Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s plot to steal the election can be defeated: Here are five things you can do to help

Don’t panic! Trump wants to steal the election, but he can be stopped — as long as everyone does their part

During Tuesday night’s debate, Donald Trump, who has gone pure fascist, once again escalated his efforts to scare people out of voting. He encouraged his followers to engage in voter intimidation under the guise of “poll watching,” and told armed hate groups to “stand by.” Trump also floated a number of baseless conspiracy theories about “voter fraud” that are clearly designed to discourage voting and rationalize legal efforts to stop votes from being counted.  [..]

Trump can’t win a free and fair election, and he knows it. So he’s doing everything in his power to keep Americans from having one. As the New York Times reported on Thursday morning, Republicans, in their efforts to save Trump, are using every dirty trick in the book to stop people from voting.

Times are scary. It’s understandable to feel demoralized, but it is more important than ever not to give into that feeling. Trump and Republicans want you to feel despair. Despair leads to inaction, which makes it a lot easier for Trump to pull this off.

Instead, it’s time to get angry, and to use that anger to propel you into action. Trump may want to steal the election, but wanting isn’t having. He can be defeated. He will likely be defeated — as long as everyone does their part to stop him.

With that in mind, here are five things you can do, starting today, to fight back and keep Trump from stealing this election.

Richard Wolffe: Trump heckled, bullied and lied through the debate. It won’t help him beat Biden

The president is behind in key states. Fighting on TV won’t turn things around or win over the sliver of undecided voters left

In a bar-room brawl, who wins the fight? The guy swinging his fists or the guy clutching his drink?

From the very first minute of the first presidential debate, the 45th president behaved as he has for the last four years: as unpresidential as possible.

He heckled. He bullied. He blustered and he lied. He came out swinging and didn’t mind where his fists landed: his opponent, the moderator, the Biden family, the microphones. It didn’t much matter. [..]

Biden sounded unsettled by the first round of the Trump onslaught. He lost his train of thought as Trump never ceased to talk over him.

If Democrats were hoping that Biden would box Trump in, they were surely disappointed. Biden’s most effective response was to laugh at the brawling around him.

But something funny happened on the way to Trump’s next swing of the fists: a pandemic. Covid-19 stopped the presidential yapping, briefly. Then Biden made a statement of the obvious, by questioning whether Trump was smart enough to handle the coronavirus.

“Did you use the word smart,” the un-president barked. “Don’t ever use the word smart with me.”

So easily offended, yet so quick to offend. Donald Trump is a heavyweight slugger with a fondant center.

Eugene Robinson: Imagine what it will be like to never have to think about Trump again

It’s within reach. We can vote him out of office — and out of our minds.

If you are like me and you watched Tuesday’s debate with a voice in your head screaming make it stop, take heart: We have the power to do just that. We can evict President Trump from the territory he has forcibly seized in our minds. We can — we must — vote him out of our thoughts.

We can remove this awful man from our collective headspace, which he has so thoroughly befouled. We can reclaim our serenity, our equilibrium, our sense 0f common humanity. We can return to a time when it was possible to go hours or even entire days without once thinking about what our president might be saying or doing. We can exhale.

At a recent rally in North Carolina, Trump was making one of his rambling attempts to mock Joe Biden when he told the crowd: “If I lose to him, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I will never speak to you again. You’ll never see me again.” Biden’s social media team quickly posted a clip of Trump’s remarks, then added a zinger: “I’m Joe Biden, and I approve this message.” [..]

If Biden wins the election, Trump will not go happily and might not go easily. But he will indeed go — and when he leaves the White House, he will also vacate our national consciousness, giving us all some psychic room to breathe.

A vote for Biden is more than a vote for sane governance. It is a vote for American sanity, period.

Jill Filipovic: Masculinity is a force in the US election – and women are responding accordingly

Women are increasingly rejecting Trump’s ruthless version of manhood. The same can not be said for white men

Tuesday night’s presidential debate was a lot of things: a debacle, a degradation, a disaster. But it was also a story about gender, and what it looks like when men lean on tired versions of white manliness to win.

Donald Trump’s entire political career has rested on aggrieved white masculinity. In the president’s view – and the view of many of his followers – there is one way to be a man: you dominate, you hurt people, you use any means necessary to assert yourself as the top dog in the pack. You don’t need to earn respect or demonstrate competence in order to be elevated. You don’t need to play by the rules. You don’t need to be a good sportsman. You just need to win.

This was all on full display at the first debate. Trump interrupted Joe Biden so often that the debate wound up largely content-free. When Trump spoke, he offered virtually nothing of substance; he used his time, instead, to berate Biden, Democrats, the left, Bernie Sanders and anything else that crossed his mind. He was vulgar, aggressive and rude, refusing to abide by the rules he agreed to beforehand. He was a know-nothing bully.

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Heather Digby Parton: A debate that will live in infamy: That sweaty, red-faced liar is actually our president

We already knew Trump was a national embarrassment. Did he think his sneering-bully act would win back voters?

