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I'm Jane Pauley and this is Sunday Morning. Two days have passed since we learned of President Trump's diagnosis, a positive COVID test that has sent him to Walter Reed Medical Center this weekend. And even as we hope for the quick recovery of the President and First Lady and others close to them, there remain many questions about how this could have happened and what it means for the future, as we'll be hearing from correspondents Ben Tracy and Ed O'Keefe, along with our Lee Cowan. I'm doing well.

With that came a modicum of calm. The President, in his own words, cautiously optimistic about the infection that has gripped him, like so many other Americans. But questions remain about his prognosis, how it all happened, and the impact on the presidential election. We'll take a look at all of it ahead on Sunday morning. President Trump's diagnosis comes roughly seven months into the COVID crisis. It's been a difficult time for many of us, but especially working mothers with young children to take care of, as Rita Braver will show us. And then it's on to the Seven, the Chicago Seven, a landmark case from the turbulent 60s that's been made into a movie for our own troubled times.

Tracy Smith will take us behind the scenes. Fifty-two years ago, in another summer of social unrest, protesters and police went to war. A handful of police clubbed a protest leader. And then they went to court. Was it as crazy as it seemed? It was crazy.

It was brutal. And so we had to fight back. And their story is a new film. We want to underscore again that we're coming to Chicago peacefully, but whether we're given permits or not, we're coming. The Chicago Seven, coming up on Sunday morning. We take note this morning of singer-songwriter Lenny Kravitz, who's telling his life story in a brand new memoir.

With Michelle Miller, we'll pay him a visit. You know him as Lenny Kravitz, the central rock star. But starting out, he thought his professional name should be Romeo Blue.

I was not comfortable with myself at the time. How Lenny Kravitz made a name for himself later on Sunday morning. Chip Reid has a political history of the October Surprise. Ted Koppel listens to some voices from The Heartland.

Martha Stewart's in the kitchen making jam. Plus thoughts from John Dickerson and more on this Sunday morning for the 4th of October 2020. We'll be right back. The President's COVID diagnosis has implications that go well beyond the personal.

Our CBS News correspondents are tracking the impact both in Washington and beyond. We'll begin with Ben Tracy. I'll be back. I think I'll be back soon. And I look forward to finishing up the campaign the way it was started.

President Trump posted this video on his Twitter feed last night, addressing the nation from his hospital suite at the Walter Reed Military Medical Center. I just want to tell you that I'm starting to feel good. You don't know over the next period of a few days.

I guess that's the real test. So we'll be seeing what happens over those next next couple of days. Late Saturday, his physician, Dr. Sean Conley, released a statement saying the president is making substantial progress, but not out of the woods yet.

At this time, the team and I are extremely happy with the progress the president has made. Earlier, Dr. Conley was evasive about whether President Trump ever needed oxygen. He's not on oxygen right now.

That's right. CBS News has learned President Trump was given supplemental oxygen at the White House Friday. And a source familiar with the president's health, identified as chief of staff Mark Meadows by the Associated Press, gave this sobering assessment that the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. We are still not on a clear path to a full recovery.

President Trump's supporters have gathered outside the hospital, where he's expected to stay for several days. The president has already been given two experimental drug therapies, including Remdesivir, provided under emergency use to hospitalize COVID patients. Dr. David Agus. The two were put together in that they worked differently against the virus. It makes clinical sense what they did.

But, yes, this is experimenting. This is not standard of care by any means. What we know is that being 74, being a man and being overweight, I worry about his lungs more than anything. It's still not known how or when the president was infected. But last weekend's Rose Garden ceremony for his Supreme Court pick, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, may have been a super spreader event.

Guests were shoulder-to-shoulder, not wearing masks outside or indoors at receptions. Several attendees now have the virus, including Senators Mike Lee of Utah, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who checked himself into the hospital Saturday. The president's campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and top aide Hope Hicks are also infected.

Just 72 hours into the diagnosis now. And Saturday, two of the president's doctors suggested Mr. Trump might have known he was infected as early as Wednesday, before trips to Minnesota for a rally and New Jersey for a fundraiser. The White House later said the doctors misspoke.

