Meanwhile, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden asserted that that last thing US needs is a president who ignores Americans and looks down upon them, and said Donald Trump's "reckless" personal conduct since his Covid-19 diagnosis is "unconscionable", reported PTI.
Addressing a campaign rally in Las Vegas, Nevada on Friday, Biden said that the country deserved a president who understood what people were going through.
"Who sees you where you are and where you want to be. The last thing you need is a president who ignores you, looks down upon you, who just doesn't understand who in God's name we are. That's President Trump," he said.
"His reckless personal conduct since his diagnosis and the destabilising effect it is having on our government is unconscionable. He didn't take the necessary precautions to protect himself or others. The longer Donald Trump is president, the more reckless he gets," Biden said.
Trump's physician Dr. Sean Conley Thursday said that the President has completed his course of therapy for Covid-19 and will be fit to resume public events from Saturday. In a memo released by the White House, Conley said Trump's condition has remained stable and he has responded "extremely well" to treatment.
Trump on Thursday refused to participate in next week's presidential debate with his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, calling it a "waste of time" after the organisers announced that the second debate will be held virtually because of the president's diagnosis of COVID-19. "I'm not going to waste my time on a virtual debate. That's not what debating is all about," Trump said in a nearly hour-long phone interview with Fox Business.
Concerns about the debate had risen after the first presidential debate took place between Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden on September 29 in Cleveland, Ohio. US President Donald Trump tested positive for the novel coronavirus soon after the debate.
President Donald Trump on Sunday declared he was healthy enough to return to the campaign trail, a day after the White House doctor said he was no longer at risk of transmitting the coronavirus but did not say explicitly whether Trump had tested negative for it.
Trump, who was poised Monday to host his first rally after his COVID-19 diagnosis, declared he was now “immune” from the virus, a claim that was impossible to prove and comes amid a series of outstanding questions about the president”s health.
“I”m immune,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News. “The president is in very good shape to fight the battles.”
President Donald Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joe Biden, takes his presidency into new territory — until now, occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan.
Trump has long demanded — quite publicly, often on Twitter — that his most senior cabinet members use the power of their office to pursue political enemies. But his appeals this week, as he trailed badly in the polls and was desperate to turn the national conversation away from the coronavirus, were so blatant that one had to look to authoritarian nations to make comparisons.
He took a step even Richard Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his reelection campaign. READ MORE
President Donald Trump made his first public appearance on Saturday following his discharge from Walter Reed hospital. In a gathering of hundreds of people on the grounds of the White House, Trump expressed support for law enforcement in the United States. Public Health officials had earlier stated that this gathering was not advised due to increasing coronavirus infections, especially after Trump’s own diagnosis and that of many White House personnel who had subsequently tested positive for the virus.
TIME had reported that although Trump had entered the White House lawns wearing a mask, he had taken it off to address the gathered supporters. “I’m feeling great,” Trump could be heard saying. Critics had said that Trump did not disclose whether he was still contagious before addressing so many people and the White House had said they did not have information in this regard. You can read the Time report here: https://bit.ly/33O6Eld READ MORE
US President Donald Trump has alleged that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden in his previous capacities as Senator and vice president was busy shipping jobs to China, prompting the latter to hit back. Biden said Trump will be the first president in modern American history to "leave office with fewer jobs than when it began". Making his first public address from Blue Room Balcony of the White House after being discharged from hospital where he was treated for COVID-19 infection, Trump charged Biden and his campaign of taking the country on the path of socialism, which he vowed would not let him do. "The Democrats' is a socialist program and platform -- and it really is more than socialist. It's not just socialist; it's beyond socialism," he said. (PTI)
The polling picture for President Donald Trump grew particularly dark this past week, as it became clear there was no sympathy bump after his positive coronavirus test. A CNN poll found him trailing Joe Biden by 16 points among likely voters nationwide — his worst result of any CNN survey this year.
The poll was conducted primarily after Trump received his virus diagnosis. Sixty-three percent of Americans in that survey said they thought the president had acted irresponsibly toward those around him in handling the threat of infection.
A pair of New York Times/Siena College polls out this past week found Biden with a 6-point lead in Nevada and a statistically insignificant 1-point edge in Ohio, where Trump won handily four years ago. (With NYT)
The first nationally televised presidential debate happened in 1960, between John F Kennedy and incumbent Richard Nixon. On October 13, 1960, the third presidential debate held between Kennedy and Nixon would be the first and only time that presidential candidates did not share the same platform. The debate was moderated by Bill Shadel of ABC News and featured a split-screen telecast with panelists in the ABC studio in Los Angeles and Kennedy in the ABC studio in New York. This debate was viewed by over 63.7 million people. (Read our Explainer here)
The Biden campaign has now spent more than $500 million on ads this year. Over the past week, the Biden campaign spent $40.3 million on television and radio, while the Trump campaign spent about $23.3 million, slightly more than the previous week, according to the ad-tracking firm Advertising Analytics. The Trump campaign has closed the spending gap on Facebook, spending $5.2 million on the platform over the past week, while the Biden campaign spent $5.9 million in the same period. (With NYT)
The year was 1949. Introducing Jawaharlal Nehru to a New York gathering, J J Singh, president of the India League for America, a private organisation that worked to “further Indian causes in” the US, had called him the “rainbow, reaching from East to West”.
