The New York Times - USA (2020-10-15)

“The World Health

Organization just

admitted that I was

right,” President Trump

tweeted this week.

“Lockdowns are killing

countries all over the

world.” But the W.H.O.

did not say that. Here’s

the truth. PAGE A

DISTORTIONS

VOL. CLXX.... No. 58,847 © 2020 The New York Times Company THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020

U(DF463D)X+[!?!&!$!"

During Judge Amy Coney Bar-

rett’s Supreme Court confirma-

tion hearings this week, Republi-

can senators, one after another,

marveled at a role that doesn’t ap-

pear on her résumé: mother of

seven. They described her moth-

ering as “tireless” and “remark-

able,” clear evidence that she was

a “superstar.” Senator Josh Haw-

ley asked her for parenting ad-

vice.

Judge Barrett has embraced

the image. News cameras were

there to watch her load her large

family into her car before her offi-

cial nomination. “While I am a

judge, I’m better known back

home as a room parent, car-pool

driver and birthday party plan-

ner,” she said the day she was

nominated.

One of her sharpest question-

ers, Senator Kamala Harris, the

Democratic vice-presidential

nominee, has, in other settings, re-

peatedly emphasized her role as

stepmother, which she took on

when she married six years ago.

She is called Momala, she has told

voters, and she cooks the Sunday

night family dinners.

For American women in public

office, being a mother has become

Mothers in Public Office Still Walk a ‘Tightrope’

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

and ALISHA HARIDASANI GUPTA Jumble of Expectations

That Men Don’t Face

Judge Amy Coney Barrett is a mother of seven, which was discussed at her confirmation hearings.

ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Continued on Page A

Long before Joseph R. Biden Jr.

was smashing online fund-raising

records, long before it was clear

he would become the Democratic

nominee, his campaign was facing

a serious cash crisis.

It was late summer 2019 and Mr.

Biden’s online fund-raising had

slowed to such a trickle that his

team basically had to shut down

its digital advertising program.

His aides knew the choice was

self-defeating: No more online

ads meant no more finding new

donors. The campaign bottomed

out in early September 2019 when

Mr. Biden raised just $24,124.

online in a day.

Now? On one recent day, Mr. Bi-

den was raising more than that ev-

ery two minutes.

The unlikely transformation of

Mr. Biden, a 77-year-old whose

seemingly limited appeal to small

donors left him financially out-

flanked in the primaries, into per-

haps the greatest magnet for on-

line money in American political

history is a testament to the feroc-

ity of Democratic opposition to

President Trump.

In a little over a year, the former

vice president’s online fund-rais-

ing had increased 1,000-fold, to

$24.1 million on Sept. 30.

Mr. Biden now has a once-un-

imaginable cash edge over Mr.

Trump, and since Sept. 1 he has re-

served about $140 million more in

television advertising than the

president. Money alone does not

determine presidential winners —

Hillary Clinton vastly outspent

Mr. Trump in 2016 — but the cash

has provided Mr. Biden enviable

flexibility to engineer the electoral

map to his advantage.

Biden’s Climb

To Cash King

Of 2020 Race

By SHANE GOLDMACHER

and RACHEL SHOREY

Continued on Page A

Michael Reinoehl was on the

run.

A few days after a shooting left a

far-right Trump supporter dead

on the streets of Portland, Ore.,

Mr. Reinoehl, an antifa activist

who had been named in the news

media as a focus of the investiga-

tion, feared that vigilantes were

after him, not to mention the po-

lice. Even some of his close friends

did not know where he was.

But the authorities knew.

On Sept. 3, about 120 miles

north of Portland, Mr. Reinoehl

was getting into his Volkswagen

station wagon when a pair of un-

marked sport utility vehicles

roared through the quiet streets,

screeching to a halt just in front of

his bumper. Members of a U.S.

Marshals task force jumped out

and unleashed a hail of bullets

that shattered windows, whizzed

past bystanders and left Mr. Rei-

noehl dead in the street.

Attorney General William P.

Barr trumpeted the operation as a

“significant accomplishment”

that removed a “violent agitator.”

The officers had opened fire, he

said, when Mr. Reinoehl “at-

Activist’s Death

In Hail of Shots

Under Scrutiny

This article is by Evan Hill, Mike

Baker, Derek Knowlesand Stella

Cooper.

