Bernie Sanders Has a Heart Attack: This Week in the 2020 Race

It was another busy week in Washington and on the campaign trail. Here is our quick rundown of what happened in the 2020 race.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont had a heart attack this week, and doctors inserted two stents to open a blocked artery.

Mr. Sanders, 78, was taken to a Las Vegas hospital on Wednesday after he experienced “some chest discomfort” at an event Tuesday night. His wife, Jane Sanders, later said that he was resting comfortably and that he would participate in the next Democratic debate, on Oct. 15. The news that he’d had a heart attack was not revealed until he was discharged from the hospital on Friday.

The end of the third fiscal quarter was Monday, and candidates have started announcing their fund-raising totals for July, August and September. We’re tracking the numbers here.

On Wednesday, Mr. Biden delivered his most forceful response yet to Mr. Trump’s requests that foreign countries investigate unsubstantiated allegations about him and his son Hunter. He accused the Trump team of trying to use “lies, smears, distortions and name calling” to knock him out of the presidential race.

Mr. Biden’s campaign also contacted television anchors and networks on Sunday to “demand” that Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, be kept off the air for promoting “false, debunked conspiracy theories.”

Ms. Harris, for her part, called (in a tweet and more formally in a letter) on Twitter to suspend Mr. Trump’s account for what she said was harassment of the whistle-blower, a violation of the platform’s terms of service.

It’s official: The next Democratic debate will feature a dozen candidates onstage at once.

As we’ve mentioned before, the Oct. 15 debate in Ohio will feature the 10 candidates who appeared at last month’s event as well as Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii and Tom Steyer, the former hedge fund investor.

  • In his article about the announcement, our colleague Michael M. Grynbaum called the debate lineup “Brobdingnagian.” (Never read “Gulliver’s Travels”? It means gigantic.)

  • Our colleagues made some very cool graphics to help you keep track of who has qualified for each debate. We hope you bookmark this page.

  • The Times’s National editor, Marc Lacey, will be a moderator at the next debate. He’s open to your question suggestions.

In the world of not-so-surprising news, we learned on Tuesday that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, is not a fan of Ms. Warren’s plan to “break up big tech.”

“If she gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge,” Mr. Zuckerberg told Facebook employees, according to recordings leaked to The Verge.

Suffice it to say, there were more remarks where those came from, and Ms. Warren offered some of her own: Facebook, she said, had repeatedly fumbled its “responsibility to protect our democracy.”

Nine of the 2020 candidates appeared at a gun policy forum in Las Vegas on Wednesday, two years and one day after a gunman massacred 58 concertgoers there, and expressed their collective support for sweeping new gun restrictions.

Gun control once splintered Democrats along regional and ideological lines, but the party is increasingly unified around an assault weapons ban, gun licensing and other measures.

Before the event, both Mr. Biden (who participated) and Mr. Steyer (who wasn’t invited) released gun control plans.

  • Mr. Biden’s would ban assault weapons and set up a voluntary buyback program; ban all online gun sales; and give grants to states that created gun licensing systems. It also includes policies designed to address domestic violence specifically.

  • Mr. Steyer is calling for a federal gun licensing program, a national registry of assault weapons, and a voluntary buyback program for all firearms. Like Ms. Warren, he is framing the nation’s gun violence epidemic as a consequence of corruption.

On Monday, Mr. Sanders unveiled another proposal aimed at reducing income inequality: a corporate tax that would penalize the country’s largest companies if they don’t narrow the gap between what they pay their top executives and what they pay their workers.

Two days later, Ms. Warren outlined a new tax on “excessive lobbying,” which would apply to corporations and trade organizations that spend more than $500,000 a year lobbying the government.

  • Mr. Booker has a new child poverty plan that would give $300 a month to most families with children under 5 years old, expand food stamps and make school meals available outside the academic year.

  • Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota released a plan on unions and workers’ rights. It would expand the National Labor Relations Act, prohibit so-called “right to work” laws, raise the federal minimum wage to $15, and guarantee paid family leave.

  • Ms. Warren’s labor plan, meanwhile, would extend the National Labor Relations Act to cover farmers and domestic workers, increase the National Labor Relations Board’s authority, expand unionization rights and address the improper classification of some workers as independent contractors.

When “Saturday Night Live” does an entire skit on a Democratic debate, all the time you’ve spent trying to keep up with this clown-car primary can suddenly seem worth it.

Enjoy the “corn pop” story, Maya Rudolph’s portrayal of Ms. Harris, and this very good tweet from Ms. Harris herself.



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