Good morning. I'm James Holman from the Washington Post and this is the Daily

202 for Wednesday, September 16th. In today's news, the Gulf Coast floods, but firefighters contain one of the worst fires in Oregon.

A new report says the Boeing 737 max crashes resulted from a horrific culmination of errors.

And Brianna Taylor's family reaches a settlement with the city of Louisville.

But first, the big idea. President Trump faced tough questions last night from

undecided voters during an ABC News town hall in Pennsylvania.

The president was pressed to defend his botched responses

to the coronavirus, racial justice protests,

and health care.

He emphasized that he would do nothing differently at all with regard to his

response to the pandemic despite nearly 200,000 Americans now having died from the outbreak. He blamed China for the coronavirus and

said he saved many lives by closing up the country, as he put it. His claim he

could not have done more to slow the virus has been rebutted by basically every epidemiologist.

Trump then blamed cities and states run by Democrats for any problems with the response

to coronavirus as well as for crime and violence in the country and he promised to

release sweeping health care and immigration plans despite not doing so over the

last three and a half years. Our fact checker Glenn Kessler documented

24 materially false statements that the president made during the hour-long

program. Meanwhile, the president's man at the Department of Health and Human Services, Michael Caputo,

apologized during a staff meeting yesterday for publicly accusing his colleagues and

subordinates of sedition. Talk about an awkward Zoom call.

During the meeting, the assistant health secretary who ironically oversees all

...