The Final Presidential Debate: ‘I Take Full Responsibility. It’s Not My Fault…’
A roundtable with Douglas Rushkoff, Garance Franke-Ruta, Max Ufberg, and Andrea González-Ramírez
Garance Franke-Ruta: Hi, I’m Garance, executive editor of GEN, here to welcome you to the final punch-drunk, no-holds-barred, mute-button-defying presidential debate to determine the course of our democracy. Our subject tonight is smears: From Whitewater to the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth to the Whitey Tape to Hillary Clinton’s emails, Republicans have been adept at creating cascading investigations and sticky insinuations that raise doubts, ensnaring and smearing Democrats in office and on the campaign trail. I fully expect the late October effort to make the election about Joe Biden’s troubled son Hunter — and to smear Biden with a mix of false and real charges leveled against Hunter — to be a main Trump line of attack tonight.
A lot of the Biden allegations are new, late-breaking, Russia-assisted campaign interventions rather than narratives that were set by mid-summer as in other presidential election years. And yet it’s worth remembering this too has all been going on a long time: Trump was impeached last winter by Congress for seeking in 2019 to pressure Ukraine into smearing Hunter Biden, thereby interfering in the…