But for an administration not known for transparency, it's adding uncertainty to an already unsettling moment for the country. Vice President Mike Pence has tested negative for the virus and is working from home. Officials here at the White House say there has been no formal transfer of power, and President Trump is still in charge.

This is Lee Cowan. The news from his physician that the president is doing, quote, very well. And I think we're going to have a very good result. Combined with the president himself saying that in his own words is all positive.

Again, over the next few days, we're going to probably know for sure. But infectious disease specialists outside Mr. Trump's orbit echo what the president also said, that the next few days will be crucial. So he still has a fight ahead of him.

Still has a fight ahead of him. We have seen patients who actually have prolonged symptoms until maybe seven days, eight days after the onset, and who actually develop complications at that time. Dr. Albert Koh is chair of epidemiology of microbial diseases at Yale Medical School. So what are we to make of the White House is probably going to be in the hospital for a couple of days? Does that give us any indication of how serious this might be? This is really quite precocious and too early, at least in our experiences and taking care of patients with COVID.

You have to take it kind of one day at a time. Balancing the president's privacy with the needs of the nation to know isn't easy. CBS's chief medical correspondent, Dr. John Laput, says that history tells us more information is more calming than less. One of the basic concepts in public health is to be transparent.

And I think that's especially important right now. We don't want to be parsing words. We don't want to be trying to interpret what somebody says. What did they really mean? You want to just have them look straight at you, tell you what's going on, and we can take it. We're grown-ups.

We just want to know what's going on. What we do know is the president is undergoing treatment, that five-day course of the antiviral remdesivir, as well as a dose of monoclonal antibodies. It makes scientific sense to me that you would want to give these kind of treatments that keep the viral load down as early as possible, but you have to also understand these are experimental treatments.

So what are the rest of us to take away from the president seeming fine one day and not the next? The cruel reality of COVID-19 is that even the best testing offers only a snapshot in time. There are definitely gaps in what the tests can do and what they can't do.

Right. A huge misconception is I just flew in from another city and I want to get tested today because if I'm negative I can see my grandmother tomorrow. No, because if you were infected a week ago you could test negative today and then test positive tomorrow and become suddenly infectious. Which brings us back to what we've been hearing from health officials now for months. Face masks and social distancing remain our best defenses. These are kind of the meat and potatoes of our public health response. Whether the president's opinions on public health protocols will change...

They're great and maybe they're just good, maybe they're not so good. ...is really anybody's guess. But for now he shares an unfortunate commonality with more than seven million Americans who have contracted the virus and is, for the moment, at its mercy. The COVID-19 crisis is hurting just about everybody in one way or another. Rita Braver has been talking to working mothers who say they are in a particularly stressful bind. For Clara Vasquez, a home health aide in the farming town of Sunnyside, Washington, the pandemic has created a new level of anxiety. I'm here to take care of people that need me but who can take care of my son.

I don't have no one. She and her husband, Agustin, a long-haul truck driver, barely make ends meet. With school now online, they can't afford a regular sitter for seven-year-old Kevin and must rely on a patchwork of friends and family. And one of the things that my son always says when he goes to bed is, who's going to watch me? He worries.

He can't sleep right because he doesn't know where he's going to be. So it's heartbreaking to me because there's days where I just say, I'm just going to see who answers me so I can drop you off. She fears he's falling behind in his school work and yearns to be home to help. Financially, how hard would it be for you if you had to stop working?

It's just going to put us more into debt, and I just can't afford to leave my job because if I do, I won't be able to pay my bills. Mothers aren't in an impossible situation. They're doing their own job, their child care worker's job, and their children's teacher's jobs. Professor Joan C. Williams is founding director of the Center for Work-Life Law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law. What's your call volume like now during the pandemic versus what it is in normal times?

