THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

Is it wiser strategically for Donald Trump’s opponents to promote anti-Trump messages or pro-Joe Biden ones? Progressives have been at odds over this basic question since the Democratic primary wound down, and actually since the 2016 campaign, when Hillary Clinton faced the same dilemma, but I think it’s worth asking again in light of the past week’s events. 

Trump warps this debate through sheer force of personality—by being so consistently repugnant and corrupt that decent people naturally imagine the masses will rise up against him if the truth gets more exposure. The last four years have tested that assumption, though, and the results are mixed. On one hand, Trump has been consistently, toxically unpopular, through good economic times and bad, and this almost certainly wouldn’t have been the case if he’d given things like “decency” and “ethics” or even “shutting the fuck up sometimes” a test drive at any point. On the other hand, he’s also retained enough support to win the electoral college, suggesting his tribal appeal to the white conservative lizard brain might blunt the effects of negative messaging.

On the other other hand, his unrelenting outrageousness makes it difficult for ordinary positive messaging to break through. It’s not as though Hillary Clinton never talked about or advertised her popular policy platform—it’s just that stump speeches about health care are no match for racist incitement and conspiracy theories in the battle for public attention. Nobody remembers what the teacher was talking about the day the kid in the back row ate a live cricket.

This history helps explain why a subset of Trump’s opponents—including many resistance liberals and the former Republicans of the Lincoln Project—tend to prize anti-Trump messaging, while the Democratic Party's leaders and number crunchers believe they are mistaken. “Pro-[B]iden messaging is considerably more effective than anti-[T]rump messaging. There are actually limited dollars and allocating most of your money toward the more effective lane is going to net more votes,” explains the progressive data analyst David Shor, “The second order effect is that the media *really* wants to talk about anti-[T]rump stuff. It requires a lot of message discipline to get them to successfully cover the things that are advantageous for us.”

In this view, it’s not just that pro-Biden messaging is marginally more effective than anti-Trump messaging. There’s also an added opportunity cost to splitting the difference with a mix of both: Without a loud drumbeat, pro-Biden messages will get drowned out (see above) which means it’s doubly imperative for people who want Trump to lose to ignore the temptation of anti-Trump expenditures and be disciplined pro-Biden messengers instead. 

It's a compelling argument, but it has one big blindspot, which the events of the past week dramatized pretty, um, dramatically. I don’t contest what the data says about the relative effectiveness of pro-Biden vs. anti-Trump messages, such as they exist right now. But data analytics can’t tell us anything about the scandals that still wade unexposed in the moral sewer of Trump world. 

Against a more conventional incumbent, I’d probably take the data as the final word, but Trump is a fire tornado of damaging secrets. When he isn’t lying and scheming to advance his own election prospects (and watching hours and hours of cable news) he devotes most of his time to fighting disclosure of secrets that he clearly believes would be damaging if revealed. 

There sadly isn’t much individual citizens can do to shake these scandals loose. And to that extent, we’re likelier to break through to angry grandpa with information about how Biden is an upstanding person and devout Catholic with popular policy ideas than by recapitulating all the bad things we already know about Trump (most of which angry grandpa has already deemed FAKE NEWS). 

But collectively, we risk leaving a ton of potentially valuable information hidden from the public when allies who've climbed the rungs of political power assume none of it will matter politically—that Trump has hit his floor, and the best we can do is raise Biden's ceiling. After I sent last week’s edition, The Atlantic published a devastating report on awful, revealing comments Trump has made about military veterans over the years, which clearly horrified his then-defense secretary and then-chief of staff, who ultimately took it upon themselves to leak the information. That story has arguably had a greater impact on the race than all positive pro-Biden messaging so far. Trump continued to reel from it through Wednesday, when reams of derogatory material and audio that Bob Woodward collected for his latest book hit the wires, including Trump’s admission that he lied to the public about the severity and spread of COVID-19 when telling the truth could’ve saved tens of thousands of lives. 

Without taking anything away from the reporting that brought those revelations to light, what’s remarkable about them is that the underlying information has been ripe for the plucking all along—particularly by an institution with resources and power like the House of Representatives—and the same is surely true for myriad scandals that have gone un- or under-pursued.

As we saw when Adam Schiff led the impeachment inquiry, a concerted Congress has an almost gravitational pull on information that the executive branch might want to bury, but unless Congress is relentless, the secrets can remain hidden. House Republicans didn’t wait for Bob Woodward to look into Hillary Clinton’s email setup before running a historically negative campaign against her. They got to it themselves by milking the fabricated Benghazi scandal for all it was worth, then milking the email situation for all it was worth, while putting immense pressure on the FBI to deem her email conduct criminal, (which in turn prefigured Jim Comey's campaign interventions and...well, you know the rest). 

