President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden participated in competing presidential town halls tonight where they discussed a range of topics, including the coronavirus pandemic, nomination of a Supreme Court justice, the economy and Roe v. Wade.
If you missed both town halls, here are some key moments from each below:
Biden’s town hall:
Trump’s town hall:
Former Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that if he loses the election, he hopes it doesn’t mean America is as divided “as it appears the President wants us to be.”
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked Biden what it would say to him about where America is today if he loses in November.
Biden argued that while Trump has worked to divide the country, he would be a president for all Americans if elected in November.
The former vice president previously told a voter at the town hall that he would hopefully go back to being a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and working with the Biden School of Public Policy and Administration at the University of Delaware, “focusing on the same issues relating to what constitutes decency and honor in this country.” He said those issues are the reason he got involved in politics.
Biden quoted his father, who he said had an expression, “Everyone’s entitled to be treated with dignity.”
“And so, whether I am a defeated candidate for president beck teaching or I am elected president, it is a major element of everything that I am about. Because it reflects who we are as a nation,” Biden said.
Citing his efforts on criminal justice reform, President Trump said he has “done more for the African American community than any president with the exception of Abraham Lincoln,” noting that “a lot of people agree.”
Facts First: This is false.
President Lyndon B. Johnson, for example, signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, monumental bills whose impact dwarfed the impact of any legislation Trump has signed.
It’s also worth mentioning that Black people themselves do not, on the whole, agree with Trump’s self-assessment. Trump has had a consistently abysmal approval rating with Black citizens — just 4% in one recent Quinnipiac University poll, for example, versus 93% disapproval.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said Thursday that he will demand President Trump take a Covid-19 test, and for that test to return negative, before he will participate in a debate.
He added, “I’m less concerned about me, but the people, the guys with the cameras, the people working in the, you know, the secret service guys you drive up with, all those people.”
Trump and Biden are set to debate next Thursday. The second presidential debate originally scheduled for today was canceled after Trump objected to the virtual format announced by the Commission on Presidential Debates put forward after his positive coronavirus diagnosis.
President Trump expanded on a false claim that he’s made previously, saying that “thousands of ballots” had been found in dumpsters.
“Thousands of them are dumped in dumpsters and when you see ballots with the name Trump — military ballots, from our great military, and they’re dumped in garbage cans,” the President said in the NBC town hall.
He went on to claim that the “thousands of ballots” were found with “my name on it.”
Facts First: This is false. There have been two incidents where ballots were found in a dumpster or trash can: 99 ballots heading to voters in New Jersey and nine ballots “incorrectly discarded” by a temporary worker in Pennsylvania.
In New Jersey, the Justice Department charged a mail worker with two felonies for tossing 1,875 pieces of mail that included 99 ballots in two dumpsters. The ballots, which were being sent to voters, were immediately delivered after the US Postal Service learned about them being tossed in the trash.
This isn’t the first time the President has lied about ballots being found in the trash. He’s repeatedly lied about ballots being found in a trash can in Pennsylvania.
According to federal and local authorities, an election worker improperly threw out nine military ballots in Luzerne County. The Justice Department initially said all nine ballots were marked for Trump, then deleted its initial statement and issued a new one saying seven were Trump votes. Local officials said they would try to reach the affected voters and fix the ballots.
Former Vice President Joe Biden slammed President Trump for not helping the jobless after the $600 weekly supplement for unemployment benefits – which Congress passed as part of its $2 trillion relief package — lapsed in late July.
“And then what happened was, when the first round of money for unemployment, enhanced unemployment went by, he didn’t do anything. He didn’t do anything,” Biden said.
Facts first: This is false. The day after congressional talks to extend the federal boost to unemployment benefits collapsed, Trump signed an executive measure to use $44 billion in federal disaster aid to provide $300 a week to the jobless.
The effort provides out-of-work Americans in 49 states and the District of Columbia with these funds for up to six weeks. The money has already been fully distributed in many states.
South Dakota declined to participate in the Lost Wages Assistance program.
Joe Biden on Thursday said he will reverse the Trump administration executive orders that a questioner described as “dangerous and discriminatory.”
Unfurling an old yarn, Biden told the story of seeing two men, “well-dressed,” kissing one another while he was with his father many years ago.
“My dad turned to me,” Biden recalled. “He said, ‘Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.’”
Biden then returned to the present day and declared, “There should be zero discrimination.”
“There is no reason to suggest that there should be any right denied to your daughter,” Biden said, “that your other daughter has a right to be and do. None. Zero.”
The former vice president also noted that his late son Beau Biden, who served as Delaware’s attorney general, backed the state’s first transgender rights law.
“I’m proud of that,” Biden said.
CNN’s Dana Bash said Thursday that President Trump refusal to say if he was tested on the day for the first presidential debate is “not something you forget.”
At Trump’s town hall with NBC, he said he did not recall taking a coronavirus test before the first presidential debate with former Vice President Joe Biden.
