Irish Examiner View: A defining challenge approaches in US election

Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., watch fireworks during the fourth day of the Democratic National Convention on Thursday. Picture: AP Photo/Andrew Harnik

As Joe Biden, the challenger in November's White House election made his acceptance speech to the virtual Democratic convention overnight, America's coronavirus death toll climbed towards 180,000 while the number of recorded cases nudged the 6m milestone. 

Cultural resistance to the disciplines needed, especially wearing face masks, to try to contain the pandemic has played a significant role in this carnage. 

President Trump's dangerous, off-the-cuff fantasies about how C19 might be defeated has not only encouraged those delusions but they grievously undermined rational efforts by scientists, medical advisors, and state leaders - some Republican - to confront the pandemic. 

That abject failure of leadership would in normal times be enough to view November's result with a good degree of certainty - that 30m Americans rely on unemployment benefits this weekend strengthens that view. That there are so many other glaring failures and reversals it seems, from the perspective of this liberal, affluent, Eurocentric, democratic republic, almost impossible to imagine a second term for President Trump. But then...

Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny may not have expected to feature in America's election run-in, few did but he will, even if only to renew concerns about how the 2016 election was influenced by Vladimir Putin and Russia. Navalny, 44, is unconscious on a ventilator in a hospital intensive care unit after a suspected poisoning attack on Wednesday. 

Like so many of Putin's brave, outspoken opponents fate seems to have dealt him a particularly difficult hand. His circumstances will refocus attention on Tuesday's 1000-page report by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s interference in America's 2016 election. 

President Donald Trump speaks to a crowd of supporters during a campaign stop at Mariotti Building Product on Thursday in Old Forge, Pa. Picture: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed extensive contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Kremlin officials, other Russians, including at least one intelligence officer and others linked to the country’s spy services. 

The SIC, in findings far more damming than the earlier Mueller report, concluded that the Russian government disrupted an American election to help Mr Trump become president; Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated; and some of Mr. Trump’s advisers were eager for support from an American adversary. That abject behaviour - a partnership with a Mafia state - would, again, in normal times be enough to view November's result with a good degree of certainty but then...

Earlier this week, in the opening hours of the convention former first lady Michelle Obama cut to the chase: "If you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can, and they will, if we don’t make a change in this election,” she said. “If we have any hope of ending this chaos, we have got to vote for Joe Biden like our lives depend on it.”

On Wednesday, her husband, former President Barack Obama was as unambiguous: “What we do these next 76 days will echo through generations to come... I did hope, for the sake of our country, that Donald Trump might show some interest in taking the job seriously... But he never did."

As Trump undermines the electoral process, as he tries to disenfranchise millions by attacking US postal services and hints at dark consequences should he be defeated in a ''rigged'' election the West approaches a defining moment, maybe the most challenging one in 80 years.