The House has subpoena and agenda-setting power; the Biden campaign has more money than it can spend, and an army of researchers and lawyers. With their powers combined, who’s to say what they might unearth, or whether it’d cost Trump a percent or two in the polls, rendering him unelectable? No one can say for sure, is the answer. And a rebuttal might point to the implied risk that these efforts would turn up nothing useful. But that's why I think any rigorous argument against pushing anti-Trump angles needs to be rooted in the concept of risk tolerance. 

Biden’s up seven to eight points against a guy who probably has skeletons in his closet that would ruin him, but if we fail to dislodge them, or the right ones don’t tumble out, we may regret trying, when the stakes are too high to do things we might regret. Alternatively we can talk about Pell grants and the minimum wage and Biden’s family life—subjects we can control—and data suggests that will pad Biden’s lead a bit. I personally think the slightly riskier path (a healthy mix of pro-Biden messaging and aggressive Trump oppo) is worth it, particularly since the window for accountability and disclosure will close if Trump’s re-elected. The one person who knows the complete truth about Donald Trump is Donald Trump, and he believes his interests are best served by seeking prior restraint against authors of tell-all books and trying to quash subpoenas, while muddying the waters of morality, fitness, and Pell grants. If there’s one thing I trust about Trump it’s his self-preservation instinct. For all the secrets he keeps, he’s made no secret of what that instinct tells him.

Woodward’s revelations have ignited a completely separate debate about the journalistic ethics of hoarding information for a profit-seeking book rollout, when the public has a strong interest in knowing the information as soon as possible. 

When this debate arises (as it does with some regularity, though the mass-casualty pandemic part is new) the usual caveat journalists offer to defend the practice is that many newsmakers will only agree to speak candidly if reporters agree to reveal the information in books, rather than the next day’s paper. Trump kinda confounds this argument by routinely confessing horrible malfeasance to whichever reporter happens to be in front of him at any given moment; and more relevantly, this isn’t Woodward’s own defense of sitting on Trump’s deadly confession. 

But let’s take Woodward’s defenders up on their caveat. Their reasoning implies that nothing is more sacred than the assurances reporters give sources when setting ground rules for interviews. Yet it’s fair to assume none of them would ride this logic to its absurd endpoints. Had Trump disclosed a plan to nuke the city of New York, or burn 100,000 ballots in Philly, and Woodward broke his agreement with Trump by alerting the public before his book came out (when it might’ve been too late) everyone would’ve recognized he’d done the ethical thing. Like the debate over what belongs in the marketplace of ideas, everyone will eventually concede we’re really fighting over where to draw lines. In this case, Woodward’s defenders will draw the line to insulate him from criticism, but it's still an arbitrary line, not an iron rule. We (thankfully?!) can’t run the last six months over again so we’ll never know, but it’s easy to see how timelier disclosure of Trump’s deceptions would’ve saved many, many lives. A thoroughgoing defense of Woodward along these lines needs to account for the consequences of his long silence. Without that accounting, it’s just a rote defense of power, or members of the guild blindly insisting the guild can do no wrong.

This season's wildfires on the west coast have filled the atmosphere above the Bay Area and elsewhere with so much ash that the sun lit the sky orange instead of blue. Donald Trump doesn’t give a shit about that, of course (climate change is fake and there are no electoral votes for him out west) but he did find time to tell GOP voters he’d like to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court with someone like Ted Cruz in his second term. 

As the nausea subsides hopefully a sense of urgency replaces it. These are just two illustrations of the stakes of the election, but they should be enough. A lot has to go right over the next few weeks, and then over the coming few years, for the country and the world to recover from four years of Trump and decades of environmental neglect: Joe Biden must win, but Democrats also need to win the Senate, and they then need to resolve to abolish the filibuster, pass legislation of historic magnitude, block the partisan courts from throwing it all out, and win elections in a fairly unbroken way until Republicans stop being a hazard to humankind. Stick that landing, and we might be OK!

It's daunting to think about. We have to cram a lot of stuff through an extremely narrow opening and any single failure might slam the opening shut. But what will surely slam it shut is Trump’s re-election, another four years at least of unrestrained pollution, a Ted Cruzified Supreme Court, and the long-term or permanent breakdown of American democracy. As long as there's a theoretical path from here to a better future, we need to feel obliged to walk it. Their effort to demoralize the public amounts to nothing more than the hope that we will become weapons against ourselves.