This was no Howdy! rally in scale or ambition, yet, as a 1951 issue of The New Yorker, featuring Singh as ‘The One-Man Lobby’ for India in the US, underlined, it was no mean feat either. Singh and his organisation were “largely responsible for the most significant period of Indian activity in the US” until then, providing a legal route for the 4,000 Indians in the US then to gain citizenship. (Read Karishma Mehrotra's report here)
Hours after the FBI revealed a group of anti-government vigilantes had plotted to kidnap her, the Democratic governor of Michigan addressed her state _ and the nation _ with a message that didn't mince words about whom she blamed for the threat: President Donald Trump was complicit for ``giving comfort to those who spread fear and hatred and division.'
It was a familiar move for a governor who has repeatedly engaged in heated public battles with the president that may only hurt him in a pivotal state against Democrat Joe Biden. While she risked politicizing the moment, the governor said Friday that she didn't think twice about calling out the president. (AP)
US President Donald Trump is no longer considered a coronavirus transmission risk to others as he has been fever-free for over 24 hours, his White House physician informed Saturday night. “The assortment of advanced diagnostic tests obtained reveal there is no longer evidence of actively replicating virus,” Conley wrote. “In addition, sequential testing throughout his illness has demonstrated decreasing viral loads.”
Hundreds of lawsuits about voting have been filed before the November 3 election. The cases concern the fundamentals of the American democratic process, including how ballots are cast and counted.
A look at some of the top lawsuits in battleground states:
ARIZONA: A federal judge ruled in favor of Democrats by holding that voters who neglected to sign their early ballots before mailing them in get up to five days after the election to fix the problem. The judge ruled that it was not fair for elections officials not to give voters a chance to "cure" the problem. The case has since been appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
IOWA: Several of the election disputes involve mail-in voting rules. In one, Democrats are challenging a new GOP-backed law that blocks county auditors from filling in any missing voter ID information on absentee ballot applications returned by voters. In a related case, Republicans have persuaded judges to invalidate tens of thousands of absentee ballot applications submitted by voters whose ID information had been pre-filled on the forms by county auditors. (AP)
Nearly 50,000 voters received incorrect absentee ballots in the county that is home to Ohio's capital and largest city, elections officials said Friday as they promised corrected ballots would be mailed within 72 hours.
With about 240,000 ballots mailed, that meant one in five voters received a wrong ballot. The error happened Saturday afternoon when someone changed a setting on a machine that places absentee ballots into mailing envelopes, Franklin County elections officials said Thursday.
Some ballots had an incorrect congressional race, while others had the correct information but were sent to voters in a different precinct. The Franklin County Elections Board said 49,669 voters received incorrect ballots out of 237,498 that were mailed.
That represents 6 per cent of Franklin County's approximately 880,000 registered voters, and 0.6 per cent of the 8 million voters registered statewide in the presidential battleground. (AP)
The morning after Sen. Kamala Harris became the first woman of color to take a debate stage as a member of a major party’s ticket, President Donald Trump disparaged her as “totally unlikable” and a “communist.” Then, twice, he called her “this monster.”
His dehumanizing language, extraordinary even by Trump’s own standards, was an unusually explicit example of the biased attitudes — about how women should behave, how people of color should behave, and especially how women of color should behave — that have pervaded commentary regarding Harris.
There was the “condescending” label, too, that undecided voters applied to Harris’ facial expressions as they assessed the debate in a focus group run by a Republican pollster, Frank Luntz. There was the member of the Trump campaign’s advisory board who called her an “insufferable lying bitch.”
And there was Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson’s depiction of her as a power-hungry usurper of Joe Biden’s would-be presidency, which played to an old racist and sexist trope even as Carlson insisted his remark had nothing to do with her identity.
These sorts of personal attacks on Harris have been coming since the day Biden chose her as his running mate, when conservative commentators repeatedly mispronounced her name and suggested she wasn’t Black, and a top Google search around that time was whether she was born in the United States.
Anthony Fauci, the US’s top infectious-disease expert, said that a gathering in the White House Rose Garden last month was a “super-spreader event” for the novel coronavirus.
