Toggle Menu

That Terrible Debate—and the Next Ones

John Nichols on the presidential debate and Katha Pollitt on Melania.

Start Making Sense and Jon Wiener

October 1, 2020

Former vice president Joe Biden and President Donald Trump during the first presidential debate.(Oliver Douliery / AFP via Getty Images)

Biden debated Trump on Tuesday night—John Nichols has our analysis, and suggests that it may be the Republicans who pull out of the remaining debates, given the damage their candidate did to his candidacy and the rest of the Republican candidates.

Also: Remember the days of the hashtag “Free Melania”? Remember how we said she was a hostage in the White House? Now there’s a book that says we were all wrong about that—Katha Pollitt talks about Stephanie Winston Wolkoff’s “tell-not-quite-all,” Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady.

Subscribe to The Nation to support all of our podcasts: thenation.com/podcastsubscribe.

Start Making SenseTwitterStart Making Sense is The Nation’s podcast, hosted by Jon Wiener and coproduced by the Los Angeles Review of Books. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts for new episodes each Thursday.  


Jon WienerTwitterJon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and co-author (with Mike Davis) of Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties.


Latest from the nation