Evidence markers near where

Michael Reinoehl was killed.

TED S. WARREN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Continued on Page A

F.D.R.-LIKEJoseph R. Biden Jr.

draws his bold pandemic plan

from the New Deal. PAGE A

On the afternoon of Feb. 24,

President Trump declared on

Twitter that the coronavirus was

“very much under control” in the

United States, one of numerous

rosy statements that he and his

advisers made at the time about

the worsening epidemic. He even

added an observation for invest-

ors: “Stock market starting to

look very good to me!”

But hours earlier, senior mem-

bers of the president’s economic

team, privately addressing board

members of the conservative

Hoover Institution, were less con-

fident. Tomas J. Philipson, a sen-

ior economic adviser to the presi-

dent, told the group he could not

yet estimate the effects of the vi-

rus on the American economy. To

some in the group, the implication

was that an outbreak could prove

worse than Mr. Philipson and

other Trump administration ad-

visers were signaling in public at

the time.

The next day, board members

— many of them Republican do-

nors — got another taste of gov-

ernment uncertainty from Larry

Kudlow, the director of the Na-

tional Economic Council. Hours

after he had boasted on CNBC

that the virus was contained in the

United States and “it’s pretty close

to airtight,” Mr. Kudlow delivered

a more ambiguous private mes-

sage. He asserted that the virus

was “contained in the U.S., to date,

but now we just don’t know,” ac-

cording to a document describing

the sessions obtained by The New

York Times.

The document, written by a

hedge fund consultant who at-

tended the three-day gathering of

Hoover’s board, was stark. “What

struck me,” the consultant wrote,

was that nearly every official he

heard from raised the virus “as a

point of concern, totally unpro-

voked.”

The consultant’s assessment

quickly spread through parts of

the investment world. U.S. stocks

were already spiraling because of

a warning from a federal public

health official that the virus was

likely to spread, but traders spot-

ted the immediate significance:

The president’s aides appeared to

be giving wealthy party donors an

early warning of a potentially im-

pactful contagion at a time when

Mr. Trump was publicly insisting

that the threat was nonexistent.

Interviews with eight people

who either received copies of the

memo or were briefed on aspects

of it as it spread among investors

in New York and elsewhere pro-

vide a glimpse of how elite traders

had access to information from

the administration that helped

them gain financial advantage

during a chaotic three days when

global markets were teetering.

The memo was occasionally

breathless and inchoate. It ap-

pears to have overstated the grav-

ity of some administration offi-

cials’ warnings to the group and

Trump’s Aides Tipped Off

Donors to Impact of Virus

Private Worries Fueled Sell-Off Even as the

White House Painted a Rosy Picture

By KATE KELLY and MARK MAZZETTI

Continued on Page A
LONDON — From France to
Russia, from Britain to the Czech
Republic, European leaders are
confronting a surge in coronavi-
rus cases that is rapidly filling
hospital beds, driving up death
tolls and raising the grim prospect
of further lockdowns in countries
already traumatized by the pan-
demic.
The continent, which once com-
pared favorably to the United
States in its handling of the pan-
demic, is being engulfed by a sec-
ond wave of infection. With an av-
erage of more than 100,000 new in-
fections per day over the past
week, Europe now accounts for
about one-third of new cases re-
ported worldwide.
In the most vivid sign of the de-
teriorating situation, President
Emmanuel Macron of France on
Wednesday imposed a curfew of 9
p.m. to 6 a.m. in the Paris region
and eight other metropolitan ar-
eas, beginning on Saturday. “The
virus is everywhere in France,” he
told the French public, as he de-
clared a state of emergency.
The resurgence has prompted
officials to close bars and clubs in
Prague and Liverpool, and to
make face masks mandatory in
public indoor spaces in Amster-
dam. In Russia, which reported its
largest daily increase in infections
on Wednesday, President Vladi-
mir V. Putin sought refuge from
the torrent of bad news by an-
nouncing that his government
had approved a second vaccine.
Chancellor Angela Merkel of
Germany better captured the anx-
ious mood when she said on Tues-
day, “I am watching with great
concern the renewed increase in
infection numbers in almost every
part of Europe.” Ms. Merkel add-
ed, “We mustn’t throw away what
we achieved via restrictions over
the past months.”
To some extent, Europe’s set-
back is hardly a surprise. Public
health experts have long warned
that the virus could roar back
when the days grew colder, driv-
ing people indoors, where the risk
of transmission is far greater.
In several European countries,
lockdowns were lifted abruptly,
sowing complacency among peo-
ple who felt they could return to
their normal lives. In the face of in-
tense political pressures, Euro-
pean leaders have been reluctant
to impose new, economically dam-