“I don’t know, I don’t even remember. I test all the time. I can tell you this. After the debate, like, I guess, a day or so, I think it was Thursday evening, maybe even late Thursday evening, uh, I tested positive. That’s when I first found out,” the President said.
Bash cited former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s statement about the severity of his coronavirus diagnosis and hospitalization and his call for Americans to take the pandemic seriously.
“The leaders of this country, meaning the President, even though he didn’t say it, have to stop being so cavalier about this,” Bash said. “And not getting a test and putting in danger the people who are in that room, including his opponent for the presidency is as cavalier and careless as it can be.”
Answering a question about vaccines, former vice president Joe Biden talked about the coronavirus’ impact on children.
“Children are getting the virus, not with as serious consequences, but we haven’t, there’s been no studies done yet on vaccines for children,” he said.
Facts first: Biden is correct about research in the US, though a leading drugmaker just this week revealed plans to include children in its vaccine research. Pfizer plans to start testing its experimental coronavirus vaccine in children as young as 12, the researcher helping lead the trial told CNN on Tuesday. It will be the first coronavirus vaccine trial to include children in the United States.
NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie, who was moderating President’s Trump town hall, asked about the QAnon-affiliated conspiracy theory Trump had retweeted earlier this week claiming Osama bin Laden was still alive and that the man killed in the raid was a body double.
Trump defended his actions, saying, “That was a retweet. That was an opinion of somebody, and that was a retweet. I’ll put it out there. People can decide for themselves. I don’t take a position.”
Facts First: This is a baseless claim with no evidence to back it up. The facts around the killing of bin Laden are not a debatable opinion.
In the early morning hours of May 2, 2011, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was killed by US Special Forces during a raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A DNA test was conducted, confirming it was bin Laden. He was buried at sea.
Those are the facts.
You can read more of the facts behind this conspiracy theory here.
Joe Biden said that while Donald Trump deserves “a little” credit for some of his foreign policy moves, he does not deserve “a whole lot” because of the way he has hurt the United States’ standing on the international stage.
The response came to a pro-Trump questioner who argued that the Republican leader has scored a host of wins on the international stage. When asked directly is Trump’s foreign police “deserve some credit,” Biden bluntly responded, “A little, but not a whole lot.”
Biden added that he does “compliment the President” on deals he helped strike that had Muslims nations normalizing relations with Israel, but that other than that, “we’re not very well trusted around the world.”
“I would respectfully suggest no, there is no plan, no coherent plan, for foreign policy,” Biden said. “He’s pulled out of almost every international organization, he gets laughed at when he goes to — literally, not figuratively — when he goes to the United Nations.”
A boast Trump delivered during his 2018 speech to the United Nations drew laughs from the international audience.
Confronted with the harm caused by fracking, Biden doubled down on his opposition to a ban on the practice.
He conceded that the emission of methane was a concern, along with small earthquakes caused by drilling, but argued that could be dealt with by being “managed very, very well.”
Biden then pivoted to his support, now and in the past, for renewable energy projects and investment. He pointed to his work, during the Obama administration, on the response to the economic crisis of 2008 and efforts to bring down the cost of wind and solar energy.
“It has great, great promise,” he said. “And it’s also the fastest growing employer in the energy industry.”
Biden’s answer matched his broader framing on most climate change questions, which is to make the argument for clean energy in the context of creating new and better-paying jobs to American workers.
Still, he made sure to distance himself from what he described as “the new green deal,” the ambitious climate and economic framework supported by many progressives.
To the specific concerns about carbon-emitting extraction, Biden focused on “carbon capture” technology that, he said, would allow for a wider transition to green energy to happen while still using “some gasses.”
The goal, he reiterated, is to achieve “net-zero emissions” in the creation of energy – one of the top goals of climate activists across the world.
After hesitating to make the commitment for weeks, President Trump said he would accept a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election, but he continued to sow doubt on the election results and made baseless claims about Obama administration officials spying on his 2016 campaign.
In his exchange with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, he made a variety of false claims about “unsolicited” and “fraudulent ballots.” You can read CNN’s fact checks on thrown out ballots and unsolicited ballots.
Presented with the claim by his own FBI director that there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud, Trump again took a swipe at FBI Director Christopher Wray, saying “oh really? Then he’s not doing a very good job.”
Asked why he seemed to be laying the groundwork for doubt in the election results, the President claimed “I don’t want that to happen.”
“I want it to be clean and I…I really feel we’re going to win, but I want this to be clean,” Trump said.
President Trump vowed to “take care of” the DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, program, an Obama-era program that shields certain undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation, but provided few details.
Trump said months ago during an interview with Telemundo he would be signing a “very major immigration bill” in the form of an executive order, but one has yet to come to fruition. He reiterated Thursday that something “very, very good” was coming.
Asked whether he would pursue his previous efforts to make cuts to the DACA program, he said he would “take care of” the program.
“We are going to take care of DACA. We are going to take care of Dreamers. It’s working right now, we’re negotiating different aspects of immigration and immigration law,” Trump said, touting wall construction at the US-Mexico border.
