The Daily - The Candidates: Donald Trump’s Promises

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

In a two-part examination of the policies of the president and of the man seeking to replace him, Joe Biden, we first take a look at what Donald Trump said he would do four years ago — and what he��s actually accomplished.On some of the big issues, Mr. Trump has been the president he told us he was going to be, keeping commitments on deregulation, taxes, military spending and the judiciary.But other potent promises — such as replacing Obamacare, draining “the swamp” in Washington and forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall — have withered.Today, we speak to Peter Baker, The Times’s chief White House correspondent, about Mr. Trump’s record. Tomorrow, we scrutinize Mr. Biden’s plans for the presidency.Guest: Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: We delve into the background of the candidates and present key questions about the campaigns of Donald Trump and Joe Biden.With 19 days to go, here’s a guide to the 2020 election with the latest updates, polling news and information on how to vote.

With the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that's ever held this office, that I can tell you. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. We will make America great again. A two-part examination of the policies of the president and the man seeking to replace him. There has never been an administration that's done what I've done.

We have the lowest unemployment rate. Your jobs are through the roof. No president has done more for our black community. I'm the best thing that ever happened to Puerto Rico. Our economy is the best it has ever been. The state of our union is stronger than ever before. In part one, what Donald Trump said he would do four years ago. And what he's actually accomplished. I didn't back down from my promises, and I've kept every single one. It's Thursday, October 15th. So, Peter Baker, we are having this conversation at pretty much the end of the president's first term,

when so much of how we think about him is dominated much the end of the president's first term when so much of how we think about him is dominated by his handling of the pandemic. But of course, Donald Trump was president for four years, and you covered every year of that as the chief White House correspondent for The Times. And it feels like in evaluating any presidential term, a very basic and important metric is comparing what a candidate for president said versus what president actually did in the job, kind of a simple scorecard. So with that in mind, I wonder if we could start with the promises that Donald Trump kept. Right. Exactly right. Because the president, of course, running for re-election has to make

first the case that he's done what he told people he was going to do. And Trump talks about this a lot, and so do his supporters. They explicitly say this is a president, as far as they're concerned, who's really followed through on his promises, and something that they see as rare in politics. And some of the most important things this president talked about as a candidate was the economy. Well, let's talk about Donald Trump's economic promises one by one and kind of how they actually pan out. Well, of course, taxes would be one big one. In fact, I've made a centerpiece of my economic revitalization plan, the largest middle class tax cut. And this is this is big

stuff. The largest tax cut since Ronald Reagan. As a candidate, Donald Trump promised he would cut them for both businesses and individuals, and he's done just that. Republican lawmakers say you'll begin seeing more money in your paychecks by February. That's because of the new tax reform bill Congress passed today. He passed a $1.6 trillion 10-year tax cutting package. That's one of the largest we've seen in a long time, not the largest, as he likes to claim, but definitely one of the largest. And it was a big moment for him. A beaming President Trump welcomed Republican lawmakers to the White House to celebrate the passage of the GOP's tax overhaul. And it brings down taxes, you know, particularly for the wealthy, as Republican tax cutting packages often do. And therefore, a lot of people say it's skewed.

But it also did affect people in the middle class. President Trump selling this tax overhaul as a Christmas present for the middle class, with some companies already delivering on the promise. AT&T investing $1 billion in U.S. networks while giving employees $1,000 bonuses. You hear a lot of his supporters talk about the tax cuts as one of the most important promises that he kept. So that's taxes. The American dream is dead. It really is with the regulations and the

problems. Another big promise was to get rid of a lot of regulations. You look at the regulations that you have to go through to even put up a house let alone do a business. And we can get rid of probably 75 percent of the regulations and in many ways more. He promised that he would pull back on what he saw as the over intrusive era of Obama's presidency. And he's done that. President Trump

keeping another campaign promise, cutting government regulations. Today, the Trump administration rolled back vehicle fuel efficiency standards from the Obama era. EPA rolling back the Obama-Ear Clean Power Plan. Mr. Trump meeting with business leaders today and signing an order to look into watering down banking regulations put in place in 2010 after the financial crisis. President Trump signed another executive order. Signing another executive order. Signing four bills, eliminating rules on federal contracts, land use, education, he says, kill jobs. And I think that, you know, that's obviously a controversial thing. A lot of these regulations were in place for a reason.

