Eliana Willis

Kim Kardashian West has spoken for the first time about her husband Kanye West’s bipolar disorder after he posted and deleted a string of erratic tweets regarding his family life after the launch of his presidential campaign in Charleston, South Carolina, on Monday.“Those who are close with Kanye know his heart and understand his words sometimes do not align with his intentions,” she wrote on her Instagram Stories.The fashion and reality TV mogul said she had previously avoided commenting on West’s mental health in order to protect her children and West’s right to privacy. In breaking that silence, she said she wished to address the “stigma and misconceptions” surrounding mental health.She wrote: “Those that understand mental illness or even compulsive behaviour know that the family is powerless unless the member is a minor. People who are unaware or far removed from this experience can be judgmental and not understand that the individual themselves have to engage in the process of getting help no matter how hard family and friends try.”In the US, involuntary hospitalisation and treatment is deemed to violate an individual’s civil rights. An individual must pose a danger to themselves or others in order to be held, for evaluation only, which typically lasts no longer than 72 hours. An elderly or “gravely disabled” person may be placed under a conservatorship. Britney Spears has been subject to such an arrangement since she experienced a breakdown in 2008, which has given rise to controversy over its appropriateness to her situation.West was willingly admitted to hospital in 2016, after an emergency call regarding his welfare during a period of erratic behaviour.Kardashian West added: “I understand Kanye is subject to criticism because he is a public figure and his actions at times can cause strong opinions and emotions. He is a brilliant but complicated person who on top of the pressures of being an artist and a black man, who experienced the painful loss of his mother, and has to deal with the pressure and isolation that is heightened by his bipolar disorder.”West has been subject to more widespread media attention than usual since he announced his presidential campaign in early July. While he is not thought to have filed official paperwork, he has tweeted asking fans to get him on the ballot in certain states.In Charleston on Monday, he gave a rambling address referencing the terms of his deal with Adidas for his fashion brand Yeezy, his faith in God and racism in the US, including an assertion that “[abolitionist] Harriet Tubman never actually freed the slaves, she just had the slaves go work for other white people”. He has since expressed doubt over whether to continue with his run this year, or postpone until 2024.Kardashian West asked the media and the public to give their family “compassion and empathy” and thanked those who had expressed concern for her husband’s wellbeing. “We as a society talk about giving grace to the issue of mental health as a whole, however we should also give it to the individuals who are living with it in times when they need it the most,” she wrote.West has said he will release a new album, Donda: With Child – named after his late mother – this Friday. More

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Donald Trump

Interview

David Smith in Washington

She is a psychologist who used to deny being related to Donald – now she has written an explosive bestseller about him. She discusses his racism, incompetence, cruelty and why he never laughs More

Donald Trump has admitted that the coronavirus pandemic is likely to “get worse before it gets better” at his first press briefing devoted to the issue since April.Facing dire poll numbers, surging cases and sharp criticism for lack of leadership, the US president returned to the White House podium attempting to show more discipline in both style and substance.In several notable reversals, he urged people to wear face masks, promised his administration was working on a “strategy” and wrapped up in less than half an hour, avoiding his digressions in past briefings that culminated in a proposal to inject disinfectant in Covid-19 patients.The pandemic will “probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better”, Trump said, reading from scripted remarks. “Something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is.”It was a marked shift from his claims last month the virus is “fading away” and “dying out”. And having once dismissed its remnants as “embers”, he now conceded that it is raging in states led by Republican governors.“We have embers and fires and we have big fires and unfortunately now, Florida is a little tough or in a big tough position,” he said. “You have a great governor there, great governor in Texas.”Trump has been widely condemned for failing to lead with a national strategy and instead shifting responsibility to state governors. Among the problems is a lack of infrastructure to process and trace test results, leaving people waiting seven days or longer.On Tuesday he claimed: “We are in the process of developing a strategy that’s going to be very, very powerful. We have developed it as we go along.”After months of refusing to wear a mask in public, Trump finally did so on 11 July and has since claimed it is patriotic. “We’re asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask,” he said. “Get a mask, whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They’ll have an effect, and we need everything we can get.”Producing a mask from his suit pocket, he added: “I carry the mask … I have the mask right here. I carry it and I will use it gladly.”The belated appeal was insufficient to placate the president’s critics, however. Heather McGhee, the co-chair of the civil rights group Color of Change, told the MSNBC network: “This is three months too late and 30 or 40,000 lives lost too late.”Despite the more subdued and realistic tone, Trump also offered upbeat words about a reduction in deaths and progress on vaccines and treatments for Covid-19. “The vaccines are coming, and they’re coming a lot sooner than anybody thought possible,” he said.He also repeatedly used the racist term “China virus” and recycled his promise that one day “it will disappear”.More than 3.8 million cases have been reported in the US, including 141,000 deaths. The briefing was the latest of several attempts to relaunch Trump’s public response to the pandemic, after months of shifting from apparent denial to a “wartime” footing to a focus on the economy and other topics.Trump has previewed the briefings as having a good “slot” at 5pm that previously boasted strong “ratings”. But on Tuesday, he was not joined by Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, who had told an interviewer he was not invited, nor by the response coordinator, Deborah Birx, whom Trump claimed was “right outside” the briefing room.Critics have suggested that briefings have returned, albeit in a different form, in an attempt to dominate the media limelight at the expense of Trump’s election rival, Joe Biden. Asked whether he thinks Americans should judge him in November on his handling of the pandemic, Trump replied: “This, among other things. I think the American people will judge us on this. But they’ll judge us on the economy that I created.”Earlier on Tuesday, Biden reiterated his criticism of Trump’s response to the pandemic. “His own staff admits that Donald Trump fails the most important test of being the American president: the duty to care – for you, for all of us,” the former vice-president said in New Castle, Delaware. “He has quit on you and he has quit on this country.” More

