People Are Still Dying. Trump Is Still Lying.

“We’re learning to live with it.”

Morry Gash/AP

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President Donald Trump may not have relentlessly interrupted Joe Biden during a discussion of the coronavirus pandemic at Thursday night’s debate, but he continued spewing lies just the same.

Coronavirus case counts in the United States are spiking for a third time, and scientists don’t expect the virus to fizzle out in the near future. Yet Trump, who contracted the coronavirus shortly after the first debate, repeated a familiar refrain: “It will go away.”

“We’re rounding the turn,” he said. “We’re rounding the corner. It’s going away.”

In terms of policy, Biden stressed national standards for reopening in-person schooling, financial support for struggling businesses, and an expanded rapid-testing system. Trump suggested “learning to live with it.”

But Biden—who during his life has lost a wife and two children—focused on the human toll of Trump’s failures.

“He says we’re learning to live with it,” Biden said. “People are learning to die with it.”

“You folks home who have an empty chair at the kitchen table this morning, that man or wife going to bed tonight and reaching over to try to touch their—out of habit—where their wife or husband was, is gone,” he said. “Learning to live with it? Come on. We’re dying with it.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

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