Absolutely unbelievable. We've had a 250 percent increase in people calling us. Washington did provide some early relief for families, but many people were ineligible, and most of that money has already run out. And while plenty of fathers are struggling, a new study shows that women are almost three times more likely than men not to be working due to child care demands because of the pandemic. 57 percent of moms now report depression and anxiety compared to only a third of dads. Eighty percent of mothers now say they're doing most or all of the housework and homeschooling. It's almost like people were just holding it together, and the whole infrastructure is crumbling. Well, you know, we were already in a crazy situation in the United States. I mean, we're the only industrialized nation with no paid parental leave.

It was a Rube Goldberg machine from the beginning, and it just broke. You may have seen the funny images of multitasking moms, but Williams says many mothers are facing serious indifference or even hostility from employers. All of them are feeling really, really embattled right now. I was working for a Fortune 50 institution. I was working as one of the leadership in that organization's cybersecurity department.

But it all collapsed in March. Danielle Mia's company told everyone to work from home. Because of COVID-19, her babysitter could not come to the house. Her husband helped, but has a high-pressure job, too.

Mia had most of the responsibility for baby Logan. How did the company react toward this circumstance that you're in? I worked in a primarily male-dominated environment. You know, I started noticing comments here and there that suggested people were not comfortable with it. You know, having the baby on a call with me or like bringing him onto a conference line would make people uncomfortable. Uncomfortable because they didn't like seeing a baby in a work environment.

I just kind of received veiled questions like, you know, when does he eat or like, does he ever sleep? And I also felt bad because I wasn't dedicating the same amount of attention and care that I normally would to the staff or to the call or to the meeting because I was preoccupied with him. It got tricky very quickly. Soon she found herself left out of key meetings. And actually someone made that comment to me of, well, just not going to invite you because you're off doing mommy duty. Did you ever talk to superiors in the company and say, look, I'm struggling here.

Can you give me some relief? I did. And the response was you have to do these things or your career is in jeopardy. And that to me felt like a threat. She finally resigned. You couldn't struggle anymore.

Yeah. And that's what kills me. Truly, this was a job that I had worked for for 10 years, you know, minimum I'd busted my butt to get there. I was bitter.

I was really angry. Mia was able to find a new family-friendly job at a similar salary. But not everyone is so lucky. I'm still unemployed. It's been a few months and I've been looking every single week. Do you want to call it?

Come on. The San Diego insurance company where Drysana Rios was an account executive switched to work at home just as her one and four-year-old preschool shut down. Her husband's an essential worker gone all day. She says her manager immediately laid down the law. He right away would say I do not want to hear the kids on client calls.

Didn't want to hear them. Yeah, he didn't want to hear him on client calls or see him, right. He would just question, you know, my availability which I didn't understand because I was available all the time.

She says a male colleague with children was treated differently but no matter how hard she tried she says her boss would not let up. And I said what else do you want me to do? Do you want me to lock my one-year-old in a room on his own? And he just responded figure it out. So figure it out. And I was just crying.

I'm like okay. So I reported the discrimination to HR via email and a week later they let me go. And I believe it is a hundred percent retaliation for bringing this up because there's I was doing my job. So the case is for wrongful termination and retaliation. Daphne Delveaux is suing on behalf of Rios. In its legal response Hub International Insurance Services denies each and every allegation Rios makes and says that she was let go for legitimate business reasons including her failure to perform her job duties.

But Rios is part of a trend. The government just announced that 865,000 women left the workforce last month versus 216,000 men. You know this virus doesn't just cause people to die but it's actually killing the working mother's careers. I feel like women are being set back decades in their progress towards equality at work. Hey could you give me a high five?

Good job. And mothers like Drisana Rios are sounding an alarm. I don't ever want a mom to feel like I do. That they have to choose to either work and not have kids or be a stay-at-home mom. We could have both.

We could be working mothers. When, where and how to cast your ballot. Planning to vote by mail?

Go online for state-by-state instructions and download the CBS News app. The story of The Seven, the Chicago Seven, is a story of protest and confrontation from long ago that's about to be retold in a new movie. Tracey Smith takes us back. No justice, no peace.

