Biden and Trump Go Head-to-Head About Supreme Court

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New top story from Time: Donald Trump and Trump Biden Square Off for First Debate

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are facing off on the debate stage during one of the most turbulent periods in modern American history. A viral pandemic has killed 200,000 Americans and pummeled the economy, racial justice protests continue in towns and cities, and vast fires wreak environmental disaster across the American West. Adding to the national sense of foreboding, Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the election and is using his bully pulpit to sow distrust in the voting process and spread false allegations that voting by mail—a safe alternative for many during the pandemic—will lead to rampant voter fraud. (It won’t.)

There’s a lot to debate.

While the head-to-head is an opportunity for both candidates to convince Americans that they are the right person to lead the country through this tumultuous time, it’s also a moment for voters to see the two men’s styles set side by side, in stark relief. The President is trailing Biden in national polls, but the race is close in battleground states Trump would need to win to get to 270 electoral votes.

Trump will try to deflect questions about his taxes

Tonight’s debate comes on the heels of explosive revelations in the New York Times laying out long-awaited details about Trump’s personal finances that tarnish his image as a successful business mogul, including that he paid little to no federal taxes for most of the last two decades and that he has massive debts coming due soon.

Even if the debate moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, doesn’t explicitly ask about the fairness of Trump’s tax avoidance, you can bet Biden will bring it up. Trump has dismissed the report as “totally fake news” and is likely to fall back on the same defenses he used in 2016: that he intends to release his financial details once they’re no longer under audit (the IRS has repeatedly said there’s nothing preventing him from doing so) and that paying less in taxes just makes him a smart businessman.

Trump will try to paint Biden as the standard bearer of an old order and make the case that only Trump can engineer an economic rebound from the pandemic. He’s repeatedly called Biden “sleepy” and led a conservative media push attacking Biden’s age (Biden is 77; Trump is 74) and implying he’s not mentally up to the job. There are few more transparent windows into mental acuity than a debate stage.

Biden won’t miss the chance to slam Trump on taxes — but he won’t linger long

For his part, Biden all but bought a billboard across from the debate site to headline what at least part of his strategy would be. Just ahead of the candidates’ arrivals on stage at the Cleveland Clinic, Biden’s campaign released tax returns for 2019, showing an almost $300,000 tax bill on combined Joe and Jill Biden adjusted gross income of $985,233. The disclosure is now the twenty-second year of tax returns made available to the public from Biden — and a clear taunt to Trump, who is notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to questions about his claims of wealth.

But Biden’s advisers are also keenly aware that the trio of chaotic through-lines to this election have had far greater effects on voters than the extent of Trump’s tax planning. Biden is expected to have his fun casting doubts on Trump’s legitimate success and telling voters they can’t trust someone who doesn’t pay his fair share, but he’s not going to linger. After all, the debate team is very familiar with how Hillary Clinton tried to make Trump’s tax dodges an issue in 2016 and then-candidate Trump’s reply of so what? inoculate him.

More pressing? The coronavirus death toll has now topped 200,000 Americans and Biden’s team has seen that stunning reality does far more to help their chances than anything that can be said about tax loopholes.

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New top story from Time: Trump vs. Biden: Facing Off on Taming a ‘Rising China’

As President, Donald Trump has cast China as a global villain: a malevolent actor that all but launched a worldwide pandemic on an unsuspecting world, robbed Americans of their jobs and stole U.S. business secrets. He has made the Chinese Communist Party a catch-all enemy that pulls puppet-like strings to make international organizations like the World Health Organization work at cross-purposes with Washington, all charges Beijing vigorously denies.

At the same time, Trump has presented himself to the world—and to U.S. voters—as the only person capable of pummeling Beijing into submission, chiefly through a landmark trade deal. Democrats, the President and his allies say, are the willing patsies who bow to Beijing, as when former Vice President-turned-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden sought closer ties to the growing superpower in his multiple visits there. “A rising China is a positive, positive development, not only for China but for America and the world writ large,” Biden said in 2011 after returning to the U.S. from one such trip.

