U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other top Republicans on Thursday repudiated President Donald Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, assuring American voters the lawmakers would accept the outcome of November’s election.

Trump declined on Wednesday to embrace a peaceful transfer in response to a reporter’s question and said he expected his election battle with Democrat Joe Biden to be settled by the Supreme Court.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Trump said he did not know that an “honest” election could be held on Nov. 3 “with this whole situation, unsolicited ballots.”

The Republican president’s rhetoric on Wednesday, which largely referred to voting by mail, set off a fury that prompted several Republicans in Congress to distance themselves from Trump.

Despite four years of incendiary statements by Trump, members of his own party have been loath to criticise him, as many feared political retribution.

“The winner of the November 3rd election will be inaugurated on January 20th. There will be an orderly transition just as there has been every four years since 1792,” McConnell wrote in a morning tweet.

Like other Republicans, McConnell did not directly criticize Trump.

By midday, with the controversy raging, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told a news briefing: “The president will accept the results of a free and fair election.”

But for months, Trump has cast November’s election as being rigged and repeatedly attacked Democrats for promoting widespread use of mail-in ballots for voters who do not want to risk contracting the deadly COVID-19 virus by casting their ballots at potentially crowded polling centers.

In an interview on Fox News Radio, Trump called mail-in ballots “a horror show,” despite studies showing no significant problems with that method of voting over the years.

Michael Waldman, president of New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, said voting arrangements were steadily advancing. In an interview with Reuters Television, he added: “The system is not broken. States are actually improving their voting rules day by day.”

Democrats accused Trump of threatening American democracy and further politicising his upcoming choice to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by suggesting the yet-to-be named nominee would have a role in the election’s outcome.

Some of McConnell’s fellow Republicans joined the effort to quell election fears, including Senators Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who told reporters: “It will be a smooth transition regardless of the outcome.”

Trump, who trails Biden in national opinion polls, has long sought to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, asserting without evidence that mail-in voting would be rife with fraud.

“President Trump, you are not a dictator and America will not permit you to be one,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, calling him “the gravest threat” to U.S. democracy.

Senator Bernie Sanders, who lost to Biden in the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating race, called for an independent commission to oversee the upcoming election.

Democratic House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi cautioned against panicking over the remarks of a president who she said admires autocratic leaders. At a news conference, she urged Americans to cast their ballots and admonished Trump: “You are not in North Korea, you are not in Turkey, you are not in Russia.”

Court challenges

If November’s election is close, Trump could contest the results in federal courts in hopes of being awarded enough Electoral College votes to retain the White House, according to political analysts.

Only one U.S. presidential election, the 2000 contest between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, has had its outcome determined by the Supreme Court.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, a Trump ally who will play a significant role in whether Trump’s upcoming Supreme Court nominee will be confirmed, said there could be litigation over the presidential election. “The (Supreme) Court will decide and if the Republicans lose, we will accept that result,” Graham told Fox News. “But we need a full court.”

If Trump nominates a conservative to serve on the Supreme Court, as expected, and the Republican-controlled Senate confirms the nominee, it will have six justices considered to be conservative and three viewed as liberals.

(REUTERS)

Joe Biden branded President Donald Trump a “climate arsonist” on Monday for refusing to acknowledge global warming’s role in deadly wildfires sweeping the western United States, while Trump blamed lax forestry and declared, “I don’t think science knows.”

Dozens of conflagrations have raged with unprecedented scope across some 4.5 million acres (1.8 million hectares) in Oregon, California and Washington state since August, laying waste to several small towns, destroying thousands of homes and killing at least 36 people.

The fires also have filled the region’s air with harmful levels of smoke and soot, bathing skies in eerie tones of orange and sepia while adding to a public health crisis already posed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Ten deaths have been confirmed during the past week in Oregon, the latest flashpoint in a larger summer outbreak of fires accompanied by catastrophic lightning storms, record-breaking heat waves and bouts of extreme winds.

Those incendiary conditions gave way over the weekend to cooler, moister weather and calmer winds, enabling weary firefighters to gain ground in efforts to outflank blazes that had burned largely unchecked last week.

Fire managers cautioned that the battle was hardly over. Thunderstorms forecast for later in the week could bring much-needed rain but also more lightning. Officials also braced for a rise in the death toll.

