Asked about not repudiating the Proud Boys, a far-right group, during the debate, Trump said: "I don't know who the Proud Boys are. I mean, you'll have to give me a definition, because I really don't know who they are."
"I can only say they have to stand down, let law enforcement do their work," the President told reporters, before pivoting again by saying "the problem is on the left."
Trump has never had a reset button, so if his hopes of preserving his presidency depend on a turnaround in approach and temperament after a bellicose first confrontation with Biden, then he's in deep trouble.
His comments on the Proud Boys display how his instinct when cornered is to fight back harder, intensify personal attacks and aim the punches farther below the belt. Such an approach worked well in 2016, when he was an outsider who appreciated the potential for a populist, insurgent campaign when no one else did.
It is far from clear that an antagonistic approach is a good fit for 2020, when Trump is an incumbent President and the country is locked in multiple crises. Those aggressive reflexes are one reason why the President's handling of the pandemic that has killed more than 200,000 people has been so poor. And they mean that any advice from Trump's aides to torque back his demeanor ahead of the next debate in Miami on October 15 will either fall on deaf ears or be ignored in the heat of battle.
The next encounter also brings the added risk of a President not used to being challenged exploding at a member of the public in a town hall format on live TV.
Despite publicly showering him with praise on Wednesday, some Trump aides secretly are deeply dismayed over the showdown with Biden. One ally described the debate, in which Trump boiled with fury, constantly heckled Biden and spouted lies and conspiracy theories, as a "disaster."
Other people in the President's orbit who spoke to CNN's White House team described Trump as obnoxious and unprepared. One source familiar with the President's thinking told CNN's Dana Bash that Trump thought he had done well in the debate and was surprised that his team thought he was too aggressive. It may take several days of cable news coverage for the reality to sink in, the source said.
Republican senators, suffering through one of hundreds of awkward on-the-spot moments of the Trump presidency, were particularly discomforted by questions about the President's "stand back and stand by" order to the Proud Boys. Senate Majority Whip John Thune, R-South Dakota, suggested it was a statement the Trump team needed to "clear up."
Even Donald Trump Jr. allowed on CBS News that his father's comment at the debate could have been a "misspeak." But the Proud Boys were in no doubt about where Trump stands, turning his comment into a new online logo.
Massive stakes for 2nd debate
The overwhelming consensus that Trump bombed in his first debate means the stakes for the second one are now even more astronomical than they were on Tuesday night. He will need a game-changer moment, with only three weeks left in the campaign. But he might have already missed his best chance.
Typically, the first debate garners the biggest TV audience. Further, by mid-October, millions more voters will have cast early ballots, and if current trends hold, a building new wave of Covid-19 infections will be having a demonstrably more serious impact on American life. Such a scenario will underscore the President's failure on Tuesday night to offer any authentic plans to conquer the pandemic and may deepen his vulnerability on health care, which offered Biden a clear opening.
Debates are not always an accurate measure of who wins presidential elections. Democratic nominees John Kerry and Hillary Clinton were generally judged to have won their debates but they lost the elections. Trump's destructive behavior likely appealed to those voters who prize him as a slayer of Washington elites and scourge of political correctness.
But if the misgivings inside his camp are on the button, the President probably did little in Cleveland to chip away at Biden's advantage in most swing state polls. He might have even weakened his own position, as many voters saw in real time on their televisions the full extent of the boorish behavior that is familiar to Trump Cabinet members, foreign leaders and journalists who cover him.
If the President went into the evening needing to win back suburban voters and non-college-educated female voters, his tantrums and extreme rhetoric on race and refusals to guarantee ceding power, even if he loses the election, seem to have been guaranteed to secure exactly the opposite outcome.
Worse, from Trump's point of view, his fury several times drowned out slips or uncertainty by Biden on the debate stage -- including the former vice president's inability to give a straight answer when asked whether he favored liberal demands for Supreme Court packing following Trump's trio of picks to the nation's top bench.
Compared with recent Democratic nominees, Biden wasn't particularly impressive at the debate -- albeit that he was trying to operate with constant haranguing from the man across the stage. But he didn't have to be.
The President's behavior meant that the sound bites from the debate being played on TV on Wednesday mostly referenced the President's rage rather than Biden's wobbly answers. Given that every day in the campaign is now crucial for a President who is behind, that was a small disaster in itself.
Biden was able to give the impression that he was the candidate with momentum heading out of the first clash, playing into what he saw as public distaste with the President's performance.
"I kind of thought at one point, maybe I should've said this, but the President of the United States conducting himself the way he did -- I think it was just a national embarrassment," Biden told CNN's Arlette Saenz on Wednesday.
Can Pence throw Trump a lifeline?
It's going to be hard for the President's political advisers to convince him that he has a problem. From the start of his presidency, Trump has existed in a bubble of praise from conservative news anchors and traded in the conspiracy theories that they amplify on shows he ravenously watches.
That helps to explain why the President came out with his normal rally punch lines in front of a far more diverse audience in the debate, mocking the use of masks, claiming he had saved millions of lives with his botched pandemic management and flinging unproven allegations about Biden's son Hunter.
