'Presidential debates are more performance art than actual ways to inform'

Opinion, comment and editorials of the day

2020 presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden seen on the screen of a smartphone
(Image credit: Pavlo Conchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket / Getty Images)

'Move on from Trump-Biden election debates'

Stuart N. Brotman in the Boston Herald

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'"Donald Trump did this": How to beat MAGA on border security'

Jill Lawrence in The Bulwark

There has "never been a better or more urgent moment" for President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats to "seize the problem-solver high ground on immigration and border security," says Jill Lawrence. Immigration remains "people's top concern" in polls. Democrats should "force Trump to own his nakedly political" sabotaging of a bipartisan border deal he apparently feared would work and spoil his plans to campaign as the "savior" who would deliver us from "border chaos."   

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'The United States had every right to force a TikTok sale'

Tim Wu in The New York Times

The United States has "every right" to tell ByteDance to sell TikTok to a new owner "not subject to the control of the Chinese state," says Tim Wu. Threatening to ban the app sends Beijing the message that democratic nations "take seriously" its "blatant and obvious" violations of internet freedom, like recently ordering Apple to "block downloads of WhatsApp, Threads and Signal within its borders." Free countries "have played the sucker for far too long."

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'Hey, SCOTUS — your hypocrisy is showing'

Austin Sarat in The Hill

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Donald Trump's immunity case last week, and it was "not a good day for American democracy," says Austin Sarat. The "conservative majority seemed ready to jettison its own originalist interpretive method and to ignore the grave threat that former President Trump's election denialism — and efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power — posed to our constitutional republic." Let's hope the justices "come to their senses" and reject Trump's plea for "unprecedented" immunity.

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Harold Maass, The Week US

Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.