It’s a black-and-white narrative that will be argued on stage Tuesday night during the first Presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, with each man’s record and the COVID-19 pandemic on the debate docket. China will loom large for its role as Trump’s designated fall guy for the virus that has killed more than 200,000 Americans, for its economy, which is thriving despite the pandemic, and for its military, which could surpass America’s in size and strength by 2049.

Biden heads for the debate stage buoyed by an August Fox News poll that shows more Americans trust him over Trump to handle China. He is sure to point out Trump’s swings between painting China as an existential threat to the U.S. and effusive praise for Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

But many Trump supporters, if not most Americans, have become accustomed to Trump’s praise of strongmen in public, which in this case has given way to a barrage of insults, slamming Xi for letting the “Wuhan virus” spread. And Trump’s arguments that the Obama Administration was fooled by China could be persuasive on live television, says Michael Green, an Asia specialist from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Trump Administration’s line,” says Green, a former Bush official who has backed Biden, “is that everybody was duped by China.” Green says that is “ridiculous and wrong…but it’s a pretty easy line to use in a debate.”

It will be tricky for Biden to counter these charges in clear terms to the American people. During his early years as Vice President, Washington and key allies like the U.K. were still hopeful of working with China, guardedly optimistic that Chinese Communist Party leaders could be carrot-pulled into more free-market, human-rights and democracy-oriented behavior.

The last year has seen China double down in a different direction. Its crackdown on Hong Kong demonstrators culminated in enacting a National Security Law on the region, decades ahead of the city’s agreed return to Chinese rule, and it has continued its crackdown on Muslim Uighurs, with hundreds of thousands reportedly sent to re-education camps.

The Trump Administration has accused Chinese leaders of being slow to tell the world how easily COVID-19 was spreading from person to person, and slow to admit a WHO team trying to investigate the outbreak. The Administration criticized China for releasing a DNA map of the virus without also sharing actual physical samples, which could help determine whether it jumped from animals or originated in a Chinese weapons lab, a popular but unsubstantiated theory among some in the GOP that is ridiculed by Chinese officials.

The Trump Administration has pursued a go-it-alone policy of using economic pain to bring Beijing to the negotiating table, aiming to check unfair trading practices and China’s aggressive militarization in the South China Sea. The Administration has slapped hundreds of billions of tariffs on Chinese goods, and imposed sanctions against alleged Chinese hackers accused of stealing U.S. intellectual property. The U.S. has also sanctioned Chinese officials who have cracked down on Hong Kong and the country’s Muslim Uighur minority.

The tough talk led to the January signing of the first phase of a trade deal, which keeps U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods largely intact, with the threat of more if China doesn’t follow through, and requires Beijing to buy upwards of $200 million in U.S. goods and services over the next two years. As of August, China has only bought $56.1 billion in U.S. goods, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and with Trump skewering Beijing verbally at every opportunity, doesn’t appear to be working to step up spending.

Meanwhile, China’s global exports rose this summer, mainly because of its dominance of personal protective equipment manufacturing and work-from-home technology, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, while the U.S. trade deficit with China has grown. The U.S.-China trade war had already cost 300,000 jobs since it started in early 2018, according to Moody Analytics, even before the coronavirus wreaked havoc on the U.S. job market.

Biden’s own approach to China, as outlined in his public comments so far, sounds like a Trump-lite trade policy with a side of wishful thinking that Beijing can still be coaxed back to better behavior by a concerted scolding by Washington and its allies. He told the Council on Foreign Relations he would double down on Trump’s sanctions over the Hong Kong security law and its detention of up to a million minority Uighurs, but he told NPR that he would lift tariffs on Chinese imports and work through international trade bodies like the WTO to bring Beijing to heel.

Biden claims a key tool to counter China would be to super-charge those measures in cooperation with allies, in part by renegotiating the Trump-abandoned Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, an acronym that by itself can cause eyes to glaze, to band Pacific economies against Beijing. As Biden wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The most effective way to meet that challenge is to build a united front of U.S. allies and partners to confront China’s abusive behaviors and human rights violations, even as we seek to cooperate with Beijing on issues where our interests converge.”

Explaining that on stage on Tuesday would be a wonky turn likely lost on any popular audience, who may not remember that it was combined allied economic action against Iran that brought it to the negotiating table for the Iran nuclear deal, an argument that would draw scorn from most Republicans.