As disaster teams scoured the ruins of dwellings engulfed by flames amid chaotic evacuations last week, Oregon’s emergency management authorities said they had yet to account for 22 people reported missing in the fires.

At least 25 people have perished in California wildfires since mid-August, and one fatality has been confirmed in Washington state. More than 6,200 homes and other structures have been lost, according to figures from all three states.

Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee slammed by Republicans for not visiting disaster areas, spoke from his home state of Delaware on the threat of increasingly frequent weather extremes that scientists have pointed to as evidence that climate change is supercharging the fires.

Trump, who trails Biden in national polls ahead of the Nov. 3 election, met with firefighters and officials in California after Democrats blasted the Republican president for remaining mostly silent on the wildfires.

“I think this is more of a management situation,” Trump answered, when asked by a reporter if climate change was a factor behind the fires. Without mentioning large wildfires that have raged elsewhere around the world in recent years – from southern Europe to Australia and Siberia – Trump asserted that other countries “don’t have this problem.”

“They have more explosive trees, meaning they catch fire much easier,” he said. “But they don’t have problems like this.”

The president and his administration have long sought to pin the blame for large wildfires on state officials, saying fuel-choked forests and scrub need to be thinned, more firebreaks should be cut and flammable debris cleared from forest floors.

Trump said improved forest management was something that could be tackled quickly, whereas climate change would take more time and require international cooperation that he said was lacking.

“When you get into climate change, well is India going to change its ways? And is China going to change its ways? And Russia? Is Russia going to change its ways?” he said after landing in McLellan Park, California.

‘I don’t think science knows’

Trump has referred to climate change as a “hoax,” and in 2017 pulled the United States out of the Paris accords laying out an international approach to global warming. Biden, the former vice president, has included climate change on his list of major crises facing the United States.

Calling Trump a “climate arsonist,” Biden said: “If we have four more years of Trump’s climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned by wildfires? How many suburban neighborhoods will have been flooded out?”

California Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged more needs to be done to better manage forests to reduce fire risks, citing more than a century of aggressive fire suppression has allowed fuels to build up.

But he countered that global warming was nevertheless a driving factor in newly extreme wildfire behavior, and he reminded Trump that 57% of forest land in California is under federal ownership.

“We come from a perspective, humbly, where we submit the science is in and observed evidence is self-evident: that climate change is real, and that is exacerbating this,” the Democratic governor said during a meeting with the president.

Trump, who has authorized federal disaster aid for both California and Oregon, questioned that science.

“It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch,” he said. “I don’t think science knows.”

Tens of thousands of displaced residents across the Pacific Northwest continued to adjust to life as evacuees. Around the devastated southwestern Oregon towns of Phoenix and Talent, some people set up food stations in parking lots. Others defied evacuation orders to guard their own homes from looters.

Reinforcing local law enforcement resources strained by the disaster, Oregon is deploying as many as 1,000 National Guard troops to fire-stricken communities.

Two men were arrested in Oregon, one on Friday and another on Monday, on arson charges stemming from a handful of relatively small fires.

But police have cautioned against fake social media reports blaming wildfires on left-wing anti-fascists or right-wing Proud Boy activists.

Source: REUTERS

Japan’s ruling party on Monday elected chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga as its new leader, making him all but certain to replace Shinzo Abe as the country’s next prime minister.

Suga easily won the ballot, taking 377 of a total of 534 valid votes from Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers and regional representatives.

His rivals, former defence minister Shigeru Ishiba and LDP policy chief Fumio Kishida, trailed far behind.

Given the LDP’s legislative majority, Suga is expected to handily win a parliamentary vote Wednesday and become prime minister, taking over from Abe, who is resigning for health reasons.

A powerful government adviser and spokesman, 71-year-old Suga is seen as promising stability and a continuation of Abe’s policies.

He has specifically said his candidacy was motivated by a desire to continue the outgoing prime minister’s programmes.

Ishiba, who is popular with the Japanese public but less so within his own party, won just 68 votes, with Kishida, who was once considered Abe’s favoured successor, taking 89.

Abe, who smashed records as Japan’s longest-serving prime minister before being forced to resign after a recurrence of ulcerative colitis, declined to publicly endorse any candidate.

The son of a strawberry farmer, Suga was raised in Japan’s northern Akita region, and the issues of rural areas suffering depopulation are said to be among his top concerns.

But not much is known about his personal ideology, and he is generally viewed as an adherent of neither the LDP’s most hawkish nor its more reformist wings.