No justice, no peace. In 2020, as the season of social unrest has become the autumn of discontent, it's remarkable how it looks like another time, 52 summers ago. In 1968, there was revolution in the air.

One young rebel climbed up to lower the American flag to half mass. The nation was in turmoil over civil rights, split over the Vietnam War. A handful of police clubbed a protest leader. And in late August, outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, around 10,000 protesters squared off with about 23,000 police and National Guard troops. And all hell broke loose.

In less than a minute, what had been a relatively quiet crowd was a raging mob. Seven months later, the government charged the suspected ring leaders with, among other things, conspiracy and crossing state lines to incite a riot. At first, there were eight Chicago defendants, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Renny Davis, Bobby Seale, Lee Weiner, John Freunds, and David Dellinger. The law doesn't recognize political trials. No, no, we weren't arrested.

We were chosen. Their trial is now the subject of a new Netflix film, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. We're giving them exactly what they want, a stage and an audience.

Yeah, you really think there's going to be a big audience? The movie's been in the works for 14 years, but Sorkin says it took on a new urgency after President Donald Trump took office. Was there a moment in Donald Trump's ascendancy when you said, okay, now I need to tell this story? Well, it began when he was running for president and at his rallies, when a protester would shout out something, he'd become nostalgic, like to punch him in the face, I'll tell you, about the old days when they beat the crap out of him and punch him in the face. Do you know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They'd be carried out on a stretcher, folks.

The old days he was talking about the 68. The police advanced into the crowd, clubbing those who resisted. One of those protesters, Chicago Seven defendant Renny Davis, needed a stretcher after taking a billy club to the head. I was being clubbed by police and police were literally screaming, kill Davis.

Oh, my goodness. And how bad was your head injury? I had to go to the hospital.

And so I'll tell the story now that I've never shared before publicly. You know, I went to the hospital to get 13 stitches and the police realized that I was in the hospital because they knew I had been clubbed. And so they started a search of a hospital room by room by room.

And mostly the nurses, they could end their career by what they did. I mean, they put me on a trolley cart and covered me with a sheet and moved me from room to room. To hide you from the police. To hide from the police, yeah.

For protesters and the police who were ordered to stop them, it was a dangerous game. But the activists all knew what they were in for, says former defendant Lee Weiner. Did you know going in that you were risking prison time? There was always, of course, not only a possibility, but a probability. You know, what are we going to do? Not do it just because of that?

Not a chance. We've heard testimony that your plans for the convention were designed specifically to draw the police into a confrontation. Well, if I'd known it was going to be the first wish of mine that came true, I would have aimed a lot higher. Actor Sasha Baron Cohen studied Abby Hoffman long before he played him. Everything pointed to one man. Who is this guy? Is he a fool or is he actually the smartest guy in the room?

What do you think? I think he was the smartest guy in the room. He developed this whole style of protesting that was designed to elicit as much media attention as possible.

And even during the riots in Chicago, Abby always had his mind on where the cameras were. We can't fight it in the court because this is the cat and these are the people that are putting us on trial, see? In fact, Hoffman and his co-defendant Jerry Rubin became celebrities in their own right, as observed by our own Bob Schieffer. It was raining, it was cold.

In short, it was not a fit night out for man and beast. So it was only natural that those masters of media manipulation, Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, should choose this night to hold a news conference. The only people that can stop this trial are the people in the streets. The U.S. attorney wanted the negro defendant to scare the jury.

I was thrown in to make the group look scarier. But the trial was a very different experience for the lone black defendant, Bobby Seal. Seal wound up representing himself and he clashed with Judge Julius Hoffman. Bobby Seal was gagged and chained today for refusing to obey the judge. Handcuffs were clamped onto both wrists, leg iron shackled both boots, and a white linen cloth reinforced with adhesive tape was knotted behind his neck.

It was breathtaking. He would try to pull his hands up and then he would just be clubbed in front of the jury. And this went on for several days. And then he would try to pull his hands in front of the jury.