Trump, for his part, will likely argue that if a tougher tack had been taken sooner, it might have clipped Beijing’s wings—though some current and former U.S. military and intelligence officers will tell you China was always heading this way, citing hawkish books like The Hundred-Year Marathon, which relies on Chinese documents and defectors to claim, controversially, that China intends to replace the U.S. as a global superpower by 2049.

Trump has already previewed a debate attack to come on Biden’s son Hunter, who Trump has claimed made more than a billion dollars in an investment deal with the Bank of China, less than two weeks after flying there on his father’s plane in 2013, a charge that multiple fact-checks have found false. Hunter Biden’s spokesperson George Mesires tells TIME that he has “never made any money” from BHR Partners, the company he founded that struck the deal, “either from his former role as a director, or on account of his equity investment, which he is actively seeking to divest.”

Then and Now

When Biden served as Vice President, he helped launch Obama’s 2009 “U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue.” At the time, it seemed that Washington and Beijing could work together toward common good in the service of mutual interests. Those early efforts arguably produced tangible results, as when both countries signed up to the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, together representing 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. “We are moving the world significantly towards the goal we have set,” Obama said of the nations’ cooperation. China also “tightened its controls on weapons sold to Iran” in response to U.S. pressure, according to a Brookings Institution review, and the countries worked together to keep North Korea in check.

“There was very broad bipartisan support for a strategy towards China… that mixed engagement with China, and counterbalancing China by keeping our defenses strong, pushing on human rights, and especially working with allies, like Japan, and Australia,” says Green, the former Bush NSC official.

The mood soured, however, by the second Obama/Biden term, with the Obama Administration decrying thousands of cyberattacks a day on the U.S. government by Chinese military hackers, and later arresting a Chinese national for the theft of millions of government employees’ personal records from the Office of Personnel Management by a secretive Chinese military hacking unit, leading to a bilateral anti-hacking pact that the Trump Administration later accused the Chinese of violating.

Obama and Biden also negotiated the TPP—which Trump swiftly pulled out of after his inauguration in 2017—to gather together 12 regional Pacific economies, representing 40% of the world’s trade, into a single trading market to offset China’s economic bullying. And Obama’s military challenged China’s construction of an artificial island and military base in the South China Sea with its own “presence patrols” of U.S. Naval vessels steaming through sea channels in international waters that China was trying to claim for its own.

All of the Obama Administration’s efforts were eventually swallowed up and erased, like the wakes of those U.S. Naval ships, in part by Trump’s TPP departure, but mostly by the steady waves of a strategically planned and clinically executed Chinese campaign to widen its economic influence, build its military might, and become a diplomatic superpower that cannot be ignored on any major international issue.

The U.S. public hasn’t paid much heed to China’s long-game, but the COVID-19 crisis has caused more Americans to see China negatively, according to a Pew Research Service poll released in July. It’s against that backdrop that Biden will have to explain to information-overwhelmed American viewers why he once entertained the notion that China’s Communist Party could be reasoned with, and how his policies would produce a different result than the steadily increasing cold war between Beijing and Washington.

China-focused political economist Derek Scissors, of the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, believes both candidates are weak on China. He says the first phase of the President’s trade deal is a “failure,” with U.S. exports to China “far behind schedule,” U.S. portfolio investment in China soaring, Beijing’s hack-and-grab theft of U.S. intellectual property continuing, and Trump’s sanctions having little effect on Chinese tech companies’ predatory behavior.

On the other hand, Biden’s China record is one of “wishful thinking,” Scissors says, mostly focused on global climate change initiatives. “The Obama Administration was paralyzed by hope for meaningful Chinese cooperation, instead getting an increasingly nasty dictatorship,” he says. “Biden’s move away from that approach is unconvincing so far.”

Retired Amb. Joseph DeTrani, former CIA director of East Asia Operations, says both candidates behaved appropriately for the China they faced at the time. In Biden’s engagement with China as a Senator during the 1980s and 1990s “bilateral relations were solid,” he says, so cooperative moves like championing Beijing’s entry into the World Trade Organization were appropriate. When tensions later rose, the Obama Administration announced its “pivot” to East Asia, concerned about China’s behavior in the South and East China Seas and its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, which ostensibly aimed to improve China’s physical access to markets by building roads, bridges and ports globally, but instead often trapped countries in debt-ridden deals that forced them to forfeit ownership of the projects to the Chinese.