As prime minister, he will face a series of tough challenges, including containing the coronavirus and righting the world’s third-biggest economy, which was in recession even before the pandemic.

(AFP)

President Donald Trump said Tuesday he may have to dip into his own pocket to finance a reelection campaign struggling to attract donors and voters alike with only eight weeks to go.

The acknowledgement that his once vaunted fundraising machine may need help from his real estate fortune underlined the obstacles facing the Republican as he set off on a tour of five swing states vital to racking up even a narrow electoral college victory on November 3.

“If I have to, I will,” Trump told reporters when asked about spending his own cash. “Whatever it takes. We have to win.”

He flew to Jupiter, Florida, for a speech with supporters in the must-win state before getting back on Air Force One to speak in North Carolina — a swing state that went his way in 2016 but threatens to flip to Democrat Joe Biden.

On Thursday he heads to Michigan and on the weekend Nevada.

Friday, Trump and Biden will both be in Pennsylvania — another electoral battleground — for 9/11 commemorations at the Flight 93 National Memorial, in Shanksville.

It was not clear whether they might declare a brief truce and appear jointly at the ceremony remembering the passengers who died after attacking their hijackers on September 11, 2001, sending the doomed plane into a field.

Biden, who was already in Pennsylvania on Labor Day Monday, will be in Michigan on Wednesday, while his vice presidential pick Kamala Harris goes to Florida and his wife Jill Biden visits Minnesota — a state Trump is pushing hard to flip.

Trump is touting promises of a quick coronavirus vaccine — possibly right before polling day — and a booming economic recovery in hopes of righting his campaign.

But Biden, who is hammering at Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, maintains a healthy lead in national polls and much smaller but consistent advantages in the swing states.

In response, Trump has thrown everything he can at Biden in the last couple weeks, calling him “stupid,” accusing him of being a puppet of socialist revolutionaries, and claiming that sometimes violent anti-racism protests are a harbinger of Democratic-led mass chaos.

“Suburban voters are pouring into the Republican Party because of the violence in Democrat-run cities and states. If Biden gets in, this violence is ‘coming to the Suburbs’, and FAST,” Trump tweeted Tuesday, repeating what has become one of his core reelection messages.

“You could say goodbye to your American Dream!”

– Donor enthusiasm gone? –

The campaign’s financial situation is a surprise.

Trump has effectively been campaigning for a second term throughout his administration, filing the paperwork for a run the same day as his 2017 inauguration.

Since the start of 2019, his campaign has spent some $800 million, more than twice as much as that of Biden.

But despite that head start and the campaign’s boastful descriptions of itself as a “juggernaut,” the Trump train is reportedly hitting a funding wall.

Biden, who began his quest for the White House with a slow, poorly funded effort, surprised many by overtaking Trump in the fundraising stakes this August with a $365 million haul — shattering previous monthly records.

Now Trump will find the bills piling up as he accelerates travel, voter outreach and — above all — expensive television ad efforts ahead of November 3.

A New York Times article published Monday homed in on profligate spending under then campaign manager Brad Parscale, particularly two ads aired during the Super Bowl with a reported price tag of $11 million.

On Twitter, Trump said any financial woes were the fault of the media, because he’d been “forced to spend in order to counter the Fake News.”

– Bad news cycle –

For his entire first term, Trump has become used to dominating the news cycle, but as election day approaches, the Republican showman’s grip on the script is slipping.

Covid-19 has ended his favorite platform of large rallies in noisy arenas and his seemingly killer instinct for defining opponents with a single catchy nickname is proving ineffective in the case of the man he dubs “sleepy Joe.”

The last week has seen Trump endure a torrent of negative headlines.

An article in The Atlantic quoting anonymous sources accusing Trump of repeatedly disparaging military members killed in war as “losers” and “suckers” continues to roil the White House, despite its strenuous attempts to discredit the story.

Those allegations are now joined by lurid claims made by his disgraced former fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen, whose book “Disloyal” is the latest in a long line of angry tell-alls by former Trump insiders.

Source: AFP

US President Donald Trump on Thursday renewed his call for supporters to try to vote twice on November 3, a potentially illegal act that he claimed is the only way to be sure that a ballot is counted.

Trump said Americans should first try to vote by mail, if that option is offered in their state, then also go to the polling station on election day to check that their ballot has been counted — and, if not, vote again.