And this went on for several days. I wasn't in any contempt, but Judge Hoffman, I told him, I said, you're in contempt of the American people. Eventually, Bobby Seal's case was declared a mistrial and the Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven. Five were convicted of some charges, but all were overturned on appeal. Their trial is history, but it seems their fight is still very much alive.

We didn't need it to get more relevant, but it did in Kenosha and Kentucky and Washington. When you see once again, peaceful protesters being met with tear gas, nightstands, you got to care a lot about this country to go out in the street and face that kind of danger. You got to care a lot about America and anti-war demonstrators gathered in Grant Park. Then, as now, the demonstrators risked their safety and their freedom to make themselves heard.

Surrounded by grim, silent soldiers, the demonstrators decided to sing. And according to former Chicago Seven defendant Lee Weiner, it was all worth it. It was crazy, for sure. It was hard. It was brutal.

It was dangerous. It was an effort by the government to belittle our efforts and our beliefs that America would be better. And so we had to fight back. And in that fighting back, we did not a bad job. This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morell. Bridge Colby is co-founder and principal of the Marathon Initiative, a project focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition.

The United States put our mind to something we can usually figure it out. What people are saying and what we kind of know analytically and empirically is our strategic situation, our military situation is not being matched up with what we're doing. Follow Intelligence Matters wherever you get your podcasts. Just how does President Trump's COVID diagnosis impact the 2020 presidential campaign? We check in with correspondent Ed O'Keefe.

In the coming days, you can expect what remains of this 2020 presidential campaign to look different, a lot different. On Wednesday, Vice President Pence and Joe Biden's running mate Kamala Harris are still set to debate in Salt Lake City. She also has a conversation with Vice President Joe Biden in Salt Lake City. She arrived Friday as a precaution. And I want to thank the people of Utah for being so welcoming in such a warm way. This Thursday, Pence, Biden and Harris are all set to hold campaign events in Arizona, but absent from the campaign trail, at least in person, will be President Trump. My wife Jill and I prayed that they'll make a quick and full recovery. Biden has been wishing the ailing president well, adding, the news is a reminder that we as a nation need to do better in dealing with this pandemic.

The business of Washington is also set to continue. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Saturday that the full Senate won't meet in person for the next two weeks, but the Judiciary Committee will in order to begin confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. With two members of that panel, Mike Lee of Utah and Tom Tillis of North Carolina, having tested positive for COVID-19, it's unknown how they will participate.

Much like everything else, the pandemic plunged the campaign into chaos back in March, when the first public events were canceled. Ever since, President Trump and opponent Biden have been a study in contrasts. Mr. Trump is rarely seen wearing a mask. Biden is rarely seen without one. Can I take my mask off? I guess I can.

All right. Biden's public events are small and infrequent. Only COVID-screened reporters, staff and VIPs can attend at a social distance. But up through last Wednesday, Mr. Trump continued holding large public rallies. Make America great again, again.

Always packed with thousands of supporters, many of whom don't cover their faces. From the campaign's start, Biden limited his appearances to brief remarks. The administration's failure on testing is colossal, and it's a failure of planning, leadership and execution. And then mostly hunkered down at home in Wilmington, Delaware.

I wish we could have done this together and gone a little more smoothly. But in recent days, it's rare when Biden doesn't talk or tweet about the president's response to the pandemic. The reports, the reports.

Oh, it's closing. While Mr. Trump has consistently tried to avoid the subject or raise doubts about his seriousness. Many called it a flu. What difference? Or mock Biden for his caution. I don't wear masks like him. Every time you see him, he's got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away from it.

He shows up with the biggest mask I've ever seen. Polling from September showed 52 percent of voters believe Biden would do a better job handling the pandemic to the president's 38 percent. And that was before Mr. Trump's COVID diagnosis. And in a campaign season already robbed of many of its usual trappings, with just 30 days to go, the 2020 campaign might have to go without one of its candidates, at least for now. With word of the president's COVID diagnosis, what are his supporters thinking about the coming election? Here's senior contributor Ted Koppel. Election night, November 1960.