"I thought the debate last night was great. We got tremendous reviews on it," the President told reporters on Wednesday. This may be typical Trump bravado. But it doesn't suggest the kind of humility and the capacity for self-criticism that allowed Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama to bounce back from disastrous first debates in their own reelection races.
Trump has occasionally had teleprompter-driven moments in which he has behaved in a more statesmanlike manner. But such efforts have largely been confined to set-piece events like the State of the Union address. It is when the President gets off the teleprompter and his confrontational impulses are unrestrained -- as in the debate situation on Tuesday -- that he torches scripts and plans drawn up by aides.
The crucial point is that Trump doesn't care. His actions show how he has long used the presidency as a channel for his personal grievances and to express how he feels, at any moment.
One possible opening for the Trump campaign is to use next week's vice presidential debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris to steady the campaign -- much as then-Vice President Biden did in 2012, when Obama messed up his first debate against Republican nominee Mitt Romney.
Pence, a smooth debater, is likely to make a far more conventional case for Trump's second term than the President himself managed. Pence will detail what the administration sees as its main achievements: a conservative Supreme Court majority, multiple judges installed on lower benches, trade deals with Mexico and Canada, a reordering of US foreign policy and an economy that was prospering until the pandemic hit earlier this year.
The vice president will probably avoid unseemly personal attacks on Harris but will attempt to forensically exploit her liberal voting record to portray their ticket as the "Trojan horse" for the left that Trump believes it to be. The California Democrat is unlikely to be aiming her jabs at Pence and is expected to bring the inquisitorial skills that made her a renowned prosecutor to bear against the President himself.
But Trump being Trump, there is no guarantee he will listen to what worked for Pence. And if the vice president gets a torrent of media praise for his performance he is more likely to be jealous than appreciative. It was only when Pence was winning good reviews for his chairing of coronavirus task force news conferences that Trump decided to take the stage, muddled the administration message and came across as out-of-touch and inept.
If that's the case, the President will go into his second debate with Biden under even more pressure than he faced in the first. He will need a Hail Mary moment to turn around the campaign with Election Day fast approaching. As Tuesday night shows, that's not a scenario in which he seems to prosper.
If we look at potential tipping-point states, the race is a bit closer, but not that much closer. After a couple of strong polls for Joe Biden earlier this week in Pennsylvania — the state that’s currently most likely to decide the election — Trump now trails there by 5 to 6 points. He’s down by about 7 points in Michigan and Wisconsin, meanwhile. Those states, along with Minnesota, Maine and New Hampshire — where Biden has also polled strongly lately — suggest that Biden is winning back some of the Obama-Trump white working-class voters who flocked to Trump four years ago. Indeed, Biden is as close to winning South Carolina or Alaska as Trump is to winning Michigan and Wisconsin, based on recent polls of those states.
At a time when Trump desperately needed a boost, the debate probably didn’t help him either — it may have hurt him. Every scientific poll we’ve seen had Trump losing the debate, some by narrow margins and some by wide ones.
That includes the poll FiveThirtyEight conducted with Ipsos, which surveyed the same group of voters before and after the debate. While the poll didn’t show a massive swing — most voters stuck to their initial preferences — more voters did rate Biden’s performance favorably, and Biden gained ground relative to Trump based on the number of voters who said they were certain to vote for him, roughly tantamount to a 3-point swing toward Biden in head-to-head polls.
Now, I’m not predicting this will happen, but if Biden’s national lead were to expand to 9 or 10 points, which is consistent with the sorts of polling bounces we’ve seen in the past for candidates who were perceived to win debates — especially challengers debating an incumbent for the first time — Trump’s situation could become quite desperate.
To be clear, none of this means that Trump’s chances are kaput. As of this writing, our forecast still gives him around a 21 percent chance of winning the Electoral College. That’s not great, but it’s a lot better than zero.
But it’s possible Trump’s chances may decline further after post-debate polling begins to roll into our forecast. Furthermore, the mere passage of time helps Biden in our model, because every day that Trump doesn’t gain ground is a day when his fate becomes slightly more sealed. (Lots of people have already voted!) Case in point: In an election held today — Trump has no more time to make up ground — his chances would be 9 percent, not 21 percent, according to our forecast.
We assume that there are reasonable efforts to allow eligible citizens to vote and to count all legal ballots, and that electors are awarded to the popular-vote winner in each state. The model also does not account for the possibility of extraconstitutional shenanigans by Trump or by anyone else, such as trying to prevent mail ballots from being counted.
Let’s back up for a second. This is FiveThirtyEight’s fourth presidential election campaign. And in the previous three, there was at least some question about who was ahead in the stretch run of the race. John McCain, for instance, briefly pulled ahead of Barack Obama following the 2008 Republican convention, and Obama didn’t really solidify his lead until early October. In 2012, national polls were very tight between Obama and Mitt Romney following the first presidential debate, and remained fairly tight thereafter (although Obama always maintained an Electoral College edge). And people forget how close the 2016 race was for stretches of the campaign; it was not such a huge upset. In fact, Hillary Clinton led by only 1.4 points in our national polling average heading into the first debate that year.