“YOU ARE NOW ASSURED THAT YOUR PRECIOUS VOTE HAS BEEN COUNTED,” he said in a Twitter thread.

Intentionally voting twice is illegal.

Facebook and Twitter, which are under growing pressure not to allow misinformation ahead of the election, put warning labels on the president’s posts about the matter.

“We placed a public interest notice on two Tweets in this thread for violating our Civic Integrity Policy, specifically for encouraging people to potentially vote twice,” Twitter said.

However, White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said Trump had been taken out of context and just wanted voters to verify that their first vote had been registered.

He “does not condone unlawful voting,” she said.

Whatever Trump meant, the tweets were his latest assault on the credibility of mail-in voting, which is being rapidly expanded across the country in response to fears of Covid-19 contagion in crowded polling stations.

Despite Trump’s relentless challenges, the mail-in practice is already widespread and largely trouble-free in the United States.

He himself uses the absentee mail-in option to vote in Florida while living in the White House.

While Trump says that increased mail-in voting will allow mass ballot tampering and rigging of the result, elections experts say there is no evidence of significant danger.

However, polls show Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, leading Trump’s opponents to fear that he is trying to suppress Biden’s vote — or set the stage for disputing the results.

– Election day worries –

Trump first aired the idea of casting a precautionary second vote on Wednesday during a trip to North Carolina.

“If you get the unsolicited ballots, send it in, and then go — make sure it counted. And if it doesn’t tabulate, you vote,” he said. “So, send it in early, and then go and vote.”

The recommendation prompted the election board in the state, which Democrat Joe Biden hopes to snatch from Trump, to issue a statement pointing out: “It is illegal to vote twice in an election.”

“Soliciting someone to do so also is a violation of North Carolina law,” the board’s director, Karen Brinson Bell, added.

Polls currently show Biden on course to defeat Trump.

But experts warn that the country faces a confusing and potentially tense aftermath of the voting on November 3, due to the unusual circumstances.

Given the larger than ordinary number of mailed-in ballots, few expect there will be a clear-cut result that evening, with mailed ballots possibly taking days if not weeks to finish counting.

Under one scenario, Trump could be shown to have won on the basis of ballots cast during the day, but mail-in ballots, once counted days later, would then put Biden over the top.

Trump has repeatedly refused to declare he will accept the results of the election.

 Source: AFP

Facing a national moment fraught with racial turmoil and a deadly pandemic, President Donald Trump accepted his party’s renomination on a massive White House South Lawn stage Thursday night, boasting of helping African Americans and defying his own administration’s pandemic guidelines to address a tightly packed, largely maskless crowd.

As troubles churned outside the gates, Trump painted an optimistic vision of America’s future, including an eventual triumph over the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 175,000 people, left millions unemployed and rewritten the rules of society. But that brighter horizon can only be secured, Trump asserted, if he defeats Democrat Joe Biden.

“We have spent the last four years reversing the damage Joe Biden inflicted over the last 47 years,” Trump said.

Presenting himself as the last barrier protecting an American way of life under siege from radical forces, Trump declared that “Joe Biden and his party repeatedly assailed America as a land of racial, economic, and social injustice.””

“So tonight, I ask you a very simple question: How can the Democrat Party ask to lead our country when it spends so much time tearing down our country?” Trump said. “In the left’s backward view, they do not see America as the most free, just, and exceptional nation on earth. Instead, they see a wicked nation that must be punished for its sins.”

As his speech brought the scaled-back Republican National Convention to a close, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric risked inflaming a divided nation reeling from a series of calamities, including the pandemic, a major hurricane that slammed into the Gulf Coast and nights of racial unrest and violence after Jacob Blake, a Black man, was shot by a White Wisconsin police officer.

He was introduced by his daughter Ivanka, an influential White House adviser, who portrayed the famously bombastic Trump as someone who has shaken up Washington with little record for norms or niceties.

“Dad, people attack you for being unconventional, but I love you for being real. And I respect you for being effective,” she said.

The president spoke from a setting that was both familiar and controversial. Despite tradition and regulation to not use the White House for purely political events, a huge stage was set up outside the executive mansion, dwarfing the trappings for some of the most important moments of past presidencies. The speaker’s stand was flanked by dozens of American flags and two big video screens.