As we've reported to you earlier, we see very little probability now of any change in these figures. It seems certain that John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts will be the next president of the United States. Walter Cronkite may not actually have been the most trusted man in America, but he was trusted, as were his counterparts on ABC and NBC. And if they said Kennedy was the new president, well, that's the way it was.

As we go through the night, then toward the dawn, counting the votes in this, one of the closest presidential elections in many, many years. West Virginians were Democrats in those days. By 2016, this was solid Trump comfort.

At one time, they had more money and they knew what to do with in this county. And McDowell County Sheriff Martin West reflected local optimism. You really think things are going to change? I think that he can help us. Four years later, the optimism is a little frayed, but support for Trump is undiminished.

He's done a lot for us in the last four years. I feel he has. How did you react when you heard the news about the president and the first lady having COVID?

I was startled when I heard it. And my first thought really was how the Democrats is going to make fun of Trump, which they already have MSNBC and CNN. They were already saying things that, you know, Trump should have already known this and everything.

And they're going to be making fun over the next few weeks up until the election. In large part, it's his own dereliction is partly to blame for this. He chose to go out to rallies. He chose to downplay masks. He chose to not social distance and call it a hoax.

Good evening. Where once television network newscasts provided a shared understanding of events, almost a social glue that held different parts of the nation together. It is understandable.

It is more than understandable to be enraged. Cable television has turned to packaging the news, according to ideological preference. And of course, it wasn't just the media. In fact, the official message of the Democratic Party is that Donald Trump had it coming. You're going to vote for him again?

I just ran. Mike Lushbaugh is a former chairman of the McDowell County Republican Party. In West Virginia, when we heard about the president having COVID, where did you get the news? I got a news flash on my phone at the same time that it was released to the public. Lushbaugh doesn't get much of his news from television anymore. You remember when back in the older days when newscasters presented the news in an unbiased way, they just threw it out there and let people think what they want to think about it. They've gotten away from the pure art of reporting, and it's just lost my interest. Where do you get your information?

A lot of it comes from Facebook, from YouTube feeds. Elizabeth Estip is the current chair of the McDowell County Republican Party. Her husband, Cody, is a county commissioner. This country is tore apart bad right now. I think either way, there's going to be an uprising here. We don't want that. We do not need that in this country.

So if if one of your friends said, Elizabeth, I don't know, I just can't handle Trump anymore. I'm going to vote for Biden. You just pray for him. Well, you know what I tell him? If he satisfies God, he has to satisfy us. This is done being prophesied, and if God chose him, we need to shut our mouth the way I feel.

So you think God chose Trump to serve two terms? Yes, I do. Dusty Cline is the mother of three. Her husband is a coal miner. She's a college grad, studied nursing. I asked her about COVID. Have people in this administration been taking it seriously enough? Now, I ask you that as a former nursing student.

I know people that have worn masks and done everything right and stayed home except for going to the grocery store, and they still ended up sick. Do you listen to radio at all? No. Do you read newspaper?

No. Where did you hear about the president having COVID? I think it was on social media Facebook, maybe. For some time now, and by the millions, people have been turning to social media platforms. The story of the 2020 election on social media is really one of domestic partisan activity. We've seen large hyper-partisan news outlets just getting enormous numbers on social media, and they're doing it in an environment where it's a pretty loose, let's say, fair attitude toward truth, and in which this goal is just to engage people, to keep them clicking and scrolling.

Kevin Reuss writes a column on technology for The New York Times. So you have these just enormous numbers for these hyper-partisan news sources that are basically disconnected from the larger mainstream media. But I think what a lot of them have in common is that they're very skilled at provoking outrage. There's a saying that what's enraging is engaging.

Trump, of course, eventually got coronavirus. Where once we assembled facts in order to change opinions now. The entirety of Silicon Valley is working against Donald Trump and Republicans this year. There is an accumulation of opinions. Regarding mask-wearing, which is that the evidence is somewhat mixed. Which ultimately distort the facts.

If Trump loses, it's President Harris. Yeah. That, pay attention. And you're telling me that they have more people coming to them than collectively come to ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, New York Times, Washington Post. Spell that out for me.