Curfew in Paris

In Virus Surge

Across Europe

By MARK LANDLER

Disinfecting a medical worker in the Covid-19 ward of a Spanish hospital. Europe has been reporting over 100,000 new cases a day.

BERNAT ARMANGUE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Continued on Page A

WASHINGTON — As Judge

Amy Coney Barrett has strained

to present herself this week as

someone who would join the

Supreme Court without having

made up her mind

on pivotal cases, she

was haunted by the

long and exceed-

ingly public record of the voluble

man who nominated her.

Like others who have found

themselves politically entangled

with President Trump, Judge

Barrett has struggled over two

days to separate herself from the

trove of tweets and other pro-

nouncements by Mr. Trump on

his legal views and demands,

many of which call into question

the very notion of an independ-

ent judiciary.

He has said incessantly that he

wants the Affordable Care Act

overturned. After the death of

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he

said he needed a full complement

of nine justices on the court to

resolve any legal battle over the

coming election, which he has

warned without evidence will

most likely be fraudulent. In his

2016 campaign, Mr. Trump de-

clared that under his administra-

tion, the reversal of the Roe v.

Wade decision establishing a

federal right to abortion would

“happen automatically, in my

opinion, because I am putting

pro-life justices on the court.”

The president, who early on

recognized the power of Su-

preme Court confirmation fights

to motivate voters on the right,

has gone much further than his

predecessors in publicly defining

what he expected out of a Su-

preme Court justice. Judge Bar-

rett, in turn, has been under

more pressure than past nomi-

nees to demonstrate her inde-

pendence, often leaving Demo-

crats skeptical of her claims of

neutrality.

“Unfortunately, that is the

cloud, the orange cloud, over

your nomination as it comes

before us here in the Senate

Judiciary Committee,” Senator

Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of

Trump’s Words Haunt a Tight-Lipped Nominee

By CARL HULSE

Continued on Page A

NEWS

ANALYSIS

Barrett Strains to Show

Distance From Man

Who Selected Her

A limousine carrying the Thai queen

got a close-up view of pro-democracy

protests in Bangkok. PAGE A

INTERNATIONAL A10-

A Glimpse of Discontent

Amid worries over vacated office build-

ings in Midtown, big tech companies

have continued with their plans to

expand in New York City. PAGE B

BUSINESS B1-

Big Tech Takes New York

Russia said a Trump aide’s claim of

agreement in principle on extending a

treaty was “nonsense.” PAGE A

No Nuclear Deal Imminent A woman being charged with falsely

calling the police on a Black bird-

watcher in Central Park actually called

twice, prosecutors revealed. PAGE A

White Accuser Doubled Down

Frank Bruni PAGE A

EDITORIAL, OP-ED A26-

Among the many tasks of the designer

Marc Jacobs’s personal assistant?

Shooting a documentary about their

lives during the pandemic. PAGE D

THURSDAY STYLES D1-

An Assistant With Access

Experts said the delays, a common

occurrence, show that the drug makers

are following safety protocols. PAGE A

TRACKING AN OUTBREAK A4-

Good Signs in 3 Trial Pauses

Most Latino voters favor Democrats,

but Hispanic men are an enduring part

of President Trump’s base. PAGE A

NATIONAL A13-

Macho Appeal of the President

Nick Saban, the Alabama football

coach, said he tested positive for the

coronavirus, deepening the pandemic’s

turmoil in the SEC. PAGE A

SPORTSTHURSDAY B8-

Alabama Coach Tests Positive

Printed in Chicago $3.

Early shower in areas. Periodic

clouds. Breezy. Highs in upper 40s

to 50s. Mostly clear tonight. Frosty

for many. Lows in 20s to 30s.

Weather map appears on Page A28.

National Edition