But there isn’t any of that ambiguity this time. Since we launched our general election polling averages on June 18, Biden has never led by less than 6.6 points nationally. Literally only one national poll — a Rasmussen Reports poll that put Trump ahead by less than a full percentage point — has shown Trump leading by any margin during that period. It’s been an exceptionally stable race.
But, amazingly, that hasn’t really shaken people’s confidence in Trump’s ability to win. In our own poll with Ipsos, we found respondents thought Biden and Trump had roughly equally likely chances of winning. And maybe that boils down to three perpetual sources of anxiety I hear in conversation with liberal friends or liberal readers:
Trump could win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by a wide margin.
There could be a large polling error in Trump’s favor.
Trump could somehow steal the election.
All three are legitimate sources of concern for Biden backers. The first two are relatively easy to quantify, however. Indeed, the whole purpose of a model like FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecast is to answer questions like those. The third one, however, is harder to get a handle on, so let’s talk about No. 1 and 2 first..
The Electoral College could still help Trump, but it only goes so far
The possibility of an Electoral College, popular vote split remains a point in Trump’s favor. In fact, there’s an 11 percent chance that Trump wins the Electoral College but not the popular vote in our forecast (but less than a 1 percent chance the other way around). At the same time, Biden’s strength in the Upper Midwest relative to Clinton’s — at least, if polls are correct there — potentially mitigates this disadvantage to some extent. The table below shows Biden’s probability of winning the Electoral College given various popular vote margins, according to our forecast as of Wednesday afternoon. And as you can see, Biden is only truly safe to win the Electoral College once he has a popular vote margin of 5 points or more! But, he’s a fairly heavy favorite with a 3- to 5-point margin, and has roughly break-even odds with a 2- to 3-point margin.
POPULAR VOTE MARGIN scenarios
Biden’s chances
of winning the ELECTORAL COLLEGE
Biden +6 to Biden +7
>99%
Biden +5 to Biden +6
98
Biden +4 to Biden +5
93
Biden +3 to Biden +4
77
Biden +2 to Biden +3
54
Biden +1 to Biden +2
29
TIE to Biden +1
11
Trump +1 to TIE
3
Trump +2 to Trump +1
<1
So, for practical purposes, you can take Biden’s lead in national polls and subtract 2 or 2.5 points from it to infer his margin in tipping-point states. In other words, if he’s ahead by around 7.5 points in national polls, that’s more like the equivalent of a 5-point lead in the Electoral College. That’s still a reasonably large advantage; empirically, it’s not that easy to overcome a 5-point deficit at this stage of the race.
A big polling error could help Trump … or Biden
One of the misconceptions I hear about FiveThirtyEight’s forecast is that “it assumes that polls are right.” Actually, in some sense the whole purpose of the forecast is to estimate the chance that the polls are wrong. In 2016, the polls did show Clinton ahead, but between tight margins in tipping-point states and the large number of undecided voters, there was a fairly high probability — around 30 percent, according to our forecast — that Trump was going to win anyway.
So while a polling error is possible — indeed, our forecast assumes there’s likely additional error this year because of an uptick in mail voting — it would still take a bigger error than in 2016 for Trump to win.
Assume that current polls hold until Election Day, and subtract 3 points from Biden’s margin in every state (roughly the average error in swing state polls in 2016) … Biden still wins Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin fairly comfortably, and therefore, the Electoral College; he’d also be a slight favorite in Arizona. And as our friends at the Upshot have calculated, even if you had a polling error of the exact same magnitude in the exact same states as in 2016, Biden would still win, albeit narrowly.
Of course, nothing intrinsically rules out a larger polling error. We had one in 1948 — when Dewey didn’t defeat Truman, after all — and in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won in an epic landslide instead of the narrow margin that polls predicted.
I want to spend more time on this topic in the coming days, so I won’t go on at too much length here. But for now, know that a 7-point Biden lead on Election Day could, indeed, turn into a 2-point Biden popular vote win where Trump narrowly wins the Electoral College.
As I wrote earlier in the piece, our forecast gives Trump about a 9 percent chance of winning an election held today despite his current deficit in polls — not bad when you’re 7 points down! But it’s about equally likely that a 7-point Biden lead could translate into a 12-point Biden win, in which he’d not only carry states like Georgia and Texas, but would also have a shot in South Carolina, Alaska and Montana.
Trump’s comments on respecting the election outcome are deeply worrisome, but it’s hard to estimate his chances of overturning the result
Hoo, boy. At some point I’m going to have to write a column about this too, I suppose. As I said at the outset, our forecast assumes that the election is free and fair — at least to the extent that past elections that we used to train the model were free and fair. (Throughout American history, there has always been plenty of voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement.)
But for now, let me advance a few propositions:
Even a small probability that the U.S. could become a failed or manifestly undemocratic state is worth taking seriously.