Where are they going? So there's a right-wing commentator named Ben Shapiro. So again, the media's take here is that if Trump had just said the right things, if Trump had been super strict in what he said, then he wouldn't have gotten COVID. He's very popular among conservatives. And in the last 30 days on his Facebook page, he has gotten 51.4 million interactions. That's more than five times as many as the New York Times. And it's more than CBS, CNN, NBC, ABC combined.

Ah, you're kind of leaving me speechless here. The president is ill, and a lot of the people that he has been with over the last few days are quite ill, and yet you're telling me that more people are getting their information from these outlets than they are from what we have traditionally looked upon as reliable news sources. Yeah, I would say that's true. And it's part of why there is so much misinformation about things like the coronavirus. I don't think that's all social media's fault. What I do think social media has done is radically amplify those things because they are engaging, because they keep people's attention. Just saying, wear a mask, it works, is a useful message and even a life-saving one, but it's not a very interesting one. Whereas telling people that masks are part of a conspiracy, that the government is engaging in mind control, that there is something nefarious going on, I mean, these are thriller plots. But I think ultimately the platforms ultimately have to decide whether or not they care if information is true or false. Which would appear to lead to this sad conclusion.

When we are unable to agree on what constitutes the nature of a lie, it can be all but impossible to settle on the truth. The timing of the president's COVID diagnosis fits into a historical pattern. The recurrence, almost every four years it seems, of the phenomenon known as the October surprise.

Here's Chip Reid. When President Trump announced early Friday that he and the first lady had tested positive for COVID-19, it was just one in a series of head-spinning shocks in an already tumultuous campaign. The president does have mild symptoms.

The doctors continue to monitor both his health and the health of the first lady. This past Tuesday, a ferocious debate left many viewers stunned. No, the answer to the question is no. But why did he do it over the last 25 years? Because you weren't president screwing things up. It's hard to get any word in with this clown. Before that, a breathtaking report in the New York Times about President Trump's tax returns.

This president appears to have over $400 million in debt to whom? That came on the heels of the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the lightning-quick nomination of conservative judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace her. There's a name for unexpected events that occur late in presidential campaigns and have the potential to change the course of the election. They're called October Surprises. This year, they got an early start.

All but the president's positive COVID test happened in September. It's our October Surprise early. Margaret Carlson, who has covered many presidential campaigns, has been the first in the presidential campaigns for Time Magazine says some October Surprises are carefully orchestrated, but others come out of the blue. Is it a man-made or woman-made surprise, or is it an event beyond anyone's capacity to control, you know, a hurricane, the financial markets collapsing in 2008?

Or is it something in an ongoing scandal? Our term, October Surprise, first appeared in our political lexicon in 1980 when Republican Ronald Reagan was running against Democratic President Jimmy Carter. In Tehran tonight, the American Embassy is in the hands of several hundred Iranian students. Fifty-two Americans were being held hostage in Iran during an election year, and there was no end in sight. It must be made clear that the failure to release the hostages will involve increasingly heavy costs to Iran and to its interests. In 1980, Jimmy Carter and his staff really believed that if they could show progress in freeing the hostages, that would be enough, that would take him over.

Larry Sabato is director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. What they didn't count on was that the promises from the Iranians completely collapsed on the Sunday before the Tuesday election. So basically Americans were told right before they went to the polls that it was either hopeless or they'd better try somebody new who would try new things to get the hostages back. So that was an October Surprise that Jimmy Carter thought was going to help him, but it reversed itself. It helped Reagan instead. 1980 might have been when the term October Surprise was coined, but Sabato says the first president to benefit decisively from a last-minute turn of events was Abraham Lincoln. Even Lincoln had not an October Surprise but a September Surprise when Sherman took Atlanta. It probably saved Lincoln's second term. He himself thought that he was going to lose, and most of his cabinet did. And it built enthusiasm in the north, and finally they could see the light at the end of the tunnel. That light was a resounding Lincoln victory.