Trying to run as an insurgent as well as incumbent, Trump rarely includes calls for unity, even in a time of national uncertainty. He has repeatedly, if not always effectively, tried to portray Biden — who is considered a moderate Democrat — as a tool of the radical left, fringe forces he has claimed don’t love their country.

The Republicans claim that the violence that has erupted in Kenosha and some other American cities is to be blamed on Democratic governors and mayors. Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday said that Americans wouldn’t be safe in “Joe Biden’s America.”

That drew a stern rebuke from his predecessor in the post.

“The problem we have right now is that we are in Donald Trump’s America,” said Biden on MSNBC. “He views this as a political benefit to him, he is rooting for more violence not less. He is pouring gasoline on the fire.”

Both parties are watching with uncertainty the developments in Wisconsin and cities across the nation with Republicans leaning hard on support for law and order — with no words offered for Black victims of police violence — while falsely claiming that Biden has not condemned the lawlessness. Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney and New York City’s former mayor, declared that Democrats’ “silence was so deafening that it reveals an acceptance of this violence because they will accept anything they hope will defeat President Donald Trump.”

Though some of the speakers, unlike on previous nights, offered notes of sympathy to the families of Black men killed by police, Giuliani also took aim at the Black Lives Matter movement, suggesting that it, along with ANTIFA, was part of the extremist voices pushing Biden to “execute their pro-criminal, anti-police policies” and had “hijacked the protests into vicious, brutal riots.”

Along with Biden, running mate Kamala Harris offered counter-programming for Trump’s prime-time speech. She delivered a speech a half mile from the White House, declaring, “Donald Trump has failed at the most basic and important job of a president of the United States: He failed to protect the American people, plain and simple.”

Some demonstrations took to Washington’s streets Thursday night, ahead of a march planned for the next day. New fencing set up along the White House perimeter was to keep the protesters at bay, but some of their shouts and car horns were clearly audible on the South Lawn where more than 1,500 people gathered. Soon after Trump began talking, the horns and sirens — which came through occasionally to the millions watching at home — caused some people in the last row to turn around and look for the source of the disturbance.

Those chants, coming from masked faces, intruded on another illusion that the Republicans have spent a week trying to create: that the pandemic is largely a thing of the past. The rows of chairs on the lawn were tightly packed, inches apart. Protective masks were not required, and Covid-19 tests were not to be administered to everyone.

But Trump, who has defended his handling of the pandemic, touted an expansion of rapid coronavirus testing. The White House announced Thursday that it had struck a $750 million deal to acquire 150 million tests from Abbott Laboratories to be deployed in nursing homes, schools and other areas with populations at high risk.

Most of the convention has been aimed at former Trump supporters or nonvoters, and has tried to drive up negative impressions of Biden so that some of his possible backers stay home. Many of the messages were aimed squarely at seniors and suburban women.

Among the more emotional moments: testimony from Alice Marie Johnson, who was granted clemency from her life sentence on nonviolent drug charges, and from Carl and Marsha Mueller, whose daughter Kayla was killed while being held in Syria by Islamic State militants during the Obama administration.

“Kayla should be here,” said Carl Mueller. “If Donald Trump was president when Kayla was captured, she would be here today.”

Four years ago, Trump declared in his acceptance speech that “I alone can fix” the nation’s woes, but he has found himself asking voters for another term at the nadir of his presidency, amid a devastating pandemic, crushing unemployment and real uncertainties about schools and businesses reopening.

Another one million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, in numbers released Thursday. And the US economy shrank at an alarming annual rate of 31.7% during the April-June quarter as it struggled under the weight of the viral pandemic. It was sharpest quarterly drop on record.

(AP)

President Donald Trump adopted a grim tone in remarks to Republicans who formally backed his bid for a second term on Monday, warning without evidence that he could face a “rigged election” in November.

Trump repeated his claim that voting by mail, a longstanding feature of American elections that is expected to be far more common during the coronavirus pandemic, could lead to an increase in fraud. Independent election security experts say voter fraud is quite rare in the United States.

Trump spoke in an unscheduled appearance on the first day of the sharply scaled-back Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, after he received enough votes to formally win the nomination to take on his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, in the Nov. 3 election.

“The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Trump said. “We’re going to win this election.”

Party members are meeting amid a coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 176,000 Americans, erased millions of jobs and eroded the president’s standing among voters.

As he has done repeatedly, Trump described states’ responses to infections of Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, in starkly partisan terms, casting lockdowns and other steps recommended by public health officials as attempts to influence voting in November.