DeTrani says Trump can argue that he, rather than his predecessors, acted against Beijing’s predatory trade practices, including “a very unfavorable historical trade imbalance with China, something previous administrations ignored.” He points out that Trump’s position hardened when it became clear China hadn’t shared data on the pandemic “in a timely way,” and with its crackdown on Hong Kong, the proliferation of Uighur reeducation camps and other human rights abuses.

With China’s military growing, already outpacing the U.S. Navy, and its still-expanding economy keeping it on track to eclipse U.S. power in the next decade, according to the Australia-based Lowy Institute, the next U.S. president will be facing a formidable adversary that no recent American leader has managed to check.

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New top story from Time: 3 Killed in Northern California as Wildfires Force Thousands to Evacuate

(SAN FRANCISCO) — Northern California’s wine country was on fire again Monday as strong winds fanned flames in the already scorched region, destroying homes and prompting orders for nearly 70,000 people to evacuated. Meanwhile, three people died in a separate fire further north in the state.

In Sonoma County, residents of the Oakmont Gardens senior living facility in Santa Rosa boarded brightly lit city buses in the darkness overnight, some wearing bathrobes and using walkers. They wore masks to protect against the coronavirus as orange flames marked the dark sky.

The fire threat forced Adventist Health St. Helena hospital to suspend care and transfer all patients elsewhere.

The fires that began Sunday in the famed Napa-Sonoma wine country about 45 miles (72 kilometers) north of San Francisco came as the region nears the third anniversary of deadly wildfires that erupted in 2017, including one that killed 22 people. Just a month ago, many of those same residents were evacuated from the path of a lightning-sparked fire that became the fourth-largest in state history.

“Our firefighters have not had much of a break, and these residents have not had much of a break,” said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire.

Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin evacuated her property in the Oakmont community of Santa Rosa at about 1 a.m. She is rebuilding a home damaged in the 2017 fires.

Gorin said she saw three neighboring houses in flames as she fled early Monday.

“We’re experienced with that,” she said of the fires. “Once you lose a house and represent thousands of folks who’ve lost homes, you become pretty fatalistic that this is a new way of life and, depressingly, a normal way of life, the megafires that are spreading throughout the West.”

More than 68,000 people in Sonoma and Napa counties have been evacuated in the latest inferno, one of nearly 30 fire clusters burning across the state, said Cal Fire Division Chief Ben Nichols. Many more residents have been warned that they might have to flee, even though winds eased significantly Monday afternoon, giving firefighters an opportunity to make some progress, he said.

“The smoky skies that we’re under are a sign that there’s not a lot of air movement out there moving the smoke around,” Nichols said at an evening briefing. “Not good for air quality, and folks outside exercising, but great for us to work on containing this fire and working on putting it out.”

The Glass Fire broke out before 4 a.m. Sunday and merged with two other fires to scorch more than 56 square miles (145 square kilometers) as of Monday. There was no containment. Officials did not have an estimate of the number of homes destroyed or burned, but the blaze engulfed the Chateau Boswell Winery in St. Helena and at least one five-star resort.

Logan Hertel of Santa Rosa used a garden hose to fight flames at a neighbor’s house in the Skyhawk neighborhood until firefighters could relieve him.

“Seems like they got enough on their hands already. So I wanted to step in and put out the fire,” Hertel said.

Dominic Wiggens, who lives in the same neighborhood, evacuated but returned later Monday. His home was still standing, but many others were gone. “It’s so sad,” he said.

Pacific Gas & Electric was inspecting its equipment as it sought to restore power to more than 100,000 customers who had it turned off in advance of gusty winds and in areas with active fire zones. The utility’s equipment has caused previous disasters, including the 2018 Camp Fire that killed 85 people and devastated the town of Paradise in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

More than 1,200 people were also evacuated in Shasta County for the Zogg Fire, spread over 23 square miles (59 square kilometers) by Monday.