I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear. While it's rare that an October Surprise actually changes the outcome of an election, Washington Post reporter Devlin Barrett believes it did happen four years ago. Yeah, I think Jim Comey, the director of the FBI, without intending to, changed the outcome of the election. Barrett is the author of a just-released book in which he contends that the key 2016 October Surprise came in the form of a letter to Congress from then-director of the FBI, James Comey.

The letter announced a new FBI investigation into emails found on a laptop belonging to Clinton campaign advisor Huma Abedin, whose husband, former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner, was under investigation for online sex crimes. The announcement was made just 11 days before the election. And one reason it was so powerful is because Trump had made such a big deal out of the Hillary Clinton emails, so this fit right into one of his main messages against her.

That's absolutely right. It absolutely fit into the Republican critique and attack on Hillary Clinton. But the other part of it, too, is that it came from a very credible place. If FBI Director Comey had not sent this letter to Capitol Hill, you believe Hillary Clinton would be president today.

I do. And more importantly, the people who study the data believe it. And what they say is it is the single most measurable impact on the outcome. Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. Barrett admits that we can never know with absolute certainty that it did change the election result.

But we do know that another 2016 October surprise did not. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Whatever you want. Grab them by the p***.

I can do anything. The notorious Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump bragging in 2005 about sexually accosting women did not block his path to victory. Larry Sabato says it's unlikely an October surprise this year will change the result of the election. I don't think October surprises are going to work as well this year because we're so polarized.

Everybody's in their own tribe, Democratic or Republican, and they're not going to move. Maybe so, but with the way things are going, more October and even November surprises seem likely in a campaign that makes the term political roller coaster sound quaint. The president's health crisis throws the final month of this volatile political campaign into even further uncertainty, which brings us to senior political analyst John Dickerson. This week, when the vice presidential candidates debate, they will be five feet further apart than originally planned in a campaign taking place a world apart from the one inhabited by the presidential candidates just the week before. Vice President Pence was at the same event where the president might have been infected.

But so far, it appears he was out of the loop. Still, Kamala Harris has asked for the extra distance just to be safe. What it means to be safe and what accommodations are necessary during the pandemic will be a key debate topic. The matter of national importance on which the campaigns disagree has also distinguished the way they carry out their campaigns. President Trump mocked Joe Biden's mask wearing and precautions.

He repeatedly ignored the guidance of his own health officials. The debate over these issues is no longer abstract and makes the inevitable abstract questions about whether the vice presidential candidates can step into the job if required a little too on the nose. That used to be the most important question asked at vice presidential debates.

Otherwise, they were characterized by peppery exchanges because the role used to require playing the attack dog. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy. That was really uncalled for, Senator. The vice presidency once had a low reputation. John Adams called it the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived. FDR sidekick John Nance Garner said the job was not worth a bucket of warm.

Well, let's just say it wasn't fresh milk. Admiral James Stockdale, Ross Perot's running mate, famously felt this way during a debate. Who am I?

Why am I here? Many vice presidents have felt that way in office, too. But the modern vice presidency is a more muscular job. And the role a president picks for his number two tells us something about how the chief executive builds their team and deploys talent. Dick Cheney shaped energy policy and the war on terrorism. Joe Biden negotiated with Congress, managed the economic recovery and played chief skeptic on Afghanistan. Mike Pence leads the task force combating coronavirus. The vice presidency is no longer about just being up to the task if something awful happens in the modern version of the office. If something awful happens, the vice president might also bear some responsibility for it. I'm Jane Pauley.

Please join us when our trumpet sounds again next Sunday morning. This is The Takeout with Major Garrett. This week, Stephen Law, ally of Mitch McConnell and one of Washington's biggest midterm money men. List for me the two Senate races where you think Republicans have the best chance of taking a Democratic seat away. Nevada, New Hampshire. Not Georgia. Well, Georgia is right up there, but New Hampshire is a surprise. In New Hampshire, people really just kind of don't like Maggie Hassan. For more from this week's conversation, follow The Takeout with Major Garrett on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.