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      Trump attempts to save himself in battleground states as Covid cases surge

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      With little more than two weeks to reverse his dismal standing in the polls, and amid a coronavirus resurgence that could sink his pursuit of a second term, Donald Trump has embarked on a tour of battleground states.New US daily cases of Covid-19 are averaging above 55,000, their highest level since July, according to government figures, and rising in more than 40 states, including many the Republican president must win on 3 November.Yet despite trailing Democratic challenger Joe Biden by double digits in almost every national poll, all of which show a substantial deficit in approval over handling the pandemic, Trump is continuing to host large rallies with few supporters wearing masks and little social distancing.Trump was in Nevada on Sunday, attending church in Las Vegas before a rally. Thousands were expected at events in other swing states on Monday (Arizona), Tuesday (Pennsylvania) and Wednesday (North Carolina). Trump is expected to continue to prioritise hopes for economic recovery above measures including new lockdowns.In an interview on a Wisconsin radio station, Trump was asked if rallies at which mostly maskless supporters are packed tightly together sent the wrong message.I’m not a big shutdown believerDonald Trump“I don’t think so because I’m not a big shutdown believer,” he said. “If you take a look at your state, they’ve been shut down and they’ve been locked down and locked up and, you know, they’ve been doing it for a long time.”Trump won Wisconsin by less than one point in 2016 but trails there now by more than seven, according to FiveThirtyEight.com. At a rally in Janesville on Saturday the president insisted again that the fight against the pandemic was being won, despite statistics from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continually showing the opposite.Only Vermont and Missouri have reported a decrease in the average number of reported cases over the past week. Connecticut and Florida lead the nation, with increases by 50% or more. Another 27 states rose between 10% and 50%, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 8.1m US cases have been confirmed, the death toll near 220,000.“We’re doing great, we’re doing really well,” Trump said in Wisconsin. “We’re rounding the corner. We have unbelievable vaccines coming out real soon.”On NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, the health secretary, Alex Azar, pleaded with the American people to “hang in there with us. We are so close. We are weeks away from monoclonal antibodies for you, for safe and effective vaccines. We need to bridge to that day, so please just give us a bit more time of your individual, responsible behavior of washing your hands, watch your distance, wear your face coverings when you can’t watch your distance.”Azar dodged questions about why the president could not deliver such advice.As my grandfather would say, ‘This guy’s gone around the bend if he thinks we’ve turned the corner’Joe BidenIn North Carolina on Sunday, Biden told supporters: “As my grandfather would say, ‘This guy’s gone around the bend if he thinks we’ve turned the corner’. Things are getting worse, and he continues to lie to us about circumstances.”Biden’s running mate, California senator Kamala Harris, canceled events over the weekend after an aide tested positive for Covid-19. She will return to the trail in Florida on Monday, that state’s first day of early in-person voting.Trump is targeting several states he won in 2016 and cannot afford to lose if he is to secure the 270 electoral college votes he needs to stay in the White House. Polling continues to suggest he is in serious trouble. His deficit to Biden in Pennsylvania, which he won from Hillary Clinton by fewer than 45,000 of 6m votes, is currently more than six points. In Arizona, he trails by about four, the margin by which he won in 2016.Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, said she did not believe the polls. “I am seeing more enthusiasm than I saw in 2016,” she told ABC’s This Week. “I study the data every day. We know that our voters are going to turn out on election day. They don’t trust the mail-in balloting as much. They are getting out in these early vote states right now.”Trump will face Biden on Thursday in a final debate in Nashville, Tennessee, following a first meeting marked by the president’s interruptions and evasions. A second debate was cancelled after Trump contracted coronavirus and spent three days in hospital, then refused to hold the debate virtually. More

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      Trump is ending the census count early. It's a feat of profound political cynicism | Andrew Gawthorpe

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      A Supreme Court ruling this week allowed the Trump administration to end the 2020 census two weeks early, risking an undercount of members of the population who are difficult to reach – particularly immigrants, transients, and the poor. From the beginning, the administration has attempted to meddle with what is usually a scrupulously non-partisan process in order to advance its goal of disenfranchising and immiserating parts of the country which do not vote Republican. And following this court ruling, it is on track to get away with it.Even by Trump’s own standards of naked partisanship and self-dealing, the weaponization of the census has been cynical and alarming. By deliberately attempting to produce an undercount in certain parts of the country, and by trying to seize control of the process whereby the census is used to allocate seats in the House of Representatives and Electoral College, the administration is leaving behind a tainted legacy.Why does the census even matter? As well as being the basis for distributing political power between and within the states, the data from the census guides the allocation of about $1.5t in federal funding each year. The constitution states that the census has to take place every ten years and be based on an “actual enumeration” of residents, meaning that the Census Bureau is not permitted to use statistical models to make up for an inaccurate count. If the census isn’t accurate, then the country has to live with the consequences until the next one takes place a decade later.The Trump administration’s interference began with its attempt to insert a citizenship question into the census, which was designed to suppress responses from immigrants. After the Supreme Court found that excuses for inserting the question were “contrived”, Trump claimed the right to unilaterally alter the Census Bureau’s count to exclude undocumented immigrants. The administration is now rushing to end the census early in order to ensure that Trump, and not a successor with more respect for the constitution, is still in the White House to transmit the altered figures.The immediate result of this move would be diminished political representation and federal resources for communities with large numbers of such immigrants. But the more long-term result would be the delegitimization of yet another vital institution. In recent years, Republicans have cynically stacked the Supreme Court and undermined confidence in the electoral process through baseless conspiracy theories about mail-in ballots. Now they refuse to carry out the simple act of counting how many people are resident in the country in order to fairly distribute power and resources. With every institution they bring low, they undermine the trust that makes governing a large and diverse democracy possible.The politicization of the census is just as disturbing as these other developments. It is a basic principle of democracy that power and resources be distributed based on population – one person, one vote, one equal share. As Republicans face the reality of a demographic shift away from their ageing white base, they would rather deny the very existence of groups to which they are unfavorable – particularly immigrants – than share power and resources. It wouldn’t be the first time the party has pulled this trick. After the 1920 census showed that city dwellers – many of whom were immigrants – outnumbered rural residents for the first time in American history, the Republican-led House of Representatives refused to reapportion Congressional seats accordingly. It took decades and the intervention of the Supreme Court to restore a semblance of fairness.As they attempt to cope with yet another Republican attack on democracy, Democrats have no clear guidelines on how to respond. This time it is they who control the House of Representatives, but it is unclear what will happen if Democrats simply refuse to accept the incorrect figures transmitted by the Trump White House. The most likely outcome is that no reapportionment will happen at all, freezing the country in an unfair and regressive status quo. And for so long as the filibuster stifles the Senate, legal changes which might ameliorate the negative impacts of a sabotaged count will be hard if not impossible to achieve.But the broader issue raised by the census is how Republican nativism and partisanship exert a death grip on American politics. When one of the two main parties no longer believes in democracy, it forces people to expend time and energy battling for the most basic of principles – even the right to have their existence acknowledged – rather than working to address the country’s very real problems. Removing Republicans from power in November won’t free the nation from this problem. The battle to rejuvenate American democracy will still be long and hard. But it will at least be a victory for the principle that every vote has a right to be counted and every voice has a right to be heard. And from there, a true reckoning with what ails the nation can begin. More