Shasta County Sheriff Eric Magrini said three people died as a result of the fire, though he gave no details.

“It’s with a sad heart that I come before you today,” he said, urging residents to heed advice to leave. “When you get that order, evacuate immediately. Do not wait.”

Residences are widely scattered in the forested area in the far northern part of the state. The region was torched just two years ago by the deadly Carr Fire — infamously remembered for producing a huge tornado-like fire whirl.

The causes of the new fires were under investigation.

Mark Ghilarducci, director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said 2020 has been challenging.

“The silver lining to it is that people who live in California become more prepared, they’re more aware, they know these events take place and we’re seeing a citizenry that does get it and is working hard to be prepared,” he said.

Numerous studies in recent years have linked bigger wildfires in America to climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas. Scientists say climate change has made California much drier, meaning trees and other plants are more flammable.

The latest fires erupted as a giant ridge of high pressure settled over the West, producing powerful gusts blowing from the interior toward the coast while slashing humidity levels and raising temperatures.

So far in this year’s historic fire season, more than 8,100 California wildfires have now killed 29 people, scorched 5,780 square miles (14,970 square kilometers), and destroyed more than 7,000 buildings.

Most of the losses occurred after a frenzy of dry lightning strikes in mid-August ignited a massive outbreak of fires.

Fire worries were developing across Southern California, although it was unclear how strong the predicted Santa Ana winds would become. Heat and extreme dryness were also expected to create problems.

Conditions were also hot, dry and windy in parts of Arizona, where the Sears Fire in Tonto National Forest north of Phoenix has grown to more than 14 square miles (36 square kilometers) since it erupted Friday. Authorities reported zero containment.

___

Associated Press reporters Christopher Weber and John Antczak in Los Angeles, Juliet Williams in San Francisco and Haven Daley in Santa Rosa, California contributed to this report.

New top story from Time: What to Watch For In Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s First Presidential Debate

Four years ago, Donald Trump prepared to debate his general-election opponent for the first time. Down in the polls to an experienced, traditional pol, he had been reduced to spreading weird rumors and casting doubt on the legitimacy of the vote, even as questions swirled about his personal finances.

Now Trump is the incumbent president, and the conditions could not be more different as he prepares for his first debate with Democratic nominee Joe Biden on Tuesday: a nation wracked by disease, disorder and disasters; an election neither candidate is treating like a foregone conclusion. And yet the similarities to 2016 are striking, from new questions about Trump’s taxes to another open Supreme Court seat. The main similarity, of course, is Trump—a singular political figure who has intensely polarized the nation.

The debate, scheduled to begin at 9 p.m. Eastern at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, is especially momentous because voters have had few opportunities to see the candidates up close. Both Trump and Biden have curtailed their travel and in-person campaigning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, though Trump has resumed holding versions of his signature rallies in recent weeks.

Moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News plans to focus the 90-minute discussion on the pandemic, the economy, the court, the candidates’ records, election integrity, and “race and violence in our cities.” Other news—such as a New York Times report that Trump has paid a negligible amount of income taxes over the past decade—could also be on the table.

Trump has not debated since his face-offs with Hillary Clinton four years ago. At the time, his refusal to release his tax returns was much in the news. When Clinton suggested he might be hiding a failure to pay income tax, Trump responded, “That makes me smart.” He also repeatedly refused to pledge to accept the results of the 2016 election if he lost. Meanwhile, Trump and his campaign stoked rumors that Clinton’s “stamina” had been damaged by unknown health conditions.

Though pundits and polls repeatedly judged Clinton the winner, those debates are now principally remembered for Trump’s jarring diversions—at various times, he lurked behind Clinton as she spoke; brought four alleged victims of sexual misconduct by her husband as his guests; and promised to jail her if elected (a pledge he notably abandoned).

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Trump may be a rusty debater, but his relentless presence on Twitter and television over the past four years has accustomed and perhaps inured the American public to his unwavering style: the lilting recitations, fact-challenged asides and derogatory nicknames. After four unrelenting years, Trump will find it difficult to change anyone’s preconceived opinion of him.