Trump’s actions are much more likely to actually change the result of the election if the outcome is close, and right now, the most likely scenario is that Biden wins by a not-so-close margin.
Beyond that, it’s hard to estimate the probability that Trump could steal the election to any degree of precision. It requires, at a minimum, some knowledge of the probabilities in a free and fair election plus some knowledge of election law and how many votes could realistically come under dispute plus some theory of the institutional incentives of the Supreme Court and various other courts plus some opinions on how Congress might interpret the Constitution in the event of a disputed election. Maybe a panel of experts could get together and try to put together some reasonable bounds on the probability of various scenarios, but I don’t know that any individual could — certainly not me.
After Trump’s actions over the past few weeks, though, I wonder if there’s some tradeoff between Trump’s chances of winning legitimately and his willingness to engage in authoritarian rhetoric and behavior, even if it probably wouldn’t succeed at stealing the election. It’s not like this is coming entirely out of left field; Trump also said in 2016 that he wouldn’t necessarily respect the election results. But his recent statements have come at a moment of increasing peril for his campaign. It’s hard to know for sure, but I think Trump’s comments might be more tempered if he were 2 points ahead in Wisconsin instead of 7 points down.
It’s not easy to see which cards Trump has left to play or which contingencies could work in his favor enough for him to win — other than if the polls have been wrong all along.
If Trump intuits that he’s unlikely to win legitimately — it’s not hard to imagine him escalating his anti-democratic rhetoric and behavior. It’s also not hard to imagine this rhetoric further eroding his position in polls. It’s highly unpopular in focus groups (yes, take those with a huge grain of salt) and Trump’s polling over the past several days has been particularly bad (although there’s been a lot of other news, too).
So we could be headed for a vicious cycle where Trump increasingly gives up on trying to persuade or turn out voters and voters increasingly give up on him. But from a polling standpoint, this is one of the clearer elections to diagnose: Biden isn’t home-free, but he’s in a strong position. Nonetheless, the outlook for what’s actually in store for America has rarely been more cloudy.
Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill April 11, 2018 in Washington, DC.
Yasin Ozturk | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Facebook on Wednesday announced that it will not allow any ads on its service that seek to delegitimize the outcome of an election, including the upcoming U.S. election on Nov. 3.
"Last week we said we'd prohibit ads that make premature declarations of victory. We also won't allow ads with content that seeks to delegitimize the outcome of an election," tweeted Rob Leathern, Facebook director of product management.
This policy will prohibit any ads that call specific methods of voting, such as voting by mail, as being inherently fraudulent or corrupt, Leathern said. It will also prohibit the use of isolated incidents of voter fraud to delegitimize the result of an election, he added.
Facebook's policy change comes as President Donald Trump has used social media to make false claims that voting by mail leads to election fraud. Trump has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose.
The new policy will apply to ads on Facebook and Instagram effective immediately, Leathern said.
President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden at their first presidential debate on Tuesday.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times
The tumultuous presidential debate on Tuesday night between President Trump and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. only added to concerns that a chaotic race to the November elections would further agitate the markets.
Companies big and small have been on a roller coaster as coronavirus cases in the United States have continued to rise, and policymakers in Washington have inspired little confidence that they are ready to pass additional pandemic relief.
The first presidential debate has only added to the risks facing business. Many business leaders were concerned about disruptions to a smooth transition of power if Mr. Trump lost, while others expressed dismay at Mr. Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacy and his suggestion that the Proud Boys, a far-right group, should be prepared to “stand back and stand by.”
“People just want stability, some degree of normalcy,” said Aaron Levie, chief executive of the tech company Box. “We want to understand what the geopolitical landscape looks like, what trade looks like, what immigration looks like. There’s not a clear underlying philosophy that drives this administration, other than nationalism. You just can’t predict the next move.”
Mr. Levie said he was concerned that another term for Mr. Trump would lead to fewer foreign nationals coming to the United States to pursue education and professional opportunities, noting that many of the country’s most successful companies have been started by immigrants.
Here’s what others said:
“I do think that America does not look very stable is a problem,” said Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, a tech company that had its debut on Wall Street on Wednesday. “Fifty percent of our business is outside of America, and the fact that the global brand of America is really suffering could long-term impact our business.”
Barry Sternlicht, a co-founder and the chief executive of Starwood Capital, a real estate investment fund, said at CNBC’s “Delivering Alpha” conference that Mr. Trump’s “stand back and stand by” comment “was it for me.” He added: “I have no space in my life for that.”
“It was hard to watch,” said Mindy Grossman, the chief executive of Weight Watchers parent WW International. “It was hard to watch. We look at our leaders in a certain way and I don’t think that was exemplified in the event last night”
“I can’t tell you who won, but I can tell you who lost: that was the American people,” Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, said on CNBC. “It was a waste of an hour and a half that gave no guidance, no direction at all over where the country will go after this election.”
Lloyd Blankfein, who served as chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs until the end of 2018, tweeted that Mr. Trump’s behavior at the debate has raised Mr. Biden’s appeal among investors.
