a campaign, ran a government, presented himself to the American public, as though this was nowhere near as serious a situation as people were saying, even though he said privately to Bob Woodward that it was a killer and he knew how serious it was. But these images of the staff getting on that helicopter, none of them wearing masks and all in kind of close contact. Biden doesn't any longer need to say that Donald press secretary made, that his staff made, not to tell other people that they were in contact with somebody who was infected. Biden to sit on the sidelines or is there something that he can do? And I think there is something that he can do. It's something that he must do and something that all of the Democrats who are on the down tickets are going to be hoping that he does, which is to use the opportunity to say, I'm going to start every day wishing the president and his family and anybody else who's

become infected well, and I'm going to then move on to what it is that we want to do for the country. What's our pandemic plan? What's our economic plan? What's our climate change plan? And I'll probably even finish with another hope for the president and others to get well soon. That almost means that he's got a free run at getting his policy agenda out in front of people. And, you know, let's be clear, it's built to appeal to a very wide mass of Americans. And I think if he talks about it more because he's less put on the defensive by a barking Donald Trump, more people will hear about it it's interesting because you're at your way the way you're painting this is that it's almost easier for him now and i i mean i don't mean that uh in any kind of brutal way he's ahead i do i do think it is i in the sense that he's ahead and that people were really kind

of going i don't know um i feel you know of the voters, as we've talked about before, I think maybe there's 8% undecided voters. Those are mostly 2016 Trump voters who are thinking about voting Biden. There's hardly any people who are Democrats who are thinking about voting Trump. see here. They're going to see a terrible debate performance by the president that really kind of reminded them of all the reasons why they had wanted to move away. And between now and election day, they may not hear very much that's policy specific. They might not hear very interesting or edgy or combustible attacks on the Biden agenda. They might just have Joe Biden saying, I'm sorry, the president's sick and I hope he gets better soon. And by the way, here's what I have on offer. And in that sense, it could be it could be easier for Mr. Biden to kind of have a bigger share of voice. Let me put it that way. Unimpeded by a president who's very, very good when he's on his game at disrupting the flow of the conversation and grabbing the limelight and bringing attention back to him.

It's never happened before in the history of the United States. But I'm sure at some point in the hours ahead or the days ahead, somebody, a Lindsey Graham type, is going to say, we've got to put the election off. We've got this, we can't have the election with this happening, with the president in a hospital, can't campaign, it's not fair, it's whatever. I predict that that's going to happen. Somebody's at least going to float that as an idea. And it'll be more than interesting to see how the Democrats respond to that. You know, I'm not sure how...

It's in the Constitution that there has to be a change of power, whether it's a change to the incumbent on January 20th in the election cycle. I'm not sure whether it's in the constitution, but there has to be an election on whatever it is, the first Tuesday in November. There may well be, and if it is, it's going to be hard to change that, but that won't stop people from trying. Okay, let's move it to the vice president because all of a sudden, next week's debate, if in fact it still happens, takes on a whole new dynamic.

It was always going to be interesting and was going to be something that people wanted to watch because of Kamala Harris's nomination as vice president and wanting to see her go up against Mike Pence. Now you very well may be looking at Mike Pence in a different light than you were looking at him even 24 hours ago. Sure he's the vice president, sure he becomes president if something happened to the president, but nobody likes to think that way. But today they're forced to think that way. So they'll be looking at him differently.

And the way they've looked at him for the last almost four years is this toady who is kind of a sycophant to Trump and never challenges him. He will kind of have the stage in a way almost to himself next week and won't necessarily have to look like he's a toady, of which he is, or certainly has been. I don't know. I think it gives him an opportunity to be more Mike Pence than Donald Trump's flunky. We'll see. That's interesting.

I almost think he's been more popular as a toady than he was as Mike Pence. And I say that because I think those base MAGA voters, the only thing they really wanted from him was total fealty to Trump because Trump is the show for them. Trump is the star. He's the hero of the movie. And Pence, the only thing that Pence could do was get it wrong by not being as enthusiastic as he has been. his kind of personal positions and value systems held up to a bunch of scrutiny and kind of put to the kind of stress test that a campaign generally does when people are thinking, well, am I maybe electing this guy as president? He might not be as ready for that kind of debate as one might think, even though he's been involved in politics for a long time.

And I do think as he approaches that debate, he's got a really interesting choice to make. He either has to present himself in that debate as somebody who could be a successful president if he needed to be sometime soon. And if he does that, is he going to draw the ire of the president? Is he going to draw the ire of groups in society who haven't spent their time focusing on what's wrong with Mike Pence because they maybe already thought that Trump was going to lose or because it was just more appealing to spend their time focusing on Trump's problems. But there definitely will be people getting ready to describe in chapter and verse everything that's wrong with Mike Pence. And and so that won't be that easy for him.

I think the other thing is that if he was approaching this debate. As Trump was from the standpoint of I'm going to be the aggressor. I'm going to constantly be on the attack. I'm going to constantly attack the Democrats for everything that they would do to harm the country. I don't think that's going to work as well, because I think the big elephant in the room as people watch this debate is a president who, along with his vice president, who actually had charge of this file, if I remember correctly, the pandemic file. Sure.

