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      Trump's national security adviser tests positive for coronavirus

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      The national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, has tested positive for the coronavirus, but the White House insisted there was “no risk” of Donald Trump being exposed.However, O’Brien recently returned from a trip to Europe where he was photographed, without wearing a mask or social distancing, with several foreign officials, including his UK counterpart, Mark Sedwill; the UK ambassador to France, Edward Llewellyn; and the French national security adviser, Emmanuel Bonne.Several White House staffers have fallen sick from the disease over the past few months, but O’Brien is highest-level administration official so far to have tested positive.“He has mild symptoms and has been self-isolating and working from a secure location off site. There is no risk of exposure to the president or the vice-president. The work of the national security council continues uninterrupted,” the White House said in a statement.CNN cited officials as saying O’Brien abruptly left the White House last Thursday and has been working from home since then.It is unclear when O’Brien last had a meeting with the president. Their most recent public appearance together was during a visit to US Southern Command in Miami on 10 July.O’Brien has hired as national security adviser in September, despite having relatively light foreign policy experience, and has taken a low-profile approach to the job, certainly compared to his immediate predecessor, John Bolton.The news stirred a tense atmosphere in Washington, as Republicans prepared to unveil their latest stimulus and relief proposals and Donald Trump digested new polling showing disapproval of his handling of the pandemic and leads in key states for his challenger, Joe Biden.O’Brien is Donald Trump’s fourth national security adviser, a role naturally requiring close contact with the president. According to CNN, O’Brien was on White House grounds last Thursday, raising questions about potential exposure. It was also reported that White House staffers only learned of O’Brien’s test via press reports.Citing anonymous sources, Bloomberg News reported that O’Brien came down with the virus after a family event and was “isolating at home while still running the NSC [national security council], doing most of his work by phone”.But CNN reported that O’Brien recently went to Europe with staffers and reporters and said “multiple pictures released from the trip showed O’Brien neither practicing social distancing nor wearing a mask”.The news will intensify scrutiny over Trump’s refusal to consistently wear a face mask in public, despite mounting evidence that masks help mitigate the spread of coronavirus. The president strongly urged Americans to wear masks for the first time last week, but he has since been seen in public not wearing a mask.Pressure was also mounting on Republicans in Congress on Monday, to finalise a new aid package and spare millions of Americans who have lost their jobs in the pandemic from enduring dire hardship when $600-a-week additional unemployment benefits expire on Friday.With the so-called “income cliff” just four days away, Republican leaders have indicated that they will unveil a $1tn aid package agreed with the White House. But bitter partisan negotiations lie ahead, with a measure likely to pass only at the 11th hour.House Democrats, who passed a $3tn package in May, have accused Republicans of dithering and object to replacing the $600 weekly benefits, which they want to extend, with a more complicated formula based on 70% of wages. That calculation could in effect see support reduced to about $200 a week.Democrats are also unhappy about liability protections likely to be included in the Republican package that insulate employers from being sued by workers who contract coronavirus.The negotiations come at a febrile time. Last week 1.4 million Americans filed new unemployment claims, joining a pool of more than 30 million out of work.As the political crisis on Capitol Hill comes to a head, there is no sign of the public health crisis abating. According to the Covid Tracking project, 4.2m confirmed cases of coronavirus have been recorded in the US with the death toll close to 140,000. Johns Hopkins University puts the death toll closer to 150,000.The death rate across the states has exceeded 1,000 people a day over the past week, although on Sunday a figure of 558 was recorded.The infection rate is continuing to surge alarmingly, particularly in the south. Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are all showing steep upward trajectories and many states have been forced to rein back on reopening their economies after the virus caused havoc in health systems.Florida now has more than 400,000 confirmed cases and has surpassed the tally in New York, a previous center of the contagion. California, struggling with a resurgence of its own, has recorded the most cases.Despite the prevalence of disease in Florida the vice-president, Mike Pence, was scheduled to visit Miami on Monday, to highlight phase three trials for a vaccine.The political fallout of the pandemic remains intense, both at state level and for the White House, where Donald Trump is dealing with the consequences of having presided over one of the worst impacts of the pandemic in the world. With fewer than 100 days to go before the presidential election, Joe Biden now holds a commanding lead in the polls.A new NBC News/Marist poll released on Monday underlined the danger of the current moment for Trump. It gave Biden a seven-point lead in the vital swing state of North Carolina, increasingly seen as a bellwether in presidential elections. Among registered voters in the state, Biden was supported by 51% to Trump’s 44%.Congressional horse trading over aid could have far-reaching implications for millions. Democrats have warned that any reduction in financial help to the unemployed could herald a wave of evictions as households struggle to meet rent.On Sunday, the Trump adviser Larry Kudlow pledged on CNN’s State of the Union that a moratorium on housing evictions, which has expired, will be extended. More

