Josh Marshall: “We are rightly focusing on President Trump last night telling rally goers he’d never be in their dump of a town if the election weren’t going so badly for him. But let’s not miss the more important and lasting part of this message. President Trump is already previewing one explanation and justification for his defeat: COVID. He was cruising toward reelection, he claims, when COVID struck. For him, there’s the added feature that it was the handiwork of his purported arch-enemy China. There’s no question that President Trump’s catastrophic handling of the pandemic has damaged his standing and chances of reelection.”
“Of course, we don’t know President Trump is going to lose today, let alone from the vantage point of eight or twelve months ago. The whole dialogue of whether or not COVID did Trump in can seem like a trivial kind of score-settling, whether a Trump loss was ‘fair’ or ‘unfair’ somehow. But it’s a conversation that still merits our attention because it is likely to figure strongly in political developments after a Trump defeat, if in fact he is defeated in two weeks.”