Particularly environmentalists would say that this is a bad thing. But from the point of view of his promise, his promise to pull back the regulatory state, that's certainly something he has made a lot of progress toward. We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. It is the cheapest single investment we can make. One of the other things, of course, that Donald Trump promises to Canada was to increase spending on the military. We will develop, build and purchase the best equipment known to mankind. And that's one more thing he's accomplished. President Trump announcing a $738 billion defense spending boost. It includes everything from new fighter jets and submarines

to a pay raise for every service member. Okay, so that is the domestic economy. And it sounds like many of the pillar promises he made on the economic front have been kept. What about another domestic set of issues, which is immigration? How many of the promises Donald Trump made on immigration have actually been kept? The first thing is I'm going to take Obama's executive order where he said, everyone just come on in. Come on in, folks. Come on in. And we're going to end it. There's been very few issues that are more central to his campaign than immigration. Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.

We have people that are so bad, they are going to be gone so fast out of this country, and they're going back where they came from. We have to do something about it, and we have to start by building a wall, a big, beautiful, powerful wall. Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall! And he's kept a fair number of these promises.

So he said he would institute a ban on Muslims. He did institute a ban on some Muslim countries. The countries there included in the current travel ban, five Muslim-majority countries, Libya, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Somalia. He said he would increase funding and empower ICE and the Border Patrol and the tools that are used to either block people from coming in or round up people who are here. He's done that. The orders will triple the resources for ICE enforcement and removal. They will also end sanctuary cities or at least federal funding for sanctuary cities, localities that... He said he would build a wall, and he's done a fair amount of that.

Thank you all for being here. It's a great stretch of wall. See where it's going. Now, it's not all new wall. In fact, most of it is hundreds of miles of wall that's replacing older barriers that were often dilapidated or ineffective. Some of it's 30 feet, some of it's 15 feet,

some of it's 12 feet, depending on the area. Much of it's 30 feet, some of it's 15 feet, some of it's 12 feet, depending on the area. Much of it's reinforced heavily and very, very hard to climb. So he certainly made America less welcoming to a lot of people around the world, that they know that this is no longer a place where the government, at least, wants them to come. Images of children being separated from parents and parents being held in large locked cages are generating strong reaction, including the child separation policy, incredibly controversial, even among Republicans who thought it seemed cruel and inhuman. But the purpose of it was to intentionally create a deterrent effect that would keep people from wanting to try to come here

because they would be separated from their children. So as much of backlash as there was at home, it accomplished the purpose that President Trump had set out to accomplish. All right. So let's turn to American foreign policy and the promises Donald Trump made as a candidate and has fulfilled. Well, one of the biggest problems he made, of course, was in his view to bomb ISIS into oblivion. I would bomb wherever they are. Right now, we're being so politically correct, nice and gentle, nice and gentle. We've got a cancer there and the cancer is ISIS. Life means nothing to them. And he more or less has done that. More breaking news this morning. The ISIS caliphate is crumbling.

The last ISIS stronghold in Syria has fallen. He continued a campaign against ISIS that had been started under Obama, but accelerated it and succeeded at taking back almost all of ISIS's territory in the Middle East. Now, that doesn't mean ISIS is gone entirely. They're not. But it's a big change from the caliphate that they were beginning to build across Syria and Iraq. For years, we have been caught up in endless wars and conflicts under the leadership of failed politicians and a failed, totally failed foreign policy.

At the same time, of course, he promised to get out of these endless wars. I mean, you know, he was always kind of an interesting candidate that way in both being bombastically tough and talking about the waste of the wars we'd had in Afghanistan and Iraq over the years. And that's something he has, in fact, basically followed through on. The president and Pentagon will announce tomorrow that they're cutting U.S. troop levels in Iraq by a third. The president pulled the troops out of the northern Syrian border. The Trump administration is now preparing to announce the long-anticipated drawdown of about 4,000 troops from Afghanistan.

Now, we still have troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He's trying to draw them down even further. But there hasn't really been significant war on his watch in either country. We have not been engaged in bigger battles. And he has not got us into any further war, which a lot of people were afraid of. He's actually the first president we've had now in quite a number of years who didn't really start a new war on his watch. My foreign policy will always put the interests of the American people and American security above all else. Has to be first. Has to be.

