The revelation that Donald Trump deliberately downplayed the coronavirus pandemic forced key aides on to desperate defence on Sunday, barely 50 days from the presidential election.
Related: Roger Stone to Donald Trump: bring in martial law if you lose election
Continue reading...The president’s campaign has paid out $800m, but at a crucial phase he is making cuts while Joe Biden is outspending him
More than $180,000 per second. That is what Donald Trump’s two TV ads during the Super Bowl worked out at in February, offering vivid proof of the outsized role of money in American politics – and of his re-election campaign’s premature and profligate spending.
The 2020 presidential election has been described by both sides as the most important in living memory and is certainly proving the most expensive. Hundreds of millions of dollars have flooded both campaigns and, in the pandemic-enforced absence of shaking hands and kissing babies, may prove even more influential than usual.
Continue reading...Trump meanwhile promises to ‘put down’ leftwing protests and says US Marshals killing Portland suspect was ‘retribution’
Roger Stone, whose 40-month prison sentence for lying to Congress and witness tampering in the Russia investigation was commuted by Donald Trump, has said Trump should seize total power and jail prominent figures including Bill and Hillary Clinton and Mark Zuckerberg if he loses to Joe Biden in November.
The long-time Republican strategist and dirty trickster, who has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, lied about contacts with WikiLeaks during the 2016 election regarding emails hacked from Democratic party accounts.
Continue reading...Donald Trump was headed for Nevada on Saturday, aiming to erode poll leads enjoyed by Joe Biden there and in Arizona, another key state, as the 3 November presidential election draws near.
Related: Trump in Fox News interview to accuse Biden of taking drugs
Continue reading...Fox News will broadcast an interview on Saturday night in which Donald Trump accuses Joe Biden of taking performance-enhancing drugs.
Related: Trump ally who sought to change CDC Covid reports claims he was fighting 'deep state'
Continue reading...A former Trump campaign official now spokesman for the US health department sought to change key reports on the coronavirus pandemic, in some cases “openly complaining” that they “would undermine the president’s optimistic messages about the outbreak”, according to internal emails seen by Politico.
Continue reading...Arab country is latest to make agreement as part of US president’s diplomatic push
Bahrain has agreed to establish diplomatic relations with Israel, and will join the United Arab Emirates in signing an agreement at the White House on Tuesday.
“Even great warriors get tired of fighting, and they’re tired of fighting,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, portraying the deals as peace agreements, although neither Gulf monarchy has ever been at war with Israel, and both had already established extensive informal ties. Bahrain has long advocated Israel’s integration in the region.
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In the latest sign of how ugly the presidential race has become, Trump baselessly accused Joe Biden of using performance-enhancing drugs in a new interview.
Fox News released a clip from Trump’s recent interview with host Jeanine Pirro, which will air in full tomorrow night.
"I think there's probably, possibly drugs involved. That's what I hear." -- during interview with Judge Jeanine, Trump casually accuses Joe Biden of using performance enhancing drugs pic.twitter.com/RVWJMqPNhn
Hello everyone, this is Julia Carrie Wong picking up the blog from smoky Oakland, California. I’ll have more news and politics coming your way for the rest of the evening.
First up: QAnon-supporting candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene’s election to Congress is all but assured after her Democratic opponent, Kevin Van Ausdal, abruptly dropped out of the race to represent Georgia’s 14th district.
A message from Kevin Van Ausdal pic.twitter.com/Y5LtVcpK2B
Related: 'Mind-bogglingly irresponsible': meet the Republican donors helping QAnon reach Congress
Continue reading...Donald Trump continued his attacks on Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, calling him 'the worst presidential candidate in the history of presidential politics'. Speaking from a rally in Freeland, Michigan, two months ahead of the election, the president said 'If Biden wins, China wins. If Biden wins, the mob wins. If Biden wins, the rioters and anarchists, arsonists and flag burners win.' Trump also boasted of his recent Nobel peace prize nomination, which he received for normalising of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates
• Norwegian far-right MP nominates Donald Trump for Nobel peace prize
Continue reading...This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to the Guardian’s Sam Levine about why election night might turn into election week … or month
This week the question might seem a simple one, but it isn’t. Jonathan asks Sam Levine in New York about how the Covid-19 pandemic will affect the US election on 3 November, and the conversation leads to Jonathan reminiscing about the infamous 2000 presidential election, when George W Bush narrowly (and potentially wrongly) pipped Al Gore to the Oval Office. So, when will we know who’s won this year?
Continue reading...On the golf course, Lindsey Graham urged restraint on Iran, while James Mattis slept in his clothes in case of emergency, book says
Four days before ordering a drone strike against the Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani, Donald Trump was debating the assassination on his own Florida golf course, according to Bob Woodward’s new book on the mercurial president.
Trump’s golfing partner that day was Senator Lindsey Graham, who had emerged as one of his closest advisers, and who urged him not to take such a “giant step”, that could trigger “almost total war”.
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A panel of three federal judges blocked the Trump administration on Thursday from excluding undocumented immigrants from the census totals used to determine how many seats in Congress each state gets.
