Elections

‘A surreal reality show’: Trump’s terrible week after Covid diagnosis
Ex-member of Amy Coney Barrett’s faith group speaks out
Debate schedule in disarray after Trump refuses virtual event
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Defiant in the face of slipping opinion polls, and determined to justify his implausible claim of a full recovery from his encounter with Covid-19, Donald Trump will return to public events on Saturday with a “law and order” address to 2,000 invited guests from the White House balcony.Questions about the president’s health are still swirling following the refusal of doctors or aides to reveal when Trump last tested negative for coronavirus, and today’s lunchtime in-person event – just six days after he left Walter Reed medical center following a three-night stay – appears to counter his own government’s health guidelines over large gatherings and social distancing.But after another tumultuous week in which Trump lost further ground to his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, and with the 3 November general election little more than three weeks away, the president is seizing an opportunity to try to reposition himself in the race, despite the apparent health risk to attendees from a man likely to still be contagious.In a Friday night interview on Fox News, Trump, who was given a cocktail of antiviral drugs and strong steroids during his hospital stay, insisted he was “medication-free”.“We pretty much finished, and now we’ll see how things go. But pretty much nothing,” Trump said when Fox medical analyst Dr Marc Siegel asked the president what medications he was still taking.Earlier in the day, Dr Sean Conley, Trump’s personal physician, issued a letter clearing the president to return to in-person campaign events, but omitting any medical justification, including crucial information about any negative coronavirus tests.In the Friday interview, Trump said he had been tested, but gave a vague answer about it. “I haven’t even found out numbers or anything yet,” he said. “But I’ve been retested and I know I’m at either the bottom of the scale or free.”Trump’s speech today at the White House South Lawn will address “law and order” and protests around the country in the wake of the death of George Floyd and racial issues, sources revealed on Friday. More

On Friday evening, US federal judge Robert Pitman blocked Texas governor Greg Abbott’s order to shut down mail-in ballot drop-off sites across the state as the election is currently under way.Last week, Abbott issued a proclamation limiting each county to only one ballot drop-off site, regardless of size or population. This decision would have led to the closure of drop-off sites across the state, including 11 in Harris county and three in Travis county. A lawsuit was immediately filed by civil right organizations.Critics argued Abbott’s order to close drop-off sites would disproportionately affect larger, more diverse counties and hit communities of color, making it more difficult for them to vote. Harris county has more than 4.7 million residents and is the most populous county in the nation and home to the city of Houston. Travis county is home to Texas’s capital city, Austin. By comparison, smaller counties like Brewster county in west Texas, which has a population of just under 10,000, would remain unaffected by the ruling as it has always only had one drop-off site.Requests for absentee ballots in Texas are higher than previous elections due to the coronavirus pandemic, but concerns of mail slowdowns presented a need for drop-off locations. The ruling by Pitman blocking Abbott’s move is a victory for those deemed eligible to vote by mail in the state, including the elderly and disabled who would have had to travel farther distances to drop off their ballot and risk exposure to Covid-19.Statement from Harris County Clerk @CGHollins:Tonight’s injunction reinstating Harris County voters’ ability to hand-deliver their ballots at 12 county offices is a victory for voting rights. (1/3) https://t.co/t5v4Zb9g6h— Harris County Clerk (@HarrisVotes) October 10, 2020
In a statement, the Harris county clerk, Chris Hollins, said: “Tonight’s injunction reinstating Harris county voters’ ability to hand-deliver their ballots at 12 county offices is a victory for voting rights. The governor’s suppressive tactics should not be tolerated, and tonight’s ruling shows that the law is on the side of Texas voters.” More

A federal judge in Texas on Friday blocked Gov. Greg Abbott’s move to limit counties in the state to one ballot drop-off site each.“The public interest is not served” by the governor’s order, Judge Robert Pitman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas said in granting a preliminary injunction against the order.The Texas League of United Latin American Citizens and other civil rights organizations had sued the governor over his order. The plaintiffs showed that the move “likely violates their fundamental right to vote,” Judge Pitman said in his ruling, which the state is likely to appeal.The public interest is best served by “ensuring that qualified absentee voters, who comprise some of the most vulnerable citizens in Texas, can exercise their right to vote and have that vote counted,” the judge wrote.Mr. Abbott’s proclamation last week was criticized by some as a move to suppress voting, particularly Democratic votes, as the limit on drop-off sites would have a harsher impact on the state’s more densely populated areas, which typically vote more heavily for Democrats.The state’s decision to reduce options for locations where voters can drop off their ballots came as questions of voting rights, voter suppression and the integrity of the election have emerged as major issues in the 2020 campaign. It also followed disputes over drop boxes in other states, including Ohio and Pennsylvania.Spokesmen for Mr. Abbott, a Republican, and the secretary of state, Ruth Hughs, who is also named in the suit, did not immediately respond early Saturday to requests for comment about the ruling.In a statement last week announcing the proclamation, the governor said that the move would enhance “ballot security protocols.”“These enhanced security protocols will ensure greater transparency and will help stop attempts at illegal voting,” he said.There is no evidence that mail-in ballots lead to widespread fraud.Gilberto Hinojosa, the Texas Democratic Party chairman, said in a statement on Friday that Judge Pitman’s order “followed well-established law and stopped the governor from making up election rules after the election started.”“This isn’t the first time Abbott and Texas Republicans have tried to suppress the vote,” he said, “and it won’t be the last.” More