“What they’re doing is using Covid to steal an election,” Trump said. “They’re using Covid to defraud the American people – all of our people – of a fair and free election.”

The in-person proceedings, a far smaller meeting than originally planned, still marked a contrast with Democrats, who opted for an almost entirely virtual format instead of gathering in the election battleground state of Wisconsin. That change was intended to reduce the risk of the virus being spread at the political event.

“We did this out of respect for your state,” said Trump, targeting his message at the people of North Carolina, which is expected to be competitive in the November election.

Trump earlier this year moved the convention to Florida, his newly adopted home state, to avoid restrictions on gatherings in North Carolina due to the coronavirus, then abandoned that plan when infection rates soared in Florida.

Donald Trump says 2020 Presidential election ‘most important in the history of the US’ during GOP convention

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Republicans said their convention would offer a more hopeful message, with an emphasis on “law and order,” gun rights, tax cuts and the “forgotten” men and women of America.

The party opted not to vote on a traditional platform document detailing its policy goals, instead saying that it supports what Trump is doing. Trump’s campaign released a series of bullet-point goals, including a promise to “create 10 million new jobs in 10 months.”

In another contrast with the Democratic event, which featured all three living former Democratic presidents, and prior nominees, the Republican event will not include speeches from that party’s past living president or candidates.

Neither former President George W. Bush nor 2012 Republican presidential nominee Senator Mitt Romney, who voted to convict Trump at the president’s impeachment trial, plan to speak. Also absent from the schedule are several Republicans facing close elections in November, including Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

Break with Tradition

With the pandemic not yet under control, good news has been in short supply for Trump. His performance as president was sharply criticized by Biden and former President Barack Obama at the Democratic convention.

Biden’s campaign said Trump would attempt to change the subject, delivering “more desperate, wild-eyed lies and toxic division, in vain attempts to distract from his mismanagement,” according to spokesman Andrew Bates.

“What they won’t hear is what American families have urgently needed and been forced to go without for over seven consecutive months: any coherent strategy for defeating the pandemic.”

The president, a former reality television star, plans to hold several live events with in-person audiences, in contrast to Democrats, who showed pre-taped segments or delivered speeches in mostly empty venues.

Trump’s planned daily speeches are a break with the tradition of the nominee keeping a low profile before an acceptance speech on the convention’s final night.

Overnight, demonstrators and law enforcement clashed for a third straight night near the Charlotte Convention Center with police using pepper spray on the crowd. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department said in a statement that officers arrested five people late on Sunday.

On Tuesday, Trump’s wife, Melania, will give a speech from the White House, while Pence follows on Wednesday from Baltimore’s Fort McHenry historic site.

Trump will accept his party’s nomination on Thursday night before a crowd on the White House South Lawn. Democrats have criticized the move as a partisan use of public property.

“Trump has four days to make two cases: One is ‘we know what we are doing and have done a great job, obviously interrupted by the virus,'” said Constantin Querard, president of Grassroots Partners, an Arizona-based conservative political consultancy.

“And then you have to knock the Democratic ticket for being as far-left as they are,” he said.

Source: REUTERS

President Donald Trump will seek to revive his re-election hopes this week at the Republican Party’s largely online convention, battered by the coronavirus pandemic, economic troubles, racial unrest and polls pointing to an uphill fight.

Trump and his top aides strived over the weekend to put an optimistic spin on the convention as he prepares to head Monday to North Carolina to formally launch the four-day event.

“I think we’re going to see something that is going to be very uplifting and positive, that’s what I’d like it to be,” the president told Fox News.

He sought to draw a sharp contrast to the just-ended Democratic convention, which he has called the “darkest, angriest and gloomiest” in history.

Republicans, facing polls that give Democrat Joe Biden an eight to 10-point lead, were also hoping for a boost from a planned Trump announcement Sunday on an advance in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 175,000 lives across the country.

– Provocative lineup –

The coming convention appears to be a highly Trump-centric affair — with the president appearing, unusually, on each of the four days — and with some speakers seen as intentionally provocative.

The scheduled includes a Missouri couple who pointed guns at anti-racist protesters marching past their mansion in June — an image that quickly went viral.

And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is set to deliver a speech Tuesday in support of Trump during an official visit to Israel.

Such a directly political intervention by the nation’s top diplomat while abroad would be highly unusual.