The president is laid low by this infection because he didn't take it seriously enough. And so if you're going to be the aggressor, you really don't want to do that if every time the other person can come back at you and say, look at where we are. We don't even know who your candidate is effectively on Election Day at this point because we're waiting to see how this infection turns out. So that's not a very auspicious situation for him. He's got a lot of tough choices in terms of how to prepare. Has the situation changed for Kamala Harris at all in terms of the way she prepares? Yes, I do. I think it does. I think that the Democrats had to approach the vice presidential debate more from the standpoint of she needed to prove that she was more energetic and effective and articulated on point that Mike Pence was, even though Biden had to approach the debate almost

from the standpoint of, I need to look like I'm the antidote to chaos. I'm stable. I'm thoughtful. I can be articulate and persuasive at given points in time, but I'm not going to try to yell all night long. I'm not saying she's going to try to yell all night long, but she has the opportunity, and I think people will be expecting her to do this, to point out what's been wrong with the Trump-Pence agenda, what's been wrong for America in the Trump-Pence agenda, not just on the pandemic, but obviously that'll be the headline, but in every other aspect. So I think she will be the aggressor in that debate. And I think that that's what people are kind of looking for her to do. And I think it'll be a difficult time for Mike Pence in that context because she's pretty effective. You know, the last point here on this special race next door, and that is, you know, when you look at the last month or six weeks of the Trump campaign,

it's just been one unholy mess. It's been one disaster after another. And I doubt whether I have the sequence here right, but just think of all the different things that have happened. There was that piece in the Atlantic about the kind of language he used about America's military heroes, losers and suckers. There was the Bob Woodward book, Rage, which is devastating in terms of his handling of the pandemic and the lies he was telling the American people about the severity of the virus. There was the money issue about how they, you know,

they'd raised a billion dollars but blown $800 million of it with nothing to show for it. And we're kind of running low on cash. They fire their campaign manager who then tries to kill himself. I mean, and now this. You know, the debate performance, first of all, which most people agree was a disaster, and now it turns out that he's got the virus, he's got COVID-19. You look at this string of one disaster after another,

you look at their position in the race, you look at the timetable, I think you said 32 days left, how they pull this one out, what would have to happen in 32 days to turn this around, it's almost like you go, it would be impossible. Yeah, it's very hard to see it. And I do think that this is a situation where, you know, I don't think you'd want to call it a self-inflicted wound but i guess in some respects it is so so people can feel empathy and want the president to get better um but that's not the same as saying

this just happened to him and there was no way for it to be avoided this is so central to the choices that he's been making and encouraging other people to make, but speaking out of both sides of his mouth, that it's impossible for people to detach the empathy that they might feel for him from the judgment that needs to be passed on how he and his staff and his campaign have handled themselves through this. The second thing I would say, Peter, is that his brand is really about ferocity. It's about he's the most energetic. He's the most ginned up all the time. He's the guy that wants to go to rallies with 20,000 people and bring them to kind of a screaming crescendo all the time. And he's the guy who makes fun of other people for being sleepy or slow or having less energy

than him. And if he can't get that back, he's lost his brand. And that's a very, very serious thing for any campaign. Can he pivot to something else? He can. But will it seem genuine and authentic? I'd say it's hard to say, but I really mean to say, no, I don't think he can. And then the last thing I would say is that one thing we know is that campaigns raise more money when they look like they're winning.

And they raise a lot less money when they look like they're losing. And there are lots of Republican candidates in the Senate, for example, who are desperate for money, who haven't felt the coattails that they felt in 2016 from Trump's fundraising effort, Lindsey Graham being a particular case in point. So they're already, you've got these Republican candidates in close Senate races, starving for cash. And they generally benefit when the Republican candidate for president is doing well, and there's momentum for that side of the ticket. But when it goes the other way, it's very hard for those big donors to decide to write another check for $10,000 or $20,000 or $100,000 if they think this campaign is doomed. And so that's another critical factor in terms of how this illness plays itself out

and whether the president's going to be able to get back on his feet and look like he's recovered his ferocity and start raising cash and getting some momentum back into his campaign. All right. Listen, thank you, Bruce, for making time for us for the special edition of The Race Next Door. I'm sure that listeners will be appreciative of hearing your insight and your thoughts as to how this all will unfold or might unfold in the days and weeks ahead. Thanks, Bruce. Well, it was great to talk to you again, Peter.

Have a good weekend. And there you go, our special edition of The Race Next Door for Friday night. And, of course, that meant what preempted was your questions and your thoughts and your ideas for the weekend special. But I'm going to hold on to them. Quite a few letters actually came in. I'm going to hold on to them, and we'll take a run at it one day next week. And I'm sure you may have thoughts on all this as well. I mean, it's been an incredible week south of the sure you may have thoughts on all this as well. I mean, it's been an incredible week south of the border and we're peering over the fence watching it all.

So if you have thoughts about it, drop me a line, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. So for this special edition, I'm Peter Mansbridge for Bruce Anderson. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you again on Monday.