So far the stock market doesn’t seem too upset at the prospect of Biden winning, despite Trump’s more market friendly policies. Perhaps folks think their stocks and 401(k)s will do better with higher taxes and increased regulation than with nastiness and scorched earth.
“I thought Trump was so horrible that he didn’t do himself any good,” said Michael Novogratz, a trader and merchant banker who is supporting Mr. Biden. “His rudeness, his facial anger, the whole body language was just so violent.”
Ryan Gellert, the new chief executive of Patagonia, the popular outdoors brand, said the debate “was a real embarrassment to America and our leadership place in the world.” He added: “The fact that we are now in advance debating the efficacy of an upcoming election and trying to delegitimize it — it’s such a turn in the wrong direction.”
Stocks climbed on Wednesday, but ended September with its first monthly loss since March.
The S&P 500 was 0.8 percent higher, after earlier gains of more than 1.5 percent faded late in the day. The benchmark fell nearly 4 percent in September.
That monthly decline came as investors worried about gridlock over a new economic stimulus plan. Those losses have been trimmed somewhat in recent days as negotiators tried to resume talks over a coronavirus relief package to provide aid to American families, businesses, schools, restaurants and airline workers. On Wednesday, the early rally came after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Wednesday that he was giving stimulus talks “one more serious try.”
A retreat in once high-flying technology stocks like Apple and Amazon has also weighed on the broad market this month. Apple dropped more than 10 percent in September. Amazon is down about 9 percent. Shares of both companies rose on Wednesday.
It may have helped on Wednesday that — despite its acrimonious tone — the presidential debate on Tuesday didn’t lead to any unexpected policy announcements by President Trump or his rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Markets have remained calm as no policy surprises have emerged from the debate so far,” wrote Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst at Oanda. “The uncertainty ahead of the debate has subsided.”
“Lost in the noise of the debate,” Mr. Halley added, “China has released another impressive set of data.” China’s official Purchasing Managers Index, which covers large firms, and the private Caixin/Markit Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index, which includes an important measure of smaller export-oriented companies, both released stronger than expected numbers.
More numbers to come: On Friday, the U.S. Labor Department will release the nonfarm payroll data for September.
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday said it would extend its ban on share buybacks by big banks as well as its cap on dividend payouts through the end of the year, a move the central bank said was an effort “to ensure that large banks maintain a high level of capital resilience” as pandemic-spurred economic uncertainty persists.
The Fed in June prevented banks from increasing their dividend payouts above second-quarter levels, with an additional limitation based on earnings, and banned stock buybacks. Those changes only lasted through the third quarter, and the central bank said in a statement earlier this month that it would “announce by the end of September” whether it would keep them in place.
The now-extended limitations apply to only the largest banks — those with more than $100 billion in total assets, which include firms like Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo. Preserving big bank capital — money that is readily available to be used — “provides a cushion against loan losses and supports lending,” the Fed said.
Lael Brainard, a Federal Reserve governor who has previously indicated that she would prefer to shut off, rather than cap, dividend payouts, dissented against the decision.
While the Fed’s decision stops short of cutting off dividends, the extended limitations may come as a disappointment to some banks. Share buybacks help boost a company’s stock price, and higher dividends are obviously desired by investors.
JPMorgan Chase & Company had indicated that it might restart buybacks if allowed. Speaking at an investor conference in mid-September, Jennifer Piepszak, JPMorgan’s chief financial officer, said that her bank “wouldn’t rule out” resuming share buybacks in the coming quarter but that “it will obviously depend on whether we have regulatory constraints.”
The Fed reiterated in its statement that it would conduct a second stress test — an analysis of how bank balance sheets hold up in bad circumstances — later this year. While stress tests are usually done annually, officials decided that it was prudent to re-examine bank health given the shaky economic backdrop.
“Results will be released by the end of the year,” the Fed said.
The administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, Stephen Dickson, flew the Boeing 737 Max on Wednesday as part of the regulator’s review of the company’s proposed fixes to the plane.Credit...Lindsey Wasson/Reuters
The head of the Federal Aviation Administration, Stephen Dickson, said on Wednesday that he was pleased with the changes that Boeing had made to its troubled 737 Max jet but that the regulator would not rush to clear the way for the plane to fly again.
Mr. Dickson, a former airline pilot, told reporters “I liked what I saw” after he flew the Max for two hours in the Seattle area, where Boeing makes and tests most of its planes.
“We’re in the home stretch, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to take shortcuts to get it done by a certain date,” Mr. Dickson said. He earlier had promised that the agency would not lift its March 2019 order grounding the plane until he flew it himself.
Mr. Dickson did not say when the plane would return to service, but analysts expect the agency to allow the Max to fly again by early next year.
The test flight came as the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee approved a bipartisan bill to strengthen the F.A.A., including its oversight of Boeing. In a scathing report this month, Democrats on the committee described the two 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people in Indonesia and Ethiopia as the “horrific culmination” of engineering flaws, mismanagement and a lack of oversight.