President Donald Trump held a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden on Sept. 26 to honor Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. While the White House had a testing regime in place to screen for virus cases, few guests wore masks and attendees mingled and sat in close proximity to one another both indoors and outdoors.
Asserting that that last thing US needs is a president who ignores Americans and looks down upon them, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said Donald Trump's "reckless" personal conduct since his Covid-19 diagnosis is "unconscionable", reported PTI.
Addressing a campaign rally in Las Vegas, Nevada on Friday, Biden said that the country deserved a president who understood what people were going through.
"Who sees you where you are and where you want to be. The last thing you need is a president who ignores you, looks down upon you, who just doesn't understand who in God's name we are. That's President Trump," he said.
"His reckless personal conduct since his diagnosis and the destabilising effect it is having on our government is unconscionable. He didn't take the necessary precautions to protect himself or others. The longer Donald Trump is president, the more reckless he gets," Biden said.
The second presidential debate was formally canceled late Friday after President Donald Trump refused to participate in a virtual event, the latest sign of the upheaval that the coronavirus has wrought on the 2020 campaign.
The Commission on Presidential Debates had tried to shift the debate to a remote format, given Trump’s illness and the uncertainty about his health, but the president soundly rejected the proposal and instead planned to resume his signature rallies, beginning on Monday in Florida.
Once Trump pulled out of the debate, his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, scheduled his own town-hall-style event that night on ABC, leaving the commission little choice but to abandon its plans. Trump’s campaign was in talks on Friday with NBC to hold a counter-event for the president, most likely on the same night, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.
Authorities were trying Friday to determine who taped razor blades to the bottom of a Trump 2020 campaign sign, slicing the fingers of a worker tasked with removing signs that were too close to a roadway in southeast Michigan.
The 52-year-old Commerce Township building inspector needed stitches after cutting three fingers Wednesday afternoon, the Oakland County sheriff's office said in a release.
A second sign also was found to have razor blades taped "all along the bottom edge," according to the sheriff's office. Both signs were along a road in front of a home in Commerce Township, which is about 30 miles (48 kilometers) northwest of Detroit. (AP)
Joe Biden will reverse Republican tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations on “day one” if he wins November’s election, his Democratic running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, vowed during Wednesday night’s vice-presidential debate.
Other Democrats in Washington, however, say that timing looks overly ambitious. A new Biden administration, which would be inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2021, would likely face a still-raging coronavirus pandemic and an economy deep in recession.
His first step on taxes could be a more straightforward one, say some Democrats, including Biden advisers: beefing up Internal Revenue Service (IRS) enforcement to go after wealthy tax cheats who cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue every year. (Reuters)
People in seven European nations overwhelmingly want Joe Biden to win the U.S. presidential election, an opinion poll showed this week, but barely 10% think the vote will be fully free and fair, a finding that comes as some diplomats in Washington worry President Donald Trump may not accept the election result.
The YouGov survey, conducted in seven European countries between Sept. 15 and Oct. 4, found that 80% of Danes want Democratic candidate Biden to win. The numbers were also high in Germany (71%), Spain (69%), Sweden (65%), France (64%) and Britain (61%). Even in Italy, where sentiment towards Trump is more positive, 58% favoured a Biden victory. (Reuters)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is questioning President Donald Trump's fitness to serve, announcing legislation Thursday that would create a commission to allow Congress to intervene under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and remove the president from executive duties.
Just weeks before the November 3 election, Pelosi said Trump needs to disclose more about his health after his COVID-19 diagnosis. She noted Trump's "strange tweet" halting talks on a new coronavirus aid package - he subsequently tried to reverse course - and said Americans need to know when, exactly, he first contracted COVID as others in the White House became infected. On Friday, she plans to roll out the legislation that would launch the commission for review.
"The public needs to know the health condition of the president," Pelosi said, later invoking the 25th Amendment, which allows a president's cabinet or Congress to intervene when a president is unable to conduct the duties of the office.
Trump responded swiftly via Twitter. "Crazy Nancy is the one who should be under observation. They don't call her Crazy for nothing!" the president said. (AP)
Contracting COVID-19 may have put President Donald Trump in the hospital, jeopardized his re-election campaign, and drawn attention to his administration’s failures to contain the deadly pathogen. But it’s been great for his Facebook page.
For the week that ended Saturday, the president received 27 million reactions, shares and comments on his Facebook posts, according to data from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned analytics platform. (Read more here)
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is questioning President Donald Trump's fitness to serve, announcing legislation Thursday that would create a commission to allow Congress to intervene under the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and remove the president from executive duties. Just weeks before the November 3 election, Pelosi said Trump needs to disclose more about his health after his COVID-19 diagnosis. She noted Trump's "strange tweet" halting talks on a new coronavirus aid package "he subsequently tried to reverse course " and said Americans need to know when, exactly, he first contracted COVID as others in the White House became infected. On Friday, she plans to roll out the legislation that would launch the commission for review.
Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris is urging Arizona residents to vote "Like your life depends on it," because, she says, "it really does." Joe Biden and Harris are campaigning together Thursday for the first time since their nominating convention in August, and they chose Arizona to highlight the critical new battleground.
Republican President Donald Trump on Friday prepared to return to the campaign trail with a pair of weekend rallies after his COVID-19 diagnosis sidelined him for a week in the race against Democratic nominee Joe Biden for the White House.Trump, who announced he had been infected with the coronavirus on Oct. 2 and spent three nights in a military hospital receiving treatment, said late on Thursday he was feeling "really good" and, with a doctor's blessing, aimed to campaign in Florida on Saturday and in Pennsylvania on Sunday.
Hours after police foiled an alleged plot to kidnap her, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer argued in a speech Thursday that President Donald Trump's words had been a rallying cry for extremists. Whitmer, a Democrat said the Republican president has spent the last seven months of the coronavirus pandemic denying science, ignoring his own health experts, stoking distrust, fomenting anger and giving comfort to those who spread fear and hatred and division. She singled out Trump's debate comments when he did not condemn white supremacist groups and told one farright extremist group to stand back and stand by. (AP)
Americans are rushing to cast ballots ahead of the Nov. 3 election at an unprecedented pace, early voting numbers show, indicating a possible record turnout for the showdown between President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
With less than four weeks to go before Election Day, more than 6.6 million Americans already have voted, more than ten times the number who had at this time in 2016, according to the United States Elections Project, which compiles early voting data. (Read more here)
President Donald Trump has completed his course of therapy for Covid-19 and will be fit to resume public events from Saturday, Dr. Sean Conley, Trump's physician said Thursday. In a memo released by the White House, Conley said Trump's condition has remained stable and he has responded "extremely well" to treatment.
"Saturday will be day 10 since Thursday's diagnosis, and based on the trajectory of advanced diagnostics the team has been conducting, I fully anticipate the President's safe return to public engagements at that time. (With Reuters)
Donald Trump on Thursday refused to participate in next week's presidential debate with his Democratic challenger Joe Biden, calling it a "waste of time" after the organisers announced that the second debate will be held virtually because of the president's diagnosis of COVID-19. The nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates said that the second presidential debate scheduled in Miami on October 15 will take the form of a town meeting, in which the candidates would participate from separate remote locations.
It said the decision has been taken in order to protect the health and safety of all involved with the second presidential debate.
However, President Trump, who tested positive for COVID-19 and was admitted to a military hospital for four days for its treatment, refused to participate in the virtual debate. "I'm not going to do a virtual debate. I'm not going to waste my time at a virtual debate," Trump told Fox News in a telephonic interview soon after the independent and not-for-profit Commission announced changes in the format of the debate.
Trump, who claimed victory over Biden in the first presidential debate, asserted that he expects to do the same in the Miami debate as well. (PTI)
President Donald Trump said Thursday that he is ready to hold campaign rallies and he credited an experimental drug treatment with helping his recovery from COVID-19, although there is no way for the president or his doctors to know whether the drug had any effect.
“I''m feeling good. Really good. I think perfect," Trump said during a telephone interview with Fox Business Channel, his first since he tested positive.
“I think I''m better to the point where I''d love to do a rally tonight,” Trump said adding that he no longer thinks he''s "contagious at all.”
Trump did not indicate where or when he might have contracted the virus, saying only, "If you''re anywhere around this thing you can catch it.”
But he mentioned a recent Rose Garden event announcing his new Supreme Court nominee and a meeting with military families. He said family members often want to get up close to him and “kiss” and “hug” him. “I can''t say ''Back up. Stand 10 feet" away, Trump said.
Trump credited the drug treatment with helping his recovery and suggested his diagnosis could be a “blessing in disguise" in the nation''s battle against the pandemic.
The second presidential debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden will take place virtually amid the fallout from the president''s diagnosis of COVID-19. The nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates debates made the announcement Thursday morning, a week before the two were scheduled to face on in Miami.
The candidates will “participate from separate remote locations,” while the participants and moderator remain in Miami, the commission said. Trump was diagnosed with the coronavirus a week ago and said he looked forward to debating Biden on stage in Miami, saying, “It will be great!” Biden, for his part, said he and Trump “shouldn''t have a debate” as long as the president remains COVID positive.
Biden told reporters in Pennsylvania that he was “looking forward to being able to debate him” but said “we''re going to have to follow very strict guidelines.”