Moreover, the president plans to deliver his acceptance speech Thursday from the lawn of the White House, shrugging off criticism over the use of the presidential residence for campaign purposes.

– Dealing with the virus –

Charlotte, North Carolina is where the party originally planned to hold its convention before the pandemic intervened, forcing first a shift to Florida and then a quick reimagining of the event as mostly virtual.

A few hundred Republican supporters are slated to gather in Charlotte to hear Trump speak on Monday, but Republican chairwoman Ronna McDaniel insisted that the gathering was being handled safely.

“We tested everybody before they came to Charlotte. We have been testing people on-site,” she told NBC.

Convention speakers includes former ambassador Nikki Haley and Donald Trump Jr. on Monday; First Lady Melania Trump and Pompeo on Tuesday; and Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday.

While Democrats heard from all living former Democratic presidents as well as former presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, former Republican president George W. Bush is not expected to appear. Bush has been a critic of Trump’s.

– Help from ‘The Apprentice’ –

The event comes only four days after the Democrats — in a history-making all-virtual convention of their own — formally crowned former vice president Biden as the party’s presidential candidate.

Trump, whose rise from New York real estate mogul to political prominence was boosted by his reality TV show “The Apprentice,” has turned to two of the program’s producers to help with convention planning, according to reports.

The Republicans’ effort is expected to incorporate more live broadcasting — an approach holding both opportunity and risk — than the Democratic event.

Republicans are expanding also the nightly program from the two hours presented by Democrats to two and a half hours, with TV networks committed to broadcast the final hour.

Trump is expected to try to impart the best possible spin on his efforts to battle the coronavirus, but polls show most Americans trust Biden far more than him to deal with it.

The president faced further criticism over the weekend from someone uncomfortably close: his sister Maryanne Trump Barry, heard on secretly recorded tapes provided to the Washington Post describing him as cruel, a liar and a man of “no principles.”

Jason Miller, Trump’s senior campaign advisor, responded angrily on NBC, saying, “It’s shameful that the Washington Post came and ran the story yesterday, literally the day after the funeral services for (the president’s brother) Robert Trump.”

Miller joined other Republican aides in dismissing the Democrats’ convention, calling it a “massive grievance-fest” from a party with no “vision for the future.”

The candidates are scheduled to hold three debates, the first on September 29, before Americans cast their ballots on November 3.

Source: AFP

US Senator Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president on Wednesday, imploring the country to elect Joe Biden president and accusing Donald Trump of failed leadership that had cost lives and livelihoods.

The first Black woman and Asian-American on a major US presidential ticket, Harris summarized her life story as emblematic of the American dream on the third day of the Democratic National Convention.

“Donald Trump’s failure of leadership has cost lives and livelihoods,” Harris said.

Former US President Barack Obama told the convention Trump’s failures as his successor had led to 170,000 people dead from the coronavirus, millions of lost jobs and America’s reputation badly diminished in the world.

The evening featured a crush of women headliners, moderators and speakers, with Harris pressing the case against Trump, speaking directly to millions of women, young Americans and voters of color, constituencies Democrats need if Biden is to defeat the Republican Trump.

“The constant chaos leaves us adrift, the incompetence makes us feel afraid, the callousness makes us feel alone. It’s a lot. And here’s the thing: we can do better and deserve so much more,” she said.

“Right now, we have a president who turns our tragedies into political weapons. Joe will be a president who turns our challenges into purpose,” she said, speaking from an austere hotel ballroom in Biden’s hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.

Biden ahead in polls

Biden leads Trump in opinion polls ahead of the Nov. 3 election, bolstered by a big lead among women voters. Throughout the convention, Democrats have appealed directly to those women voters, highlighting Biden’s co-sponsorship of the landmark Violence Against Woman Act of 1994 and his proposals to bolster childcare and protect family healthcare provisions.

Obama, whose vice president was Biden from 2009-2017, said he had hoped that Trump would take the job seriously, come to feel the weight of the office, and discover a reverence for American democracy.

“Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job because he can’t. And the consequences of that failure are severe,” Obama said in unusually blunt criticism from an ex-president.

“Millions of jobs gone. Our worst impulses unleashed, our proud reputation around the world badly diminished, and our democratic institutions threatened like never before,” Obama said.

