Time November 2/November 9, 2020The PresidenT’s voice sTarTs ouT a liTTle
raspy, but before long he’s in full roar. “We’re going
to have a big victory, and that will be the end of it,”
Donald Trump says. “Because you know what? One
more defeat and they’re going to accept it.”
A murmur rises from the sweaty, jubilant crowd
in this horse-breeding hub northwest of Orlando.
Thousands are packed onto the airport tarmac in
the blazing October sun. Nearly everyone is wear-
ing a Trump shirt or hat—KeeP america GreaT,
maKe l iBerals crY aGain, no more Bullsh-T,
adoraBle dePloraBle Kid For TrumP—and al-
most no one is wearing a face mask. They’re going
to win Florida again, Trump says. There’s going to
be a big red wave.
In the other version of reality, things are
far less hopeful for Trump. Most polls
say his opponent, Joe Biden, is ahead in
Florida, a state without which it’s almost
impossible for Trump to win, where more
than 16,000 people have died of COVID-19
and nearly 4 million have already voted.
The President is on the defensive in the
battlegrounds he won four years ago,
struggling even in states he should have
locked up, like Ohio and Georgia. At a
time when the nation’s problems are urgent
and obvious, Trump’s closing message is
an argle-bargle of conspiracy theories and
personal grievance.
As the President rallies in Florida, Biden is in
Michigan doing normal-candidate things: giving a
pat speech on health care, holding a drive-in rally
at a fairgrounds in Detroit and posing for (masked!)
selfies with a youth choir. But what Biden is doing
is almost beside the point. This election isn’t about
Biden, and everyone, including Biden, knows it.
It’s about Trump: the ultimate referendum on
this norm-shattering presidency, the climactic epi-
sode of our national nervous breakdown, the final
reckoning. From the start, Biden has been calling his
campaign a “battle for the soul of the nation,” and
as trite and grandiose as that may sound, it’s hard
to disagree. It is a campaign premised entirely on
emotional contrast—compassion, trust, inclusion—
and a plea for an ending, a do-over, a return to nor-
mal times. “Everybody knows who Donald Trump
is,” Biden says in Michigan. “We have to let them
know who we are.” But as Trump is fond of pointing
out, if the old normal was so great, he wouldn’t have
gotten elected in the first place.
An embattled Trump insisting the prognosticators
are wrong, while chaos swirls and his opponent
attempts to play by the old rules: in so many ways,
it feels like 2016 all over again. Gloomy Republicans
fret that Trump is dragging the party down with
him. One Republican Senator recently called the
President a “TV-obsessed narcissistic individual,”
while another isn’t supporting his Supreme Court
nominee; Trump, of course, lashed out at both
of them on Twitter. The campaign pros wish he‘THEY CAN GET
RID OF TRUMP,
BUT THEY CAN’T
GET RID OF US.’
—RAYMOND TEDESCO,
TRUMP SUPPORTER
SEASON
FINALE
WITH HIS CHALLENGER IN THE LEAD AND THE NATION AT A
CROSSROADS, DONALD TRUMP MAKES HIS LAST STAND
By Molly Ball/Ocala, Fla.