At the conclusion of the first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on Tuesday night, CNN’s Dana Bash gave the best review of the proceedings: “That was a sh**show.” Her colleague Jake Tapper who described it as “a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck. That was the worst debate I have ever seen. In fact, it wasn’t a debate. It was a disgrace. It’s primarily because of President Trump, who spent the entire time interrupting [and] lying.” Or maybe Rachel Maddow’s assessment on MSNBC — a “monstrous cavalcade of increasingly wild and obscene lies” — draws the most accurate picture of what went down in Cleveland on Tuesday night.

However you want to phrase it, a great truth was expressed by Wolf Blitzer when he opened his show:

I’d like to welcome viewers from here and around the world. Clearly this debate was an embarrassment for the United States …

I would only add that it was an embarrassment entirely because of Donald Trump’s sophomoric behavior, which was more befitting a nasty tween bully trying to shake someone down for his lunch money than the president of the United States. But then, why would we expect otherwise? The Donald Trump whom millions of people watched in horror as he lied, insulted, interrupted and acted like a barbaric brute is who he is virtually every day at his briefings, press avails, interviews and, most especially, the grotesque super-spreader events he calls campaign rallies. To expect him to behave with the decorum befitting the leader of the most powerful country in the world is absurd. He simply doesn’t know how.

Robert Reich: The coming civil war caused by Trump’s ego

Regardless of what happens, Trump’s megalomaniacal ego will prevail

What is America really fighting over in the upcoming election? No particular issue. Not even Democrats versus Republicans.

The central fight is over Donald J Trump.

Before Trump, most Americans weren’t especially passionate about politics. But Trump’s MO has been to force people to become passionate about him – to take fierce sides for or against. And he considers himself president only of the former – whom he calls “my people.”

Trump came to office with no agenda except to feed his monstrous ego. He has never fueled his base. His base has fueled him. Its adoration sustains him.

So does the antipathy of his detractors. Presidents usually try to appease their critics. Trump has gone out of his way to offend them. “I do bring rage out,” Trump unapologetically told journalist Bob Woodward in 2016.

In this way, he has turned America into a gargantuan projection of his own pathological narcissism.

His entire re-election platform is found in his use of the pronouns “we” and “them.” “We” are people who love him, Trump Nation. “They” hate him.

Karen Tumulty: The debate was a nightmare, and a fitting summation of Trump’s presidency

It is hard to imagine that anyone but the most obdurate partisans watching Tuesday’s spectacle wants to see four more years of this.

The nightmare that played out Tuesday evening on a debate stage in Cleveland served at least one useful purpose. It encapsulated, in a single 98-minute span, the entire presidency of Donald J. Trump.

All of the impulses that drive Trump were unleashed: The lying. The rage. The bluster. The incoherence.

It is hard to imagine that anyone but the most obdurate of partisans could have watched the spectacle and thought, Gee, wouldn’t it be great to have four more years of this?

Trump sent fact-checkers into overdrive, though as my Post colleagues pointed out, most of his false claims were retreads of lies that he has previously told.

But on a more fundamental level, Trump showed an uncharacteristic lack of pretense.

In what is likely to be remembered as the debate’s most illuminating moment, the president laid bare the devil’s bargain that he has been willing to make with racism in this country to achieve his ends.

Alexander Vindman and John Gans: Trump Has Sold Off America’s Credibility for His Personal Gain

Lt. Col. Vindman served on the National Security Council. Mr. Gans is the author of “White House Warriors,” a history of the council.

From China to Ukraine, this president has acted at odds with American foreign policy. Imagine what he could do with four more years.

A year ago, the world read a record of a phone call in which President Trump pressured Ukraine’s government to provide dirt on his political rival, Joe Biden. The transcript of that call, along with other evidence, made clear the president and his associates asked officials in Kyiv to deliver on Mr. Trump’s political interests in exchange for American military aid needed to defend Ukraine. At the end of last year, the president was impeached for that abuse of power.

This was not a unique instance of Mr. Trump’s personal priorities corrupting American foreign policy. As the 2020 election grew closer, the president increasingly ignored the policies developed by his own government and instead pursued transactions guided by self-interest and instinct. The result is a patchwork of formal policies and informal deals that has undermined America’s interests and credibility. But Mr. Trump’s sloppy management matters less than its result: No one can trust American foreign policy right now.

Thomas L. Friedman: Trump Sent a Warning. Let’s Take It Seriously.

Our democracy is in terrible danger — more than since the Civil War, more than after Pearl Harbor, more than during the Cuban missile crisis.

President Trump has made it unmistakably clear in recent weeks — and even more crystal clear at the Tuesday debate — that there are only two choices before voters on Nov. 3 — and electing Joe Biden is not one of them.

The president has told us in innumerable ways that either he will be re-elected or he will delegitimize the vote by claiming that all mail-in ballots — a time-honored tradition that has ushered Republicans and Democrats into office and has been used by Trump himself — are invalid.

Trump’s motives could not be more transparent. If he does not win the Electoral College, he’ll muddy the results so that the outcome can be decided only by the Supreme Court or the House of Representatives (where each state delegation gets one vote). Trump has advantages in both right now, which he has boasted about for the past week.

I can’t say this any more clearly: Our democracy is in terrible danger — more danger than it has been since the Civil War, more danger than after Pearl Harbor, more danger than during the Cuban missile crisis and more danger than during Watergate.