Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Heather Digby Parton: A debate that will live in infamy: That sweaty, red-faced liar is actually our president

We already knew Trump was a national embarrassment. Did he think his sneering-bully act would win back voters?

At the conclusion of the first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on Tuesday night, CNN’s Dana Bash gave the best review of the proceedings: “That was a sh**show.” Her colleague Jake Tapper who described it as “a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck. That was the worst debate I have ever seen. In fact, it wasn’t a debate. It was a disgrace. It’s primarily because of President Trump, who spent the entire time interrupting [and] lying.” Or maybe Rachel Maddow’s assessment on MSNBC — a “monstrous cavalcade of increasingly wild and obscene lies” — draws the most accurate picture of what went down in Cleveland on Tuesday night.

However you want to phrase it, a great truth was expressed by Wolf Blitzer when he opened his show:

I’d like to welcome viewers from here and around the world. Clearly this debate was an embarrassment for the United States …

I would only add that it was an embarrassment entirely because of Donald Trump’s sophomoric behavior, which was more befitting a nasty tween bully trying to shake someone down for his lunch money than the president of the United States. But then, why would we expect otherwise? The Donald Trump whom millions of people watched in horror as he lied, insulted, interrupted and acted like a barbaric brute is who he is virtually every day at his briefings, press avails, interviews and, most especially, the grotesque super-spreader events he calls campaign rallies. To expect him to behave with the decorum befitting the leader of the most powerful country in the world is absurd. He simply doesn’t know how.

Robert Reich: The coming civil war caused by Trump’s ego

Regardless of what happens, Trump’s megalomaniacal ego will prevail

What is America really fighting over in the upcoming election? No particular issue. Not even Democrats versus Republicans.

The central fight is over Donald J Trump.

Before Trump, most Americans weren’t especially passionate about politics. But Trump’s MO has been to force people to become passionate about him – to take fierce sides for or against. And he considers himself president only of the former – whom he calls “my people.”

Trump came to office with no agenda except to feed his monstrous ego. He has never fueled his base. His base has fueled him. Its adoration sustains him.

So does the antipathy of his detractors. Presidents usually try to appease their critics. Trump has gone out of his way to offend them. “I do bring rage out,” Trump unapologetically told journalist Bob Woodward in 2016.

In this way, he has turned America into a gargantuan projection of his own pathological narcissism.

His entire re-election platform is found in his use of the pronouns “we” and “them.” “We” are people who love him, Trump Nation. “They” hate him.

Karen Tumulty: The debate was a nightmare, and a fitting summation of Trump’s presidency

It is hard to imagine that anyone but the most obdurate partisans watching Tuesday’s spectacle wants to see four more years of this.

The nightmare that played out Tuesday evening on a debate stage in Cleveland served at least one useful purpose. It encapsulated, in a single 98-minute span, the entire presidency of Donald J. Trump.

All of the impulses that drive Trump were unleashed: The lying. The rage. The bluster. The incoherence.

It is hard to imagine that anyone but the most obdurate of partisans could have watched the spectacle and thought, Gee, wouldn’t it be great to have four more years of this?

Trump sent fact-checkers into overdrive, though as my Post colleagues pointed out, most of his false claims were retreads of lies that he has previously told.

But on a more fundamental level, Trump showed an uncharacteristic lack of pretense.

In what is likely to be remembered as the debate’s most illuminating moment, the president laid bare the devil’s bargain that he has been willing to make with racism in this country to achieve his ends.

Alexander Vindman and John Gans: Trump Has Sold Off America’s Credibility for His Personal Gain

Lt. Col. Vindman served on the National Security Council. Mr. Gans is the author of “White House Warriors,” a history of the council.

From China to Ukraine, this president has acted at odds with American foreign policy. Imagine what he could do with four more years.

A year ago, the world read a record of a phone call in which President Trump pressured Ukraine’s government to provide dirt on his political rival, Joe Biden. The transcript of that call, along with other evidence, made clear the president and his associates asked officials in Kyiv to deliver on Mr. Trump’s political interests in exchange for American military aid needed to defend Ukraine. At the end of last year, the president was impeached for that abuse of power.

This was not a unique instance of Mr. Trump’s personal priorities corrupting American foreign policy. As the 2020 election grew closer, the president increasingly ignored the policies developed by his own government and instead pursued transactions guided by self-interest and instinct. The result is a patchwork of formal policies and informal deals that has undermined America’s interests and credibility. But Mr. Trump’s sloppy management matters less than its result: No one can trust American foreign policy right now.

Thomas L. Friedman: Trump Sent a Warning. Let’s Take It Seriously.

Our democracy is in terrible danger — more than since the Civil War, more than after Pearl Harbor, more than during the Cuban missile crisis.

President Trump has made it unmistakably clear in recent weeks — and even more crystal clear at the Tuesday debate — that there are only two choices before voters on Nov. 3 — and electing Joe Biden is not one of them.

The president has told us in innumerable ways that either he will be re-elected or he will delegitimize the vote by claiming that all mail-in ballots — a time-honored tradition that has ushered Republicans and Democrats into office and has been used by Trump himself — are invalid.

Trump’s motives could not be more transparent. If he does not win the Electoral College, he’ll muddy the results so that the outcome can be decided only by the Supreme Court or the House of Representatives (where each state delegation gets one vote). Trump has advantages in both right now, which he has boasted about for the past week.