Another big foreign policy promise he made as a candidate was to be an anti-globalist, an America first president, free from those multinational entanglements. That will be the foundation of every single decision that I will make. One of the things he was most vocal about as a candidate, of course, was the idea that allies were shafting us on security and on trade. And that's been one thing he's pursued pretty vigorously. Our NATO partners, as an example, were very far behind in their defense payments. But at my strong urging, they agreed to pay $130 billion more a year, the first time in over 20 years that they upped their payments.

He has tried relentlessly to bully NATO allies into spending more on their own defense. And they are spending tens of billions of dollars now more on their defense. Not as much as he has said. He exaggerates that like he exaggerates many things. But they are chipping in more on trade. I'm going to direct the Secretary of Commerce to identify every violation of trade agreements a foreign country is currently using to harm you, the American worker. He talked about how he was going to stop our trading partners from taking advantage of us. And that's an area where he has at least fulfilled some of the promise, but not as much as he actually talked about. It's my great honor to announce that we have successfully completed negotiations on a brand new deal to terminate and replace NAFTA.

For instance, he did renegotiate NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada. Both countries have now signed it along with us. Most people think that's an improvement on the old trade agreement. It isn't a revolution, though. It didn't completely transform the relationship. It was more of an update of where things had been. Similarly, I am skeptical of international unions that tie us up and bring America down.

He pulled us out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was a 10-nation Asian trade deal. He pulled us out of the Iran nuclear accord, which was meant to lift sanctions on Iran in exchange for them promising not to build a nuclear weapon. Most significantly, of course, he pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. And of course, he said he's going to withdraw us

from the World Health Organization. So it all is part of this larger anti-globalization promise that he made. And then he largely made a lot of progress on. So Peter, another significant set of promises that Donald Trump made as a candidate were around the judiciary. We're going to have to replace

probably over the next four-year term, it could be as many as four Supreme Court justices, including Judge Scalia. Can you imagine what will happen if that happens? Now, I don't know if these people are thinking right, because I pledge that I'm going to put on good, conservative, brilliant judges, right? And my sense is that this may be the single biggest promise that Trump has kept and in a way kept beyond his promise because of events that were ultimately out of his control. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, this is the most specific thing that he was able to say he was going to do and that he followed through on. He had even during the campaign in 2016, of course, produced a list of people he would consider to be candidates for the Supreme Court if he won office, something no presidential candidate has done before that I'm aware of. We picked 11 great, great judges. And I said, from this group or very similar to this group,

we are going to pick judges for the United States Supreme Court. And this list, of course, was assembled with the help of the Federalist Society, which is the conservative legal organization that has been pushing for years to try to remake the judiciary. And you're going to be proud of those judges and they're going to be terrific, hopefully very much in the mold of Judge Scalia. That's what we want to do. And one of the first things he does when he comes into office, of course, is to fill the empty seat of Antonin Scalia that the Republicans had refused to let Barack Obama fill with a candidate from that list he had produced during the campaign. The Senate made history today. Judge Neil Gorsuch is officially joining the nation's highest court. And he would go on to fill a second seat when Justice Anthony Kennedy retired.

Judge Brett Kavanaugh is now Justice Kavanaugh, cementing a solid five to four conservative majority. And then a third seat became open when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and the president nominated Amy Coney Barrett, a favorite of conservatives. If Judge Barrett is confirmed by the Senate, conservative-leaning justices will hold a six to three majority on America's highest court for the foreseeable future. And during this whole period, almost as important, he's filling dozens and dozens of lower court positions on the district courts, on the appeals courts around the country, more than 200 seats that were generally held open by the Senate Republicans who wouldn't let Barack

Obama fill them, transforming a lot of the judiciary in a very short amount of time. And my sense, Peter, is that this promise kept, no matter what you think of it, may have the longest tail. It may have the kind of most profound legacy of everything we're talking about so far. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's one of the reasons why conservatives supported him

four years ago, despite their misgivings, and why they may support him again this year, is because these are lifetime appointments. Every judge he puts on the bench is somebody who is there, entitled to be there for years to come, maybe decades to come. That's a huge, fundamental, profound shift. And these are not even conservatives of the style that we're used to from the Bush presidents or even from Reagan. These are conservative of an even more ideological flavor because the Senate got rid of the filibuster and Republicans were able to push through their judicial nominees without having to reach out to the other side. You know, Peter, listening to you and reserving judgment for a

moment on whether these were wise or unwise policy decisions. This is a fairly long and meaningful list of promises kept. It is, yes. In fact, one of the slogans he uses quite often in his rallies is promises made, promises kept. So he has been the president he told us he would be. The Donald Trump you see in the fall of 2020 is the Donald Trump that he promised to be in the fall of 2020 is the Donald Trump that he promised to be in the fall of 2016. We'll be right back. So, Peter, let's turn now to the promises that Donald Trump did not keep. And I guess for the sake of consistency, let's start again with those related to domestic policy and the economy.