Trump has continually portrayed Biden as “dumb,” incompetent and senile, devoid of energy and hiding from voters. Trump’s advisers privately worry he’s set expectations too low—that Biden’s ability to string sentences together will now strike people as impressive. Trump allies have falsely accused Biden of relying on teleprompters, and in recent days Trump himself has trollishly demanded the candidates take a drug test before the debate—another tactic recycled from his tussle against Clinton four years ago.

Political experts say Trump thrives on breaking decorum and creating a memorable spectacle, daring his opponent to object to his out-of-bounds tactics. “Can Biden hold it together against a no-holds-barred wrestler who’s willing to throw sand in people’s faces, gouge eyeballs, exaggerate facts and say things without evidence?” says Will Ritter, a Virginia-based GOP consultant unaffiliated with the Trump campaign. “Do you try to correct him like Hillary did, or do you try to throw your own sand? If you spend the whole time going, ‘No, no, he can’t say that, that’s not true,’ he’s still winning.”

Win McNamee—Getty ImagesStudents stand-ins for U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden respectively, participate in a rehearsal for the first presidential debate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, September 28, 2020.

Biden served as vice president for eight years and has been a fixture of national politics for debates, yet is still a less familiar figure to the public, to the point that some Democratic campaigners worry he remains ill-defined. Trump and his allies have signaled they plan to deploy a version of the anti-Clinton playbook, seeking to turn the established politician’s experience into a negative by casting him as part of the failed policies of the past.

In vice presidential debates in 2008 and 2012, Biden cut a fast-talking, sometimes wise-cracking figure, mingling folksy turns of phrase with senatorial disquisitions on the finer points of policy. Ritter, who helped prepare then-GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan to debate Biden in 2012, recalls, “Joe does the ‘aw, shucks, man,’ kind of thing really well, which allows him to roll off the ropes pretty easily. Hillary didn’t have that personality gear.”

Biden has aged since then, and his recent debates against Democratic counterparts were inconsistent. His answers were often meandering or clumsily worded, and he sometimes got lost in obscure reminiscence. Still, his opponents’ attacks rarely seemed to register and frequently backfired; his essential humanity, former opponents say, tended to shine through. “He has this thing where he’ll just flash this big, high-wattage smile instead of getting nasty or defensive, and it serves him well,” says Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who masterminded Pete Buttigieg’s primary campaign and is unaffiliated with the Biden camp. “He’s a sympathetic figure—there’s just not much value in punching Uncle Joe in the face.”

Democrats are haunted by the ghosts of 2016, when many believe Clinton put too much emphasis on attacking Trump and not enough on defining her own vision or making the case that she represented a change from the status quo. That remains a danger for Biden, whose supporters, polls have shown, are motivated primarily by passionate dislike for Trump.

But Trump, Democrats argue, will have a harder time playing the outsider now that he is the incumbent. “Trump thrives at the lowest level, in the sewer, and he’s going to try everything he can to get Joe Biden down there with him,” Smith says. “But now that we’ve seen what four years of Trump is like, it’s harder to pull the wool over the eyes of voters like he did last time.”

Though the debate promises to be exciting, political observers express doubt that it will have much effect on the outcome of a campaign whose fundamentals have been remarkably stable. Biden leads nationally by an average of seven percentage points—a lead that has neither expanded nor contracted substantially since the onset of COVID-19 or the other seismic events of this dismal year. His leads in most swing states have been similarly steady.

“If a global pandemic and recession couldn’t fundamentally change the numbers in this race, it’s hard to believe 90 minutes of televised debate will,” Smith says.

Ritter, the GOP consultant, echoed that analysis. In the populations his firm contacts for down-ballot campaigns, “we’re not seeing a lot of swing voters,” he says. “People might be tuning into the debate to see if Joe Biden will melt or Donald Trump will do something so beyond the pale it takes your breath away. But I don’t think anyone is going in with an open mind, just curious to see what these two candidates for higher office have to say.”

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New top story from Time: 1 Million People Have Died of COVID-19. It’s a Reminder That We Still Have So Much to Do

With an ever-climbing tally of COVID-19 infections, deaths, and calculations about how quickly the virus is spreading, the numbers can start to lose meaning. But one million is a resonant milestone.