Donald Trump is a very stable genius – and he has the test results to prove it. In an extraordinary interview on Sunday with Chris Wallace on Fox News, Trump bragged about acing a cognitive exam he had taken, and said he could “guarantee” Joe Biden would not have scored so highly. This wasn’t the first time Trump has cited this test as proof of his mental acumen: in a Fox News interview earlier this month he claimed he had blown doctors away with his results. “Rarely does anyone do what you just did,” they supposedly told him.While Trump hasn’t specified which test he is talking about, it is widely believed to be the Montreal Cognitive Assessment. This isn’t an IQ test – it’s used to detect mental impairment and dementia – with sample questions including drawing a clock and identifying pictures of animals. As Wallace noted, a lot of it is basic stuff: “They have a picture, and it says: ‘What’s that?’ and it’s an elephant.”I’m not a doctor and it is not my place to speculate on the cognitive health of the US president. But while liberals relentlessly mock Trump’s boorishness and overinflated ego, I’m not sure we focus enough on the fact that much of what he says doesn’t make any sense at all. As Lenore Taylor pointed out last year, because reporters impose structure and sense on Trump’s disjointed rambling, we sometimes forget how unintelligible he is: “The process of reporting about this president can mask and normalise his full and alarming incoherence.”It’s not just the process of reporting that has helped to normalise Trump. It is the criminally low standards that far too many reporters hold him to. When Trump finally wore a face mask earlier this month, for example, a White House reporter for the Washington Post described him as looking “presidential”. In 2017, Trump honoured the widow of a Navy Seal; this two-second break from being awful was enough to prompt Van Jones on CNN to announce that Trump “became president of the United States in that moment”. In March, when Trump managed to say something moderately sensible about the pandemic, CNN’s political correspondent described him as “the kind of leader that people need”.And then, of course, there’s the fact that it’s impossible to properly scrutinise anything Trump says because there’s always another distraction. One minute he’s advocating injecting bleach to counter coronavirus, the next, his daughter-cum-adviser is advertising canned beans on Twitter. Normally, an ethics violation like that would be headline news, but it’s swiftly forgotten because (look!) Trump is on Fox News refusing to answer a question about whether he will accept the results of the November election. Which, again, would normally be a big story but, despite the fact it only happened on Sunday, has already been largely forgotten because, on Monday, the notoriously anti-mask president tweeted a bizarre photo of himself and declared mask-wearing patriotic. Now we’re all analysing that.As for tomorrow? God knows what fresh hell that will bring. It’s almost as if Trump has forced us to live by his own warped logic; it is like we’re all staring at a picture of an elephant and are collectively keeping up the pretence that it’s a president.• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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With Donald Trump’s approval rating plummeting as coronavirus cases in the US continue to rise, the president plans to resume daily briefings on the pandemic at the White House on Tuesday.Keenly aware of the need to change perceptions of how he is handling the virus if he hopes to win re-election, Trump also came out for the first time on Monday as a supporter of facial masks.Trump tweeted a picture of himself wearing a mask with the line: “Many people say that it is patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance.”It represented a whiplash reversal by Trump, who was facing a Republican mutiny. Governors in 28 states have now made mask-wearing in public mandatory as virus cases have exploded across the south and west, mostly in states governed by Republicans.The US recorded about 60,000 new cases of Covid-19 on Monday, up more than 30% in the last two weeks for a total of more than 3.8m. Deaths over the same period are up 64% and total confirmed deaths have passed 140,000.For months, Trump has punished and exiled public health experts such as Dr Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who have advanced basic recommendations such as mask-wearing and hand-washing.Trump’s mockery of his election rival Joe Biden for wearing a mask and his own refusal to wear one in the 19 weeks since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic helped to create a partisan divide on mask-wearing and provoke violent clashes in shops and streets.But aides have reportedly shown polling to Trump demonstrating that he is out of step with the public. Eight out of 10 Americans, and 66% of Republicans, say they wear a mask all or most of the time when they leave home, an ABC News-Washington Post poll last week found.The poll also found that only 38% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, down 13 points from March, and 60% disapprove, up 15.It is unknown whether Trump’s plan to reverse those numbers includes any new action to fight the coronavirus. As the reality of the pandemic has settled in, criticism of the federal government’s failure to establish routine testing, contact tracing and supported isolation has intensified.As negotiations continue over a new stimulus and relief package for the battered US economy, the White House is widely reported to want to cut new funding for testing and tracing and other efforts against the pandemic. While Senate Republicans aim to reduce special unemployment payments, Trump is pushing for a payroll tax cut, a move which would hit social security and Medicare in the middle of a public health crisis. More

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