Trump acted unlawfully in July when he ordered the Commerce Department to produce data that would allow him to exclude undocumented immigrants from the count, the panel said. Federal law is clear that only a single data source - the census count of total population - can be used to apportion the 435 seats in the US House among states, the judges wrote. The decennial census does not ask about citizenship status and by requesting a second set of data outside of the decennial census, Trump ran afoul of the law.
Unprecedented wildfires and rushed evacuations in Oregon have wreaked havoc on the state’s incarcerated population, with thousands now packed into a single overcrowded prison that was already a major Covid-19 hotspot.
A destructive and rapidly spreading fire in Marion county prompted the state to evacuate three prisons on Tuesday, transferring 1,450 people to the Oregon state penitentiary (OSP) in Salem. Evacuees are sleeping on the floor and on emergency beds throughout OSP, including in indoor recreational areas, program rooms and other facilities not typically used for housing.
Related: Oregon fires: evacuated prisoners sleep on floor in packed Covid-19 hotspot
Continue reading...Nancy Pelosi has said that Donald Trump’s interview with Bob Woodward, where the president said he intentionally downplayed the coronavirus pandemic to avoid panic, was evidence of ‘contempt’ for Americans’ health.
During her weekly press conference, the House speaker said Trump’s comments were not a sign of real leadership
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From me and Joan E Greve:
Iowa’s governor, Kim Reynolds, is refusing to enforce a White House coronavirus taskforce recommendation to close bars and require people to wear masks after Covid-19 infections in some of the state’s cities surged.
Meanwhile, coronavirus cases have risen sharply across the whole midwest in recent weeks, putting the region at the forefront of America’s pandemic. The region accounted for six of the eight states with the highest number of new Covid-19 cases by early September even as infections fell in other parts of the US previously among the worst hit.
Related: Iowa refuses to close bars and require masks as Covid-19 cases surge in cities
Continue reading...Brian Murphy claims he was demoted for refusing to accept fabrication of intelligence to match Donald Trump’s rhetoric
Trump loyalists running the Department of Homeland Security manipulated intelligence reports to play down the threat of Russian election interference and white supremacists and exaggerate the threat of antifa and anarchist groups, according to the department’s former top intelligence official.
The official, Brian Murphy, said he was demoted in August from his position running the department’s office of intelligence and analysis because of his refusal to go along with the fabrication of intelligence to match Donald Trump’s rhetoric, and for making formal complaints about the political pressure. He filed a whistleblower reprisal complaint on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Donald Trump said he was 'trying to avoid panic' by not revealing the severity of Covid-19, despite CNN audio published on Wednesday from an interview in February in which he acknowledged the virus was 'deadly'.
The president, who defended his comments to the journalist Bob Woodward for Woodward's book Rage, insisted his strategy was focused on encouraging Americans to remain calm, as the virus spread across the country
Continue reading...Joe Biden took the offensive against Donald Trump during a campaign event in Warren, Michigan after CNN released audio of Trump telling the journalist Bob Woodward in February that he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and airborne.
Biden said the president had ‘failed to do his job on purpose’ as he knew the danger of Covid-19 but downplayed the severity of the virus for months
Continue reading...The president’s fixer wanted to be a Goodfella but ended up taking a fall. His revenge is a tawdrily readable tell-all memoir
Michael Cohen is no saint. Aside from the obvious, Donald Trump’s former fixer has never entered into a formal cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors, a fact duly noted by the US attorneys’ office for the southern district of New York in its sentencing memorandum. Because of that, the “inability to fully vet his criminal history and reliability impact his utility as a witness”.
Related: Michael Cohen book details Trump's racism and toxic family dynamic
Continue reading...As the US election draws closer, the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington hears from civil leaders on their fears for the integrity of the process and the future of their democracy
When Barack Obama spoke at the Democratic national convention recently he had as his backdrop a facsimile of the US constitution. He spoke pointedly about the importance of that document and criticised Donald Trump, a reality TV star who had damaged the reputation of the United States with “our democratic institutions threatened like never before”.
It is a concern shared by many across the US and the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington tells Anushka Asthana that he was alarmed by what he heard in interviews with some of the most prominent figures in civil rights, the law and academia on the state of democracy in America. He spoke to Michael Waldman, the head of the Brennan Center for Justice; Derrick Johnson, the president of the NAACP; Deirdre Schifeling, the campaign director of Democracy For All 2021; K. Sabeel Rahman, the head of Demos, and Vanita Gupta, the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. All told him versions of the same story: democracy in America is in peril like never before.
Continue reading...The president also chose to ridicule the mass protests against racism and policing, saying, ‘We call our rallies peaceful protests’
A packed crowd of hundreds gathered in North Carolina for a Donald Trump campaign rally on Tuesday, with many people forgoing masks, in defiance of state guidelines capping gatherings at 50 people.
Ahead of the president’s visit to Winston-Salem, the chair of the local county commission, a Republican, urged Trump to wear a face mask. The state has a mask requirement in place to slow the spread of coronavirus.
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