Still, the plane could soon be back in service. Last month, the F.A.A. determined that Boeing’s proposed changes to the Max’s design and crew training and maintenance procedures “effectively mitigate” the safety problems that contributed to the crashes. It is also finalizing an order, a draft of which was published last month, that would lift the grounding order. Once that happens, Boeing and the airlines that fly the Max will start getting the planes ready by checking the plane’s systems, rerouting some internal wiring and training pilots.
Before Wednesday’s flight, Mr. Dickson also received the recommended pilot training reviewed this month by the F.A.A. and aviation regulators in Canada, the European Union and Brazil. That aviation regulators’s findings will be incorporated in a forthcoming F.A.A. report and is expected to include flight simulator training, which some experts have argued might have prevented the crashes had it been required earlier.
Dennis Williams after his farewell speech as president of the United Auto Workers union in 2018. He pleaded guilty to embezzling tens of thousands of dollars of union funds.Credit...Rebecca Cook/Reuters
Dennis Williams, a former president of the United Auto Workers union, on Wednesday pleaded guilty to embezzling tens of thousands of dollars of union funds for lavish personal expenses and luxury travel and participating in a scheme with other senior union officials to conceal those activities.
Mr. Williams, 67, was president of the union from 2014 to 2018 and is one of 15 people who have been charged in a yearslong investigation into corruption at the U.A.W. by federal prosecutors in Detroit.
“Dennis Williams’s guilty plea today shows that instead of fulfilling his fiduciary duty to his fellow union members, Williams chose to betray their trust and embezzle hundreds of thousands of dollars from the U.A.W. for the personal benefit of himself and other high-ranking U.A.W. officers,” Thomas Murray, district director at the Department of Labor’s Office of Labor-Management Standards, said in a statement.
Prosecutors previously obtained guilty pleas from Mr. Williams’s successor as president, Gary Jones, and other senior union officials. The leaders were charged with using union funds to pay for private villas in Palm Springs, Calif., expensive cigars, golfing apparel, greens fees at golf courses and lavish dinners.
The investigation, which has been led by U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, has also resulted in guilty pleas on other charges unrelated to embezzlement case by three former executives at Fiat Chrysler, a senior union official who once served on the board of directors for General Motors, and several other union officials.
The U.S. attorney, Matthew J. Schneider, has described the investigation as the largest of its kind into a labor union.
“Today’s conviction demonstrates that we will continue our drive forward to provide ethical and honest leadership for the U.A.W.’s membership,” he said on Wednesday.
An AMC theater in Tulsa, Okla., in July. A trade group on Wednesday pleaded with Congress for aid to help theaters survive the pandemic.Credit...Chris Creese for The New York Times
The National Association of Theater Owners, a trade organization for cinemas in the United States and beyond, has mostly put on a brave face during the pandemic: Movie theaters can and will get through this crisis.
On Wednesday, with cinemas still closed in New York and Los Angeles and studios having vacated most of the October release calendar, the group struck a very different tone in a letter to Congress pleading for financial help. “Absent a solution designed for their circumstances, theaters may not survive the impact of the pandemic,” the letter said.
The theater association was joined by the Motion Picture Association, which represents the largest studios and Netflix; the Directors Guild of America; and 70 Hollywood heavyweights, including Martin Scorsese, Greta Gerwig, Clint Eastwood, Alfonso Cuarón, Lulu Wang, Christopher Nolan, Judd Apatow, James Cameron, Michael Bay, Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, Barry Jenkins and Barbara Broccoli.
The letter said that “69 percent of small and midsize theater companies will be forced to file for bankruptcy or close permanently” without government help. The group suggested Congress could redirect unallocated CARES Act stimulus funds or enact new measures. Such theater closures would translate into 99,000 lost jobs.
Black and Latino households with children are more likely to face financial hardships in the pandemic than their white counterparts, according to a new study.Credit...Rogelio V. Solis/Associated Press
More than 60 percent of households with children in the United States reported serious financial problems — including struggles to afford medical care, depletion of household savings and difficulty paying credit card and other debts — during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new poll.
Black and Latino households with children bear the brunt of the hardships. Of the Latino households who responded, 86 percent reported these difficulties; in Black households, 66 percent reported them. In white households, the number hovers around 50 percent.
The immense differences were surprising, as they came after federal and state governments invested heavily in programs for communities disproportionately affected by the pandemic, said Robert Blendon, a director of the study behind the report and a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.
“So much money was spent to put a cushion under households,” Dr. Blendon said, adding that because of this, “the expenditures should have lowered for everybody.” But, he said, “the numbers of people in trouble, that is the shock.”
The poll, conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, surveyed more than 3,400 adults, 1,000 of whom were living with children under the age of 18, from July 1 to Aug. 3.
Now that some government measures to support households financially during the pandemic are waning, experts are concerned that the financial devastation could be worse than what the survey shows, said Julie Morita, the executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Now, Dr. Morita said, “households are probably suffering just as much if not more,” leaving Black and Latino communities especially “unprotected.”
