The New Yorker:

By Charles Bethea

The debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was held in an audience-free studio some three hundred yards from where the press assembled to watch—“as the crow flies,” an official noted. The crow: a symbol of intelligence, transformation, bravery, fate. Also, death. A cockroach scuttled across the carpeted floor inside the filing center, and Michael Wolff, the author of “Fire and Fury” and other books on Trump, got a hot dog as we all waited.

Ninety minutes after the debate had begun, there was a funereal air and some bleak laughter in the press center. Down on the spin-room floor, under the lights, a band of Biden surrogates—California’s governor, Gavin Newsom; Senator Raphael Warnock, of Georgia; Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump—was surrounded. The Trump V.P. hopeful Byron Donalds, a representative from Florida, looked down on the scrum, from a booth above, with a smug grin as the Biden envoys did damage control. Policy and substance matter, they insisted, not a weak voice further diminished by a cold. Mary Trump focussed on her uncle’s low and lying character. Warnock did, too. Governor Newsom, smiling a lot, said, “I will never turn my back on President Biden.” Then he left, looking relatively vital.

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