Under a Trump presidency, the American worker will finally have a president who will protect them and fight for them. One of the things he did most famously was promise to restore American manufacturing. It will be American steel that will fortify America's crumbling bridges. American steel. He had this image of America as a 1950s economic manufacturing giant. We will make Michigan into the manufacturing hub of the world once again. And that basically hasn't happened. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports GM shut down its plant in Lordstown, Ohio,

after more than half a century in business. GM is eliminating all 1,700 hourly positions at the Ohio factory. The plant shutdown is the first of five that GM plans by early next year. There were some small factories here or there that might have come back or been built in the Midwest or something. But broadly speaking, manufacturing has not had the great comeback that the president promised. the president promised. What's interesting about this as a promise unkept is that it may be the most politically potent promise that Donald Trump made. Like you said, it was so central to his first victory in the Midwest with the Electoral College. It helped carry swing states. And it could potentially be very valuable to a reelection. But you're saying there just isn't anything to show for that particular promise. No, not in the big way that he promised. That's true, but you're saying there just isn't anything to show for that particular promise. No, not in the big way that he promised. That's true. And you're right, it's so important in these particular states, right? Michigan, Wisconsin, the Midwest, Pennsylvania,

these places where he turned around normally Democratic bastions because they had felt the Democrats had failed to protect them. So there's a lot of symbolic potency to this promise, and the fact that he wasn't able to keep it, I think, has a particular electoral consequence. I have a feeling that China would like to see me not win. Do you agree with that? I have a feeling. A major related promise the president made as a candidate was that he was going to lower, if not entirely eliminate, the U.S. trade deficit with China.

We have a $500 billion trade deficit. And you know what? We're going to start reversing things very, very quickly. Believe me. Has he kept that? The answer is no. In January 2017, the month President Trump took office, the trade deficit with China that month was $31 billion. The trade deficit with China in July of 2020,

it was $31 billion. Exactly the same. What other economic promises fizzled out? We have to repeal and replace Obamacare. Have to do it. Have to do it. Have to do it. Have to do it. Well, he promised that he would not only get rid of Obamacare, he would replace it with something that was much better. Your deductibles are through the roof. You could be dead and never get any of the money. Your deductibles are so high.

So we're going to repeal Obamacare. We're going to replace it with something that's going to be terrific. And that, of course, has not happened. Republicans are regrouping after a bitter defeat Friday on their plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. He wasn't able to actually get rid of Obamacare. He did eliminate the individual mandate that required people to buy health insurance. But the program remains in place other than that. And overall, he has not been able to find anything that would be anywhere like it, much less better and cheaper, which is what he promised.

Another unkept promise, of course, is the national debt. We owe 19 trillion as a country. And we're going to knock it down and we're going to bring it down big league and quickly. We're going to bring jobs back. We're going to bring business back. He said in 2016 that he could wipe out the entire national debt, not just the annual deficit, but the entire annual national debt that had been accumulated over generations in eight years' time. We pay it back so easily. How?

It's easy to pay it back. How? How? Because essentially, if you look at the country like a profit-making corporation or a losing corporation, right now we're a losing corporation. We're going to make it a profit-making corporation. And instead, not only has he not even reduced it... The total of annual budget deficits is reaching a new milestone, topping $22 trillion for the first time in our nation's history. He has significantly increased it.

In fact, by next year, the national debt will be roughly 100% of the size of the American economy for the first time since the World War II era. How did the president manage that? Because it is such an enormous amount of deficit. Well, this is a case where keeping one promise offset the ability to keep another promise, right? By cutting taxes and increasing military spending,

he ended up ballooning the national debt. And then, of course, the pandemic happened, and both parties went straight to, you know, spending a lot of money to try to prop up the economy, trillions of dollars that both sides agree were necessary, but of course also has continued to accelerate the red ink. So ultimately, the president cared more about keeping the tax promise, keeping the military spending promise than he did about keeping the red ink. So ultimately, the president cared more about keeping the tax promise, keeping the military spending promise than he did about keeping the debt promise. Right. This is a president who, as a businessman, never really cared too much about debt. I'm the king of debt. I'm great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me. I've made

