Opinion: October surprises have already happened

No need to worry about an October surprise this time around. It’s already happened.

You guessed it, I’m talking about President Trump contracting COVID-19. It’s the barn-burner that changes everything. Or, nothing.

There’s so much uncertainly to this moment in history that it’s hard to keep up, and even harder to predict where it’s all going.

Consider last week:

It started with the debate over Amy Coney Barrett, the president’s nominee to the Supreme Court. It’s an appointment of incredible importance because it will create a 6-3 conservative majority, which will in turn threaten Roe v. Wade, the Affordable Care Act, and the power of the Environmental Protection Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. All that and more could be repealed under the new court’s configuration.

But the debate over her selection didn’t even get a full day of uninterrupted attention as the New York Times published a story about the president’s tax filings, reporting that Trump didn’t pay any income taxes for 11 of the 18 years of tax filings the newspaper examined. The Times also found that Trump owes millions of dollars to foreign sources.

His sparse tax payments either point to bad business dealings or, worse, shady business practices that could ultimately come crashing down on him and his financial house of cards.

Meanwhile, all that money he owes foreign interests suggests that he’s compromised as our president on the world stage.

That’s a bombshell story that should have commanded a week’s worth of news cycles, but instead it got barely more than a mention in Tuesday’s shout-fest, also known as a “debate” between Trump and challenger Joe Biden.

Any reasonable observer of that joke of a debate has to conclude it was Trump’s bullying tactics that sabotaged the event, and the entire nation that got a black eye from it. BBC World News America actually interviewed two kindergarten teachers on how they would have controlled the debate (with insights that made me wonder if they were more suited to have moderated the event than was veteran Fox News journalist Chris Wallace).

Wednesday is deadline day at my weekly newspaper, so my attention to the whirlwind of national news was limited. Maybe that explains why I don’t remember anything earth-shattering taking place in the middle of the week.

Of course, off in the background where the fires out West are still raging out of control, an unhinged president continued his attempt to undercut the election and, of course, this lingering pandemic. Is that enough for you? It sure is for me.

But wait, says the sales cliché, there’s more! Not only did we have all of the above thrown at us last week, but on Friday morning we awoke to news that the president himself has the virus. The man who has minimized it all along now has it.

I want to believe that Trump, in his illness, will deeply and transformatively feel the love being sent his way, and emerges with a new attitude about his country. Then maybe he’d start working for the good of us all, instead of just for his supporters.

I realize that’s a stretch, but you gotta believe that miracles happen.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]