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I remember back in 2016 when Trump resoundingly crushed Clinton in the televised debates. He just ran circles around her and exposed her humiliatingly as the washed up establishment hack she is. He has undeniably sharp instincts in a live setting, and he’s almost always able to sharply undermine whatever his opponent says with a cutting one-liner every time they conclude a point (remember ‘because you’d be in jail’?). The reason he was able to do all this so effectively is because his talking points back then were a list of very legitimate criticisms of Clinton – how she supported the Iraq war, how she represented the status quo, how she was complicit in the outsourcing of American jobs overseas, how corrupt she was, and so on. ‘Crooked Hillary’ has to go down as one of the most effective political slogans of all time for how succinctly it encapsulates the grievances that millions of people had with the type of politics she represented. 

In 2020? Well, watching Trump handle the debate with Biden a few nights ago his performance was comparatively miserable. He’s had four chaotic years in office, during which time his policy record has been a whole lot less outsider-ish than some initially thought, so the anti-establishment angle is no longer particularly viable (he attempted a few times to hit Biden on that line by saying he’d achieved nothing in 47 years, but I think Joe countered that quite effectively by bringing up the obvious defence that the Obama administration saved General Motors), and thus his range of available insults has been transformed from cogent criticisms of the American political system to a laundry list of half-baked conspiracies and personal attacks. He’s spent quite a lot of time trying to paint Biden as a far-left radical or puppet of Bernie, whilst also simultaneously slamming him for writing the infamously authoritarian 1994 crime bill and for being a figure of the establishment and a ‘Do-Nothing Democrat’, a hilariously incoherent position that has probably left scores of voters more confused than anything else. The attacks on Biden’s family were an optics disaster, too, it made him look childish and immature, as did his constant interrupting and bickering with the moderator. 

How Trump’s positive coronavirus result will affect this remains to be seen, but it seems to me the discourse has split into two camps with one insisting that he’s perfectly healthy and the other that he’s on the verge of death. The overall effect, I think, is just utter confusion, which I don’t think will benefit Trump much. After all, the longer Trump’s health is the subject of public attention, the less focus there will be on Biden’s own cognitive decline. 

A coronavirus vaccine can kill up to half a million sharks due to using their liver oil.

I stumbled across the article and found it very interesting.

At least you’re not here in the US, where even Tories like Piers Morgan and Andrew Neil would be considered far-left by a good chunk of the population.

50yearslate said
What do you mean, far more people are Democrats than Republicans? Is that true? It doesn’t really feel like that :/

  

While maybe using the words ‘far more people’ is an exaggeration, if you look at this link you can scroll down polls on this topic dating back to 2004 and see that polling for Republican affiliation is typically in the mid-20s percentage wise whereas for Democrats it’s usually high-20s, low-30s. There are some outliers, but I think that’s generally the case. Of the two occasions in recent history when the president lost the popular vote but won the electoral college, both times Democrats won the popular vote. Furthermore, this poll shows that independents tend to lean Democrat, by about 17% to 14% as of 2019. That’s not even counting all the recent polls which show Biden absolutely crushing Trump, sometimes by a margin of up to 15%, even among Trump’s core base such as older voters. 

Also, I think it’s pretty clear that if the electoral college were to be abolished, Republicans would have far less chance of winning in Congress, given that votes in Republican leaning states like Wyoming are worth far more than votes in typically Democrat-leaning states with larger populations, like California or New York.