The survey highlights other challenges faced by households with children during the pandemic. More than a third of them reported “serious problems” keeping children’s education going. Six in 10 said that an adult in the home lost their job, was furloughed or had wages or hours cut. And in nine out of 10 households where someone contracted the coronavirus, they faced “serious financial problems” in addition to difficulty caring for their children.
These responses, Dr. Blendon said, show that a high number of households — particularly Black and Latino ones — will face substantial long-term financial effects from the pandemic.
“It’s a very large number of people who can’t pay the basics,” Dr. Blendon said. “You have unbelievably vulnerable people over the next six months.”
One in four women — and one in three mothers — are considering scaling back or dropping out of the work force, according to a new study that examined disruptions in the workplace caused by the pandemic.
Mothers are more likely to be thinking about taking drastic steps than fathers, and among those mothers who are thinking about downsizing or leaving, a majority cite child care responsibilities as a primary reason, according to the study, the sixth annual Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn.org.
Researchers at McKinsey and Lean In polled more than 40,000 North American workers for the survey, which is one of the most comprehensive studies of working men and women during the pandemic. The study comes at a time when many children have returned to school and parents are struggling to juggle work responsibilities while helping their adjust to online learning or a different and limited in-person school schedule.
The study also found that the pandemic has hit Black and Latina mothers particularly hard, with Latina mothers 1.6 times more likely than white mothers to be responsible for all child care and housework, and Black mothers twice as likely to be handling these obligations.
The report warned that corporate America is at a crossroads for gender parity. Over all, the study found that as many as two million women are considering taking a leave of absence or leaving the work force, the first year that the study has shown signs that women are leaving the labor force at higher rates than men.
“Without bold steps, we could erase all the progress we’ve made toward gender equality in the six years of this study,” the report stated. “But if companies rise to the moment, we can lay the foundation for a more flexible and equitable workplace in the long term.”
Rupert Stadler, center, in a Munich courtroom on Wednesday. He ran Audi from 2007 to 2018.Credit...Sebastian Widmann/Getty Images
A panel of judges began hearing evidence Wednesday against Rupert Stadler, the former chief executive of Audi, a division of Volkswagen, as he became the first of dozens of former managers and engineers to face trial in Germany on charges they oversaw an enormous emissions cheating conspiracy.
For the first time, prosecutors offered a new motivation for why they contend Mr. Stadler, who was also a member of Volkswagen’s management board, authorized the sale of diesel Audis with illegal emissions software even after U. S. authorities had exposed the fraud: He wanted to keep sales up so he could collect his bonus.
Mr. Stadler, 57, who ran Audi, Volkswagen’s luxury car division, from 2007 to 2018, arrived at a Munich courtroom Wednesday morning with his lawyers, German media reported.
The evidence against Mr. Stadler and three other defendants will be heard by a panel of three professional judges and two lay judges, who are similar to jurors, in that they do not necessarily have formal legal training. All five members of the panel will vote on whether to convict Mr. Stadler when the trial concludes after proceedings that are expected to last two years. He has denied the charges.
No witnesses were scheduled to testify Wednesday. Prosecutors were expected to spend most of the day reading a 92-page indictment, which details how Audi engineers developed software beginning in the early 2000s that could detect when regulators were testing a car’s emissions.
The software adjusted the emissions controls so that the car appeared to be compliant. Other times, the car polluted far more than allowed.
Initially, Audi wanted to spare customers the loud noise that diesel engines made while the emissions control system was warming up. Later, to avoid inconveniencing customers, Audi used the software to limit how often owners would have to refill a tank on the car with a fluid, known as AdBlue, that was necessary for the emissions system to work properly.
Engineers at Volkswagen, the parent company, adapted the illegal software in 2006 when they ran into problems developing a diesel engine that could meet U.S. pollution standards, which are stricter than in Europe.
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Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he would try to restart talks with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a new economic relief bill.Credit...Pool photo by Drew Angerer/EPA, via Shutterstock
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Wednesday that he was giving stimulus talks “one more serious try” and that he would present House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a counteroffer later in the day that lays out the Trump administration’s proposal.
“I think we’re hopeful that we can get something done,” Mr. Mnuchin said at a conference sponsored by CNBC.
The Treasury secretary said that the proposal would be similar to the one unveiled by the House Problem Solvers caucus this month and that it would be about $1.5 trillion.
Mr. Mnuchin said that it would include liability protections for schools and businesses, more economic impact payments, support for airlines and relief money for emergency workers in states.
“More fiscal response will help the economy,” Mr. Mnuchin said.
Mr. Mnuchin indicated that it would be clear in the next day or two if a deal was possible. He said he did not anticipate a stand-alone bill to help the airline industry but said that he would be briefing airline executives on Wednesday afternoon on progress and had been encouraging them to hold off on planned layoffs.
The remains of the farmhouse at Castello di Amorosa winery in Napa, Calif.Credit...Samuel Corum/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
More than 8,100 blazes have burned nearly four million acres across California this year. The Glass Fire that broke out this week near Napa, which is only 2 percent contained, is ravaging parts of the famous winemaking region in the middle of the harvest season, and the effects may linger long after it and other fires are extinguished.