The choice of a running mate has added significance for Biden, 77, who would be the oldest person to become president if he is elected. His age has led to speculation he will serve only one term, making Harris a potential top contender for the nomination in 2024.

Biden named Harris, 55, as his running mate last week to face incumbents Trump, 74, and Vice President Mike Pence, 61.

Former first lady and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee who lost to Trump, told the convention she constantly hears from voters who regret backing Trump or not voting at all.

“This can’t be another woulda coulda shoulda election.” Clinton said. “No matter what, vote. Vote like our lives and livelihoods are on the line, because they are.”

Clinton, who won the popular vote against Trump but lost in the Electoral College, said Biden needs to win overwhelmingly, warning he could win the popular vote but still lose the White House.

“Joe and Kamala can win by 3 million votes and still lose,” Clinton said. “Take it from me. So we need numbers overwhelming so Trump can’t sneak or steal his way to victory.”

Democrats have been alarmed by Trump’s frequent criticism of mail-in voting, and by cost-cutting changes at the US Postal Service instituted by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump supporter, that could delay mail during the election crunch. DeJoy said recently he would delay those changes until after the election.

Democrats also broadcast videos highlighting Trump’s crackdown on immigration, opposition to gun restrictions and his decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord.

‘Disrespect’ for facts, for women

Nancy Pelosi, the first woman Speaker of the US House of Representatives, told the convention she had seen firsthand Trump’s “disrespect for facts, for working families, and for women in particular – disrespect written into his policies toward our health and our rights, not just his conduct. But we know what he doesn’t: that when women succeed, America succeeds.”

US Senator Elizabeth Warren, a leading progressive who ran against Biden in the 2020 primary, spoke to the convention from a childcare center in Massachusetts and cited Biden’s proposal to make childcare more affordable as a vital part of his agenda to help working Americans.

“It’s time to recognize that childcare is part of the basic infrastructure of this nation — it’s infrastructure for families,” she said. “Joe and Kamala will make high-quality childcare affordable for every family, make preschool universal, and raise the wages for every childcare worker.”

In her speech later, Harris will have an opportunity to outline her background as a child of immigrants from India and Jamaica who as a district attorney, state attorney general, US senator from California and now vice-presidential candidate shattered gender and racial barriers.

She gained prominence in the Senate for her exacting interrogations of Trump nominees, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Attorney General Bill Barr.

The Republican National Convention, also largely virtual, takes place next week.

Source: REUTERS

A new opinion poll shows that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has a nine percentage-point lead over President Donald Trump nationally with less than three months before the 2020 election.

The NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, released on Sunday, found that 50 percent of registered voters favored Biden while just 41 percent said they would support the Republican incumbent.

Forty-nine percent of participants said the former US vice president was better suited to handle the current health crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, while just 33 percent said the same of Trump.

The survey also showed that Biden leads Trump by 24 percentage points on handling race relations.

The new poll was carried out days after Biden selected Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) to be his running mate.

Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, was the wire-to-wire frontrunner for Biden’s No. 2 job.

Thirty-nine percent of voters expressed a positive view about the California senator, while 35 percent said the opposite. Feelings about Harris also created sharp division along party lines, with 71 percent of Biden-backing voters saying they held a positive view of her and just four percent of Trump’s supporters saying the same.

The NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll was conducted from August 9 to 12 among a population of 900 registered voters. The survey has a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points.

The opinion poll, published just a day ahead of the start of the Democratic National Convention, comes as national and states polls have continued to show Biden with substantial advantages over Trump in his bid for the White House.

A CNBC poll released last week found the former US vice president leading the incumbent in five of six battleground states, including Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

The decline in national support for Trump can be explained by the president’s chaotic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has taken a heavy toll on American lives and economy.

The United States remains the worst-hit country by the pandemic, with over 5.5 million infections and more than 170,000 deaths.

Trump and his administration have been under fire for an untimely relaxing of lockdown measures as well as a blatant disregard for personal protection equipment since the flu-like pathogen erupted in the US early in January.        

Moreover, police violence and racial injustice protests that followed the brutal murder of unarmed African American George Floyd in police custody have dealt a heavy blow to the president’s approval rating.

The 46-year-old died after a white officer knelt on his neck and pinned him to the ground for nine minutes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25.

His death unleashed protests against police brutality and for racial justice in the US and many world countries, with protesters saying they were hopeful that Floyd’s death would mark a turning point in race relations and police reform the US.

Source: Presstv