According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, the world has now lost one million lives to the new coronavirus. It’s easy to draw analogies—one million people dying of COVID-19 would be the equivalent of just over the entire population of a country like Djibouti, or just under the populace of Cyprus. Perhaps more sobering would be to think of that number less as an entity and more in terms of the precious individual lives it represents. It’s a chance to remind ourselves that each of those deaths is a mother, a father, a grandmother, a grandfather, a friend, a loved one.

It’s also a warning to learn from these deaths so they haven’t occurred in vain. When the novel coronavirus burst into the world last winter, the best virus and public health experts were initially helpless to combat infections in a world where almost nobody had any immunity to fight it. As a result, the mortality rate, which hovered just under 3% around the world starting in late January, slowly began to creep upward, doubling in two months and hitting a peak of more than 7% at the end of April before inching downward again.

While every death from COVID-19 is one too many, public health experts see some hope in the fact that while new cases continue to pile up around the world, deaths are starting to slow. That declining case fatality curve was and continues to be fueled by everything we have learned about SARS-CoV-2 (the COVID-19 virus) and everything that we have put into practice to fight it. That includes using experimental therapies like the antiviral drug remdesivir, as well as existing anti-inflammatory medicines that reduce the inflammation that can compromise and damage the lungs and respiratory tissues in the most severely ill patients.

That falling case fatality is also due in part to wider adoption of prevention strategies such as frequent hand washing, mask wearing and social distancing. And to the fact that globally, we began testing more people so those who are infected can then self-isolate quickly.

Read more: The Lives Lost to Coronavirus

Still, another thing we have learned from the pandemic is that deaths often lag behind cases, sometimes by months. And the number of cases globally continues to increase, especially in new hot spots in South America and India, so the declining curve of the fatality rate hasn’t necessarily led to fewer overall deaths.

Understanding how the geography and nature of COVID-19 deaths have shifted in recent months will be critical to maintaining any progress we’ve made, as nations and as a species, in suppressing COVID-19. In the U.S., for example, deaths early in the pandemic were centered in densely populated metropolitan areas, where infections spread quickly and hospitals became overwhelmed with severely ill people needing intensive care and ventilators to breathe. The virus had the advantage, and exploited the fact that there wasn’t much that science or medicine could do to fight it.

Read more: COVID-19 Has Killed More Than 200,000 Americans. How Many More Lives Will Be Lost Before the U.S. Gets It Right?

The only strategy was to take ourselves out of the virus’s way. Lockdowns that prohibited gatherings, mandates for social distancing and requirements that people wear masks in public helped to slow transmission and gradually reduce mortality, as the most vulnerable were protected from infection. But nine months into the pandemic, deaths are beginning to rise in less populated parts of the country. Medium- and small-sized cities and rural areas accounted for around 30% of U.S. deaths at their peak in late April, but in September they have been responsible for about half of COVID-19 deaths in the country.

The reason for that, public health experts suspect, has to do with the false sense of security that less populated communities felt and the assumption that the virus wouldn’t find them. Less stringent requirements and enforcement of social distancing and basic hygiene practices like hand washing and mask-wearing could have provided SARS-CoV-2 the entrée it needed to find new chances to infect people as those opportunities in more populated regions began to dwindle. Furthermore, health resources in rural areas aren’t as well distributed as they are in metropolitan regions, which makes preparing for an infectious disease more challenging.

Globally, COVID-19 mortality also reflects the unequal distribution of health care around the world. While developed countries are able to rely on existing resources—including hospital systems equipped with the latest medical tools and well-trained nurses and doctors—those resources aren’t as robust in lower income countries where health care isn’t always a high national priority. That puts these countries at greater risk of higher fatality from COVID-19 as new infections climb. Without medical equipment and personnel to ramp up testing and isolate infected people, or to care for the sickest patients, deaths quickly follow new infections.

That tragic reality is being borne out in recent case fatality trends. While the U.S. continues to lead the world in overall COVID-19 cases and deaths, the burden of deaths is shifting to countries such as Brazil and Mexico; Brazil has just over half the number of deaths of the U.S. Deaths in India are also likely to continue inching upward before they start to decline, as survival there under lockdown conditions is nearly impossible for families that have no income to buy food and pay rent. The pressure to reopen and re-emerge into densely populated cities will provide more fertile ground for COVID-19 to spread—and to claim more lives—before better treatments and vaccines can start to suppress the virus’ relentless blaze of despair.