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department suspended all diversity and inclusion training for its employees and managers this week, complying with President Trump’s recent executive order to eliminate any training that suggests that implicit racial and gender biases exist in the workplace, according to a memo distributed to the department’s executive officers.The guidance, sent on Thursday to Justice Department leaders, seemingly goes further than the president’s executive order — which pertains only to diversity training — to include work-related programs, activities and events that touch on diversity.The memo, reviewed by The New York Times, said that managers must remove all diversity-related mandatory training requirements that have been assigned to employees from the department’s internal system, and they must suspend any related activities and events until materials can be approved by the Office of Personnel Management.The Justice Department, which has more than 115,000 employees, did not respond to a request for comment. The guidance was earlier reported by The San Francisco Chronicle.In the run-up to the election on Nov. 3, Mr. Trump has waged a war against education and training courses that assert that systemic racism exists and that encourage employees to be aware of it, denouncing such ideas as part of a radical liberal agenda.Last month, he said that school curriculums that examined the way racism had shaped the United States pushed a false narrative that “America is a wicked and racist nation,” and he vowed to “restore patriotic education to our schools.”“Our youth will be taught to love America,” the president said.Days later, Mr. Trump signed an executive order to end the federal government’s use of traditional diversity and inclusion training, which supports the idea that people have unconscious biases around race and gender that can negatively affect how employees are treated. Such views have gained broad traction in corporate America and across the federal government, which has long offered trainings to combat such biases.In his executive order, the president said that this idea was “rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country,” and that it promoted “divisive concepts,” including the idea that races were valued differently, that the United States was fundamentally racist or sexist and that individuals could unconsciously act in racist or sexist ways.Mr. Trump’s executive order also said that no training should support the idea that a person “bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex” or that “any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”After the president signed the order, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Personnel Management sent memos to administration officials laying out preliminary guidance for how they would carry it out.The order immediately caused confusion at some agencies, which were not sure how best to comply. It also threw into disarray longstanding relationships with government contractors and internal federal government groups that conduct diversity trainings intended to push back on unconscious biases and promote gender and racial diversity in the workplace.The order dovetailed with comments that Attorney General William P. Barr has made that suggest racism is not a wide-scale problem in the United States.He has publicly said that he does not believe that systemic racism exists within law enforcement, despite a recent spate of police killings and shootings of Black people that led to months of nationwide demonstrations against racism in policing.Last month, he criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, which has played an important role in many of the protests, accusing those aligned with the movement of using Black people as props to advance a radical political agenda.According to the Justice Department’s memo, senior political appointees would have to approve in advance any future spending on diversity and inclusion training. More

The second presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden has been cancelled, the Commission on Presidential Debates confirmed Friday, a move that came as the president announced his first in-person events since being diagnosed with Covid-19.The decision by the nonpartisan commission follows a public disagreement between the two candidates over the debate’s format. The commission had previously announced the debate would take place “virtually” due to Trump’s diagnosis. Trump, however, said he would refuse to participate in a virtual event, while Biden advocated for it for safety reasons.But the commission said it would not reverse its decision, citing an abundance of caution and health concerns, particularly for the town-hall-style debate that was to feature questions from voters.“It is now apparent there will be no debate on October 15, and the CPD will turn its attention to preparations for the final presidential debate scheduled for October 22,” the commission said in a statement.The third and final debate, scheduled for 22 October in Nashville, Tennessee, is still on.The move came shortly after Trump announced his first in-person events since his Covid-19 diagnosis, including a speech at the White House on Saturday and a campaign rally in Florida on Monday, even as he remains potentially contagious for the virus.The White House event will see Trump discuss “law and order”, and he is expecting to address a crowd from the White House balcony.The White House physician, Sean Conley, said on Thursday in a press release that “based on the trajectory of advanced diagnostics the team has been conducting, I fully anticipate the president’s safe return to public engagements” on Saturday, eight days after Trump announced his positive test early last Friday.Trump had initially indicated he hoped to hold a rally on Saturday night. “I think I’m going to try doing a rally on Saturday night if we can, if we have enough time to put it together,” Trump said on Thursday. The event did not materialize.At least one Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, has been linked by a local health official to an increase in coronavirus cases. Most supporters at recent Trump events have eschewed masks and social distancing measures.While Trump has been doing hours-long interviews with conservative hosts, it has only been just over a week since he announced his diagnosis. Medical experts have voiced concerns that, because the White House has refused to show results of Trump’s chest x-rays and lung scans, the public does not have a complete picture of whether the president has fully recovered from the virus. More