I can’t say this any more clearly: Our democracy is in terrible danger — more danger than it has been since the Civil War, more danger than after Pearl Harbor, more danger than during the Cuban missile crisis and more danger than during Watergate.

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Trump’s Debt, His Future and Ours

The president — our chief law enforcement and national security official — could be facing huge liabilities. That’s chilling.

The bombshell New York Times report on Donald Trump’s tax returns is a remarkable feat of journalism. The team deserves special praise for making their findings comprehensible to general readers, and not getting lost in the details.

Yet like many other revelations in the Trump era, the tax news falls into the category of “shocking but not surprising.” Many observers had already surmised that Trump paid little or no taxes, that his claims of brilliant business success were a fiction, and that he is deep in debt. Now all of that is virtually confirmed. But what does it mean for America’s future?

Everyone will come at this question from their own angle. When I read the Times report, I quickly found myself thinking about … the theory of business capital structure. No, really.

For many people, no doubt, the main takeaway from the tax revelations will be “$750? Really?” The fact that Trump paid less in taxes than tens of millions of hard-working Americans struggling to make ends meet is an outrage. It’s also easy to explain in a few seconds, which is why it’s the theme of a quickly released ad from the Biden campaign.

Michelle Goldberg: Does Donald Trump Need a Bailout?

Maybe that’s why he sucks up to Putin.

In his new book “Rage,” Bob Woodward reports that Dan Coats, Donald Trump’s first director of national intelligence, was never able to shake his suspicions that Trump is in the pocket of President Vladimir Putin of Russia.

Coats is obviously not alone — Trump’s obsequiousness toward the Russian strongman has been one of the enduring enigmas of his presidency. Even Trump’s natural affinity for autocrats doesn’t explain why Putin is one of the few men on earth whom the president of the United States treats as his better.

The New York Times’s blockbuster exposé of Trump’s taxes does not directly solve this mystery. The journalists Russ Buettner, Susanne Craig and Mike McIntire make clear that Trump’s taxes reveal no previously unreported financial link to Russia; the documents mostly “lack the specificity” required to do so. But the revelation of the gargantuan debt closing in on Trump offers one plausible motive for why the president constantly sucks up to Putin, even when doing so seems politically self-defeating.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, has said that Trump thinks Putin is the richest man in the world. And the American president, The Times’s reporting suggests, may need a bailout.

Amanda Marcotte: Biden should attack Trump as a massive, ludicrous failure — not just a tax cheat

Trump is no bold captain of industry: He’s a loser who kept afloat by selling ringtones and defrauding Granny

Using its agenda-setting powers for good instead of evil for once, the New York Times has released the second in a series of stories detailing exactly what kind of fraud Donald Trump is, using recently obtained copies of the tax returns the president has spent years desperately trying to hide.

This second one is a doozy, focusing as it does on how Trump, desperate for cash to prop up his failing empire, faked being a successful businessman on “The Apprentice.” Then, because he is unbelievably bad at business, Trump managed to burn through the $424.7 million windfall he “earned” from that show, leaving him apparently dead broke before he announced his presidential campaign in 2015.

Much attention has been paid to the revelation from the first article in this series that Trump is a promiscuous tax cheat who uses all sorts of shady strategies — paying his daughter Ivanka as a “consultant” to hide money from the IRS, for one — to keep his income tax bill at zero in most years.

But this second article focuses on what is likely a far more potent slam against Trump in the eyes of the voters he’ll need to win over if he wants to be re-elected in November: He is a comically terrible businessman. His real estate empire was kept on life support through ads with cartoon sheep and selling ringtones, as well multi-level marketing schemes and other ploys to defraud desperate people.

Eugene Robinson: Democrats need to put an expiration date on the Republican Senate

Defeating Trump is necessary. It’s not sufficient.

It is necessary, but not sufficient, to defeat President Trump in the coming election. Democrats must also take control of the Senate — and are deliciously close to that goal.

If there is anyone left who fails to grasp the importance of the Senate majority, they will be enlightened in the coming weeks, as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) rush Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett through her confirmation process. In doing so, they will cement a 6-to-3 conservative majority on the high court that is likely to warp our jurisprudence for decades.

That is power in action. Democrats may not be able to stop this outrage, but on Nov. 3 they can — and should — put a firm expiration date on the Republican Party’s power.

Nouriel Roubini: Why Joe Biden is better than Donald Trump for the US economy

It’s a myth that Republicans handle the economy better – US recessions almost always occur under the GOP

Joe Biden has consistently held a wide polling lead over US President Donald Trump ahead of November’s election. But, despite Trump’s botched response to the Covid-19 pandemic – a failure that has left the economy far weaker than it otherwise would have been – he has maintained a marginal edge on the question of which candidate would be better for the US economy. Thanks to Trump, a country with just 4% of the world’s population now accounts for more than 20% of total Covid-19 deaths – an utterly shameful outcome, given America’s advanced (albeit expensive) healthcare system.

The presumption that Republicans are better than Democrats at economic stewardship is a longstanding myth that must be debunked. In our 1997 book, Political Cycles and the Macroeconomy, the late (and great) Alberto Alesina and I showed that Democratic administrations tend to preside over faster growth, lower unemployment and stronger stock markets than Republican presidents do.