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      Trump may not respect the election. We need a Democratic senate more than ever | Sidney Blumenthal

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      Donald Trump’s declaration that he might not accept the results of the 2020 election has fundamentally transformed the campaign, making plain what had previously only been suspected. No other president has ever made such a statement.“I have to see,” said Trump in an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News on 19 July, after Wallace asked him if he would accept the election outcome. “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.” Indeed, in 2016, Trump claimed that the election was being “rigged” against him.“I will look at it at the time,” Trump said to Wallace. “I will keep you in suspense.”Unlike last time, Trump is the president and has taken an oath to uphold the constitution. His refusal to accept the election results would be a clear violation of that oath and an impeachable offense. Indeed, simply by announcing he might reject the results by his own fiat, Trump has issued the most blatant desecration of the constitution’s values since the Confederate secession in 1860-61.No one has proposed a more urgent and persuasive argument for the election of a Democratic-controlled Senate than Trump. America needs a Democratic-controlled Senate as a warning to Trump that if he attempts to overturn an election that goes against him he will face a second impeachment and a full and fair trial. If anything, Trump’s lawless contempt for the constitution is the strongest possible incentive to elect Democrats this fall. Remember what happened last time, in the absence of a Democratic-controlled Senate: Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for coercing the government of Ukraine to fabricate false information to damage Joe Biden, then, in the Senate, the case ran into Trump’s most powerful firewall, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. McConnell ensured that no witnesses were heard in the Senate and that Republican members were whipped into line to dismiss the evidence gathered by the House impeachment inquiry.Trump has sought to subvert the 2020 election through every conceivable effort at voter suppressionTrump has sought to subvert the 2020 election through every conceivable effort at voter suppression, including opposing mail-in ballots during the coronavirus pandemic, forcing voters to put their lives potentially at risk by waiting in lengthy lines. Even if his tactics to thwart the vote fail, his comments to Wallace indicate that Trump may cause a constitutional crisis to deny the people’s judgment. He may, as he has in the past, incite violence, calling on his armed supporters to threaten state officials to prevent accurate ballot tabulations.But whatever scenarios, gambits and tricks that Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, have up their sleeves, they should understand that the newly elected 117th Congress, especially if the Democrats have House and Senate majorities, could intervene to expose whatever they might do, beginning on the day the new congress members are sworn in on 3 January 2021. Without McConnell staging a farce to maintain Trump in power, the House can immediately impeach a defiant Trump’s repudiation of constitutional democracy and the Senate can conduct a trial with witnesses, starting with Barr, in fulfillment of the voters’ verdict. If Senate Republicans, even after their election losses, maintain their phalanx to frustrate a two-thirds majority, their disgraceful identification with the utterly discredited Trump would be complete. And if it comes to this, Trump and the Republicans will have delivered the nation to an authoritarian regime that dispenses with the constitution.In the meantime, Democrats in state legislatures should propose resolutions calling on the presidential candidates to accept the results of the election. Let every Republican be presented with an opportunity to stand for or against Trump’s disregard for democracy. The practice of passing such statements, even legislatures instructing elected federal office holders to adhere to certain policies, goes back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison’s Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions to protest against the trampling of civil liberties imposed through the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.Trump’s statement that he may not accept the election result has only one precedent, the most glaring example of illegality and treason. According to the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, secession was compelled because of the election of Abraham Lincoln, “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”Lincoln answered the counter-revolution against democracy in a special message to the Congress on 4 July 1861. “It presents to the whole family of man,” he said, “the question of whether a constitutional republic or democracy – a government of the people, by the same people – can or cannot maintain its territorial integrity against its own domestic foes. It presents the question whether the discontented individuals – too few in numbers to control the administration, according to organic law, in any case – can always, upon the pretenses made in this case or on any other pretenses, or arbitrarily without any pretense, break up the government and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth.”It is hardly a surprise that Trump defends Confederate monuments and the Confederate battle flag. With his scorn for democracy and disdain for the constitution, Trump is preparing for the last battle of his own “Lost Cause”.Sidney Blumenthal is the author of All the Powers of Earth, A Self-Made Man, and Wrestling with His Angel, the first three volumes in his five-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln. He is a former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for the Washington Post, Washington editor and writer for the New Yorker and senior editor of the New Republic More