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When President Trump promoted an experimental drug as a “cure” for Covid-19 in a video on Wednesday, it might have seemed that he was at it again: touting a questionable fix for a deadly pandemic, not unlike his earlier enthusiasm for the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine or even, at one point, disinfectant.But the treatment that Mr. Trump extolled, which was administered last week after doctors diagnosed Covid-19, is not a fringe product. It’s a promising drug in the final stages of testing developed by a respected biotech company, Regeneron. Infectious disease experts have been closely following the treatment, as well as a similar product from Eli Lilly, in the hopes that the therapies could be a real advance in the fight against Covid-19.Pharmaceutical companies often pay handsomely for celebrity endorsements, but this patient testimonial was like no other. It came from a polarizing president who, just weeks away from an election, and having found himself and his White House at the center of an outbreak, is eager to show that his administration is doing something about a pandemic that has killed more than 212,000 Americans.Although he couldn’t possibly have known whether Regeneron’s treatment had helped him — or even if he was out of the woods yet — Mr. Trump sang its praises in the video, calling it “unbelievable” and suggesting it was only moments away from being authorized it for widespread use. In doing so, Mr. Trump reminded his critics of the many times — from reopening schools to authorizing hydroxychloroquine and blood plasma — over the past nine months that he has inserted politics into the decisions of independent health agencies.Regeneron, which filed an application with regulators within hours of the president’s video, must now shepherd its antibody treatment through a politically fraught approval process, where the president’s over-the-top endorsement has likely raised the profile of its product, but could also sow suspicion about whether it works.“I don’t see how it is going to end up being good for a pharma company,” said Ronny Gal, a pharmaceutical analyst for the Wall Street firm Bernstein. “Once you become a political opinion, that’s not great.”Already, Regeneron is fielding messy questions about how its treatment was tested using cells originally derived from an aborted fetus — a line of research that Mr. Trump has opposed — and the president’s relationship with Regeneron’s chief executive.Mr. Trump has further complicated the potential rollout of these treatments by pledging — first on Wednesday and again in another video Thursday — that the drugs would be free of charge and would be soon be available in hundreds of thousands of doses.But Regeneron said it would only initially have enough doses for 50,000 patients, with the plan to have enough for about 300,000 people by the end of the year. Regeneron has received more than $500 million in federal funding to develop and manufacture the treatment, and through that deal, the company has said it will make the products available at no cost to Americans.Still, that’s a small number, given the scale of the outbreak in the United States and the fact that the treatment is believed to work best soon after infection. On Wednesday alone, more than 50,000 Americans tested positive for the virus.“This is like a massive direct-to-consumer advertising campaign for a product where we have scarce supply and limited capacity to treat, which is a nightmare for companies in the industry,” said Geoffrey Porges, an analyst for SVB Leerink, an investment bank in Boston.There is no way to know if Regeneron’s antibodies have helped Mr. Trump. The president was given several drugs at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, including the antiviral remdesivir and the steroid dexamethasone, which have been proven to help patients with Covid-19.Mr. Trump has said he is feeling better, but his doctors have provided sparse and conflicting details about his health, and he has only just entered the second week of the disease, when some patients take a turn for the worse.Dr. Mark Mulligan, director of the N.Y.U. Langone Vaccine Center, who is involved in studies of both Regeneron’s and Eli Lilly’s antibody products, said the president’s claim that he was cured seemed premature — though not impossible.“We know sometimes people will get better and then worse,” Dr. Mulligan said. “I would want to reserve judgment and hope he’s on a good trajectory.”The only way to know whether a treatment works is to test it in large groups of patients, comparing those who got the drug to those who got a placebo.Monoclonal antibodies, the treatments developed by Regeneron and Eli Lilly, are believed to work by giving patients powerful antibodies that help fight the virus. Like Regeneron, Eli Lilly has also recently asked the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization of its treatment.Election 2020 More