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Coronvirus

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Donald Trump Paid Only $750 In Income Taxes In 2016: Report

US President Donald Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he won the election, The New York Times reported Sunday, citing tax return data extending more than 20 years.

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New top story from Time: President Trump Paid $750 in Federal Income Tax in 2016 and 2017, New York Times Reports

President Donald Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes the year he ran for president and in his first year in the White House, according to a report Sunday in The New York Times.

Trump, who has fiercely guarded his tax filings and is the only president in modern times not to make them public, paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the past 15 years.

The details of the tax filings complicate Trump’s description of himself as a shrewd and patriotic businessman, revealing instead a series of financial losses and income from abroad that could come into conflict with his responsibilities as president. The president’s financial disclosures indicated he earned at least $434.9 million in 2018, but the tax filings reported a $47.4 million loss.

The tax filings also illustrate how a reputed billionaire could pay little to nothing in taxes, while someone in the middle class could pay substantially more than him. Nearly half of Americans pay no income taxes, primarily because of how their low incomes are. But IRS figures indicate that the average tax filer paid roughly $12,200 in 2017, about 16 times more than what the president paid.

The disclosure, which the Times said comes from tax return data it obtained extending over two decades, comes at a pivotal moment ahead of the first presidential debate Tuesday and weeks before a divisive election against Democrat Joe Biden.

Speaking at a news conference Sunday at the White House, Trump dismissed the report as “fake news” and maintained he has paid taxes, though he gave no specifics. He also vowed that information about his taxes “will all be revealed,” but he offered no timeline for the disclosure and made similar promises during the 2016 campaign on which he never followed through.

In fact, the president has fielded court challenges against those seeking access to his returns, including the U.S. House, which is suing for access to Trump’s tax returns as part of congressional oversight.

During his first two years as president, Trump received $73 million from foreign operations, which in addition to his golf properties in Scotland and Ireland included $3 million from the Philippines, $2.3 million from India and $1 million from Turkey, among other nations. The president in 2017 paid $145,400 in taxes in India and $156,824 in the Philippines, compared to just $750 in U.S. income taxes. The Times said the tax records did not reveal any unreported connections to Russia.

Trump found multiple ways to reduce his tax bills. He has taken tax deductions on personal expenses such as housing, aircraft and $70,000 to style his hair while he filmed “The Apprentice.” Losses in the property businesses solely owned and managed by Trump appear to have offset income from his stake in “The Apprentice” and other entities with multiple owners.

During the first two years of his presidency, Trump relied on business tax credits to reduce his tax obligations. The Times said $9.7 million worth of business investment credits that were submitted after Trump requested an extension to file his taxes allowed him to reduce his income and pay just $750 each in 2016 and 2017.

Income tax payments help finance the military and domestic programs.

Trump, starting in 2010, claimed and received an income tax refund that totaled $72.9 million, which the Times said was at the core of an ongoing audit by the IRS. The Times said a ruling against Trump could cost him $100 million or more. He also has more than $300 million in loans due to be repaid in the next four years.

Richard Neal, D-Mass., the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee who has tried unsuccessfully to obtain Trump’s tax records, said the Times report makes it even more essential for his committee to get the documents.

“It appears that the President has gamed the tax code to his advantage and used legal fights to delay or avoid paying what he owes,” Neal wrote in a statement. “Now, Donald Trump is the boss of the agency he considers an adversary. It is essential that the IRS’s presidential audit program remain free of interference.”

A lawyer for the Trump Organization, Alan Garten, and a spokesperson for the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press on the report.

Garten told the Times that “most, if not all, of the facts appear to be inaccurate.”

He said in a statement to the news organization that the president “has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015.”

The New York Times said it declined to provide Garten with the tax filings in order to protect its sources, but it said its sources had legal access to the records.

During his first general election debate against Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016, Clinton said that perhaps Trump wasn’t releasing his tax returns because he had paid nothing in federal taxes.

Trump interrupted her to say, “That makes me smart.”

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