a fortune by using debt. A lot of his business projects were financed that way. So he's never been somebody who cared too much about carrying a lot of debt. Peter, what about the wall between the United States and Mexico? You said earlier that the president did build some of the wall and therefore did fulfill some of the promise. But doesn't the wall actually fit squarely

into the promises not kept by the president because of the nature of the promise he made about it? And who's gonna pay for the wall who's going to pay for the wall? Who's going to pay for the wall? Right. He said that Mexico was going to pay to build the wall. No matter how unlikely, how ludicrous that idea sounded, he kept insisting that he would be able to make that happen, and of course he hasn't. He kept insisting that he would be able to make that happen, and of course he hasn't.

Mexico's president fired back tonight in an address to his nation. Enrique Peña Nieto said Mexico will not pay for the wall. As far as unkept promises go, an unfinished wall that Mexico didn't pay for feels very symbolically important. Yeah, it is. And he knew, and his advisor told him, that if he did nothing else as president, he had to build the wall. So that's why it's important to him to make at least some progress toward it and to boast about the progress he has made toward it

and to ignore the parts that are not favorable, which is that it's not finished, that it hasn't actually been a lot of new wall, and that Mexico certainly hasn't paid for it. And speaking of symbolism, I want to turn to a promise that was always a bit intangible during the campaign, but which was said over and over again.

So when we win, we are going to Washington, D.C., and we are going to drain the swamp. Which is draining the swamp. Right. Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp. Which is draining the swamp. Right. Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp! And I always took that to mean rooting out

corruption and a culture of self dealing in Washington. Where does that stand as a promise? Oh, I think the swamp is alive and well. And a lot of people would argue that he's simply filled it even further. New York Jets owner Woody Johnson gave a million bucks. Trump plans to nominate him as ambassador to the UK.

This is a president, of course, who didn't give up his business and has continued to profit from it while in office. At his golf courses alone, Trump reported $288 million in income over the past year. He's fired inspectors general, who were meant to, in fact, root out corruption and self-dealing. State Department Inspector General Steve Linick lost his job Friday, becoming the fifth oversight official to be removed since March. He's given pardons to people who had personal connections to him.

Roger Stone was due to report to prison next week for lying to Congress and witness tampering for a stay of more than three years, but the president just commuted his sentence of his longtime confidence, so he's not going to go to prison at all. He has eliminated or purged people who dared to dissent. In a whistleblower complaint, Dr. Rick Bright said he was demoted by the Trump administration for prioritizing science over politics. And he has stiffed Congress, which is supposed to be a co-equal branch of government. Trump is stonewalling more than 20 congressional investigations.

He is saying he's going to ignore all their subpoenas. documents, refusing to provide testimony, refusing to respect their role as, you know, a guardian of the public interest and a form of accountability over his administration. None of this is what people would have thought draining the swamp was all about. And if this is a president who positioned himself as an outsider coming into a corrupt Washington. What he's managed to do instead is simply turn Washington to his own interests. So not only is this a promise unkept, draining the swamp, you're saying this is a level of self-dealing that we have never seen before. Well, you know, I've covered four presidents. I've spent a lot of time studying others.

I've never seen anything quite like this. This is a president who sees no promise to be a steward of the Constitution, right? To respect the role of Congress, to respect the statutes in the Constitution around self-dealing and fidelity to the law. Well, he has shown time and time again that he doesn't have the same understanding of the Constitution and the laws that other presidents have and that we thought we had. You know, Rex Tillerson, his first Secretary of State, said that one of the things he always had to do was tell the president, no, you can't do that. That's illegal. He repeatedly, you know, would tell you that Article 2 of the Constitution gave him the power to do fill in the blank, which, of course, it often didn't. When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that's the way of the United States, the authority is total.

And that's the way it's got to be. The authority is total. It's total. It's total. And of course, he became only the third president in our history to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. What was the allegation involved in the impeachment trial?