Grapes untouched by flames can be tarnished by ash or smoke taint, and the extent of the damage is revealed only in the fermentation process. (Because red wines are fermented along with their skins, which bear the brunt of smoke taint, they are more affected than whites.) There is a testing backlog, so the extent of the taint is not yet known, Gladys Horiuchi of the lobbying group Wine Institute told the DealBook newsletter.
Most California wine grapes are sold in advance, so vineyards and wineries are negotiating to mitigate the impact of the fires, Ms. Horiuchi said. The goal is to avoid any smoke-tainted wine ever going on sale. That means, for now, drinkers are unaffected, sipping wines from prior harvests. But even if consumers don’t notice any difference in flavor or pricing down the line, behind the scenes, supply chains and longstanding industry relationships are already coming under strain.
Some wineries are offering growers reduced payments to keep them in business but avoid potentially tainted grapes, while major buyers like Constellation Brands warn that contracts could be voided for elevated taint. And wineries previously concerned about oversupply because of the pandemic’s effect on restaurant sales are looking to the bulk market to cover a potential shortfall.
The San Francisco Chronicle is keeping a running list of wineries and vineyards in Napa that have been hit by the Glass Fire, with extensive damage reported at Castello di Amorosa (although its famous castle survived), Chateau Boswell and LVMH-owned Newton Vineyard, among others.
Shell’s chief executive said the company was reshaping itself to meet a target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.Credit...Robin Utrecht/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Ben van Beurden, the chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, said Wednesday that he was speeding up a reorganization of the company that will result in the loss of up to 9,000 jobs by the end of 2022.
In an interview published on Shell’s website, Mr. van Beurden said the company needed to be reshaped to meet its targets of net zero carbon emissions by 2050. At the same time, Shell is under pressure to cut costs because of lower demand for oil and gas because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. van Beurden said the job cuts would help Shell shed up to $2.5 billion in operating costs. He said that 1,500 people had already left the company on voluntary redundancy packages this year. Shell has about 83,000 employees.
By 2050, Mr. van Beurden said, Shell’s business lines would differ markedly from today. He said that Shell would still sell some oil and gas but that its products by midcentury would be “predominantly low-carbon electricity, low carbon biofuels,” as well as hydrogen and other “solutions.” The company is expected to present more details of its plans in February.
The Treasury Department said Tuesday that it had completed loans for seven passenger airlines, drawing from the $25 billion set aside for the industry under the March stimulus law known as the CARES Act.
“The payroll support and loan programs created by the CARES Act have saved a large number of aviation industry jobs, and kept workers employed and connected to their health care, during an unprecedented time,” Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin said in a statement. “We are pleased to conclude loans that will support this critical industry while ensuring appropriate taxpayer compensation.”
In exchange for the loans, the airlines are subject to requirements like limiting executive compensation, refraining from stock buybacks and issuing warrants or equity to the federal government. The recipients are Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, Frontier Airlines, JetBlue Airways, Hawaiian Airlines, SkyWest Airlines and United Airlines.
American announced last week that it had completed a $5.5 billion loan from the Treasury, but expected that to rise to $7.5 billion after the agency reallocates funding set aside for other carriers, like Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines, that declined the loans. That amount, $7.5 billion, is the maximum any airline will receive, the Treasury said.
Walt Disney World in Florida reopened in July but attendance has been weaker than expected.Credit...Eve Edelheit for The New York Times
For six months, Disney has kept tens of thousands of theme park workers on furlough with full health-care benefits in hopes that a light at the end of the pandemic tunnel would appear. On Tuesday, Disney conceded that none was coming.
The company said it would eliminate 28,000 theme park jobs in the United States, or about 25 percent of its domestic resort work force.
“As heartbreaking as it is to take this action, this is the only feasible option we have in light of the prolonged impact of Covid-19 on our business, including limited capacity due to physical distancing requirements and the continued uncertainty regarding the duration of the pandemic,” Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, said in an email to “cast members,” which is how Disney refers to theme park workers.
About 67 percent of the layoffs will involve part-time jobs that pay by the hour. However, executives and salaried workers will be among the laid off. Disney’s theme parks in California and Florida employed roughly 110,000 before the pandemic. The job cuts, which will come from both resorts, will reduce that number to about 82,000.
Disneyland in California has remained closed because Governor Gavin Newsom has refused to allow theme parks in the state to restart operations. About 31,000 people work at the Disneyland complex and the majority are unionized and have been furloughed.
Mr. D’Amaro said in a statement that the layoffs were “exacerbated in California by the state’s unwillingness to lift restrictions that would allow Disneyland to reopen.”
Walt Disney World in Florida reopened on a limited basis in mid-July. But attendance has been weaker than Disney expected, with concern about coronavirus safety a major factor.
Disney will now begin negotiations with unions that represent the bulk of the affected employees. About 20,000 unionized Disney workers have been called back to work at Disney World. Roughly 20,000 more remain on furlough, a stoppage that began in mid-April. Disney World employed more than 70,000 workers before the pandemic.