That he tried to leverage military aid to an ally in order to get that ally to besmirch his domestic political rivals. Now, whether you think that's impeachable or not, whether or not you think he should have been convicted or not, the very essence of that episode was about using the power of his office to further his own personal political aims at the expense of national security policy in a very volatile region of the world. So I think that's the thing that seems so central to what you just said, is that promise to uphold the Constitution and uphold the rules and the laws and the norms that we've

seen governing us in recent decades. Peter, so far we have been contrasting kept promises and not kept promises. we have been contrasting kept promises and not kept promises. It occurs to me that nobody seeking the presidency makes explicit promises about a pandemic in the absence of a pandemic. So how do you and how should we be thinking about the coronavirus in the context of this conversation we're having about promises? Yeah, I think implicit in the oath that a president takes, and implicit in the very job, is a promise to protect America and to protect Americans. Right. And you hear a lot of presidents, including President Trump, say that, you know, my first duty is to protect Americans. So I do think it's fair to judge it as a promise.

Now, when you evaluate his performance on it, it depends on how you look at it. What he would tell you is by shutting down most travel from China early, by agreeing to the lockdown in March, by speeding up the possible vaccine development, he has fulfilled that promise and that millions more people could have died had he not done so. But we have it under control. It's going to be just fine. You also have to look at the rest of how he handled this. The risk to the American people remains very low. He repeatedly told us that this was not a serious threat. You know, in many cases, when you catch this, it's very light. You don't even know there's a problem. That, in fact, it was really just like the flu, even when he was privately saying the opposite. Sometimes they just get the sniffle. Sometimes they just get something

where they're not feeling quite right. And sometimes they feel really bad. But that's a little bit like the flu. It's a little like the regular flu. That it would simply disappear, that it was under control, all of which turned out to be false. And you look at a president who almost as quickly as he began to shut things down, tried to reverse himself. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself. We're not going to let the cure be worse than the problem. Because the economic cost was so great, and he perceived, obviously, the political cost to be so great, that he undermined the very measures he was taking

to try to combat the virus. I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens. I don't know. Somehow, I don't see it for myself. I just— He'd encourage people to protest against the same public health guidelines that his own government was advocating. He refused to wear a mask himself and mocked those who did. I don't wear masks like him. Every time you see him, he's got a mask himself and mocked those who did. I don't wear masks like him. Every time you see him, he's got a mask.

He could be speaking 200 feet away from me and he shows up with the biggest mask I've ever seen. And of course, in the end... I just left Walter Reed Medical Center and it's really something very special. His own cavalier approach to the virus resulted in his own infection. So it's been a very interesting journey.

I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. So I think we can certainly say that the death toll is greater than it would have been or could have been had another course been taken. And as a result, even just a couple of weeks before Election Day, we've already seen

215,000 Americans have lost their lives. That's the equivalent of more than any casualties Americans have taken in any war in our history, other than World War II and the Civil War. Really one of the largest mass casualty events in our history. 215,000 deaths is the equivalent of 72 9-11s. 215,000 deaths would be the equivalent of a fair-sized city in the United States, simply being wiped off the map. And so just on that basis, you'd have to say that the promise to protect the country wasn't fully kept. Peter, when we think about scale and what promises ultimately are going to matter, whether kept or unkept, when it comes to the legacy of this president and how voters judge him, not just now, but I guess through eternity,

this feels like absolutely the biggest one. Yeah, I think you'd have to say that have an election in the middle of a pandemic in which 215,000 Americans have died and millions have been infected, including the president of the United States himself. That's the biggest, most singular, defining issue of the United States himself. That's the biggest, most singular, defining issue of the campaign.

And polls show so far that people do not approve of how the president has handled it. And he's only got a couple weeks left to convince them otherwise. But this will be an issue, if not the issue, that the electorate judges him on and the history judges him on.

Peter, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you. Tomorrow on The Daily, a look at Joe Biden's plans for the presidency. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. A resurgence in coronavirus infections is intensifying across Europe. The Times reports that over the past seven days, France, Spain and the United Kingdom have all reported more cases per capita than the U.S. On Wednesday, France said it would begin imposing a nightly curfew across nine cities, including Paris, to try to reduce infection rates. We fully appreciate that this will be a difficult and worrying news for a lot of people.

The executive has taken this decision because it is necessary. At the same time, Northern Ireland announced a lockdown that will close schools for two weeks and restaurants and bars for a month. And we do not take this step lightly. Meanwhile, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands have announced their own restrictions in recent days. Europe now averages 100,000 new infections a day and accounts for roughly one-third of new cases worldwide. And Joe Biden and President Trump will hold rival town halls tonight at 8 p.m. The forums will serve as a stand-in for the second presidential debate,

which was canceled after Trump refused to participate remotely. Biden's town hall will air on ABC. Trump's will run on NBC. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.