“We want people to come into our country. They have to come in, legally, but we are working very hard on the DACA program, and you will be, I think, very happy over the course of the next year,” he added.
But pressed by moderator Savannah Guthrie on the fact that his administration has systematically curtailed the program, he blamed the coronavirus pandemic and cases in Mexico, even though there are more cases per 100,000 people in the US.
President Trump said at Thursday’s NBC town hall that he doesn’t expect his Supreme Court nominee, judge Amy Coney Barrett, to rule a certain way on two hot-button issues — a potential case over the results of the 2020 general election or a case revisiting abortion access.
“Believe it or not, I never talked about it,” Trump claimed.
The President also defended his decision to appoint Barrett so close to the presidential election, arguing that, “If you put the shoe on the other foot, if (Democrats) had this, they would do it.”
Trump also asserted that “the whole ball game changed when I saw the way that they treated Justice (Brett) Kavanaugh” — Trump’s previous Supreme Court nominee and now Supreme Court justice, who faced intense scrutiny over allegations of sexual assault during his confirmation.
The President also carefully toed the line on whether the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade, should be overturned. He said he did not tell Barrett how to rule on the issue.
“I think it would be inappropriate to talk to her about it,” Trump said, adding, “I would like to see a brilliant jurist, a brilliant person who has done this in great depth and has actually skirted this issue for a long time, make a decision. And that’s why I chose her. I think that she’s going to make a great decision.”
While most anti-abortion conservatives argue that the the law should be overturned, Trump said he didn’t want to be accused of signaling Barrett either way.
CNN previously reported on several instances where Barrett appeared to advocate for anti-abortion causes.
In 2006, Barrett signed onto a “right to life ad,” sponsored by a group that opposes abortion. Ten years later, Barrett told an audience at Jacksonville University she believed that while Roe wouldn’t be overturned, access to abortion could eventually be limited.
She also initially failed to disclose two talks she gave in 2013 hosted by two anti-abortion student groups on paperwork provided to the Senate ahead of her confirmation hearing to become the next Supreme Court justice.
Watch the moment:
Former vice president Joe Biden claimed that President Donald Trump said injecting bleach could help combat the virus.
“President Trump says things like…crazy stuff he’s walking away from now, ‘inject bleach in your arm and that’s going to work,’” Biden said. “I’m being a bit — I’m not being facetious though; he actually said these things.”
Facts First: This is misleading. Biden was recalling a moment from a Trump briefing that attracted broad derision. Biden, however, overstated some of the specifics.
During an April 23 press briefing, which included a discussion of tests that appeared to show disinfectants like bleach and isopropyl alcohol quickly killed the coronavirus on surfaces in lab studies, Trump expressed interest in exploring the possibility of “injection inside or almost a cleaning” with disinfectants. Here’s what he said:
“(T)hen I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”
President Trump’s town hall with NBC has ended. Trump was pressed by moderator Savannah Guthrie on his coronavirus response, the Supreme Court and immigration.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s town hall on ABC is still on air and will wrap at 9:30 p.m. ET.
Both Trump and Biden’s competing town halls began at 8 p.m. ET.
President Trump claimed the US was “expected to lose 2,200,000 people and maybe more than that” from coronavirus.
Facts First: This is misleading.
Trump is likely citing a report posted in March by scholars from the Imperial College in London that predicted that a total of 2.2 million Americans could die from Covid-19 if no preventative measures were installed on any level of society.
In other words, that would be the loss of lives if no action were taken at all to mitigate it.
The report did not analyze what would happen if just the federal government took no action against the virus but rather what would occur if there were absolutely no “control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour.”
Joe Biden said he is “not a fan” of court-packing, but whether he ultimately seeks to push for more seats on the Supreme Court depends on how Senate Republicans handle the confirmation process of Amy Coney Barrett.
If that does not take place and Republicans rush to confirm Barrett before the election, he said, “I’m open to considering what happens from that point on.”
Biden said he would take a clearer position on court-packing before the election, after seeing how the confirmation process plays out. But he also said he was hesitant to take a specific position at this stage because he wants attention to focus on what confirming Barrett and handing conservatives a 6-3 Supreme Court majority would mean for abortion rights, health care, LGBTQ rights and more.
Here’s the moment:
Joe Biden had biting words for Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump’s most recent nomination to the Supreme Court, on Thursday, faulting her for not directly answering many questions and not laying out “much of a judicial philosophy.”
The Senate held days of hearings on Barrett’s nomination this week, but because Republicans control the legislative body and few appear willing to break with the Republican president.
Biden said, because he was traveling, he was unable to watch the hearings, but had read about them.
The question came from a man named Nathan, who asked about the safeguards in place to ensure LGBTQ rights if another conservative justice is approved.
“I think there’s great reason to be concerned for the LGBTQ,” Biden said. “I fought very hard for a long time to make sure there’s equality across the board.”
Biden said he also has concerns for the future of health care, an issue that is top of mind to a number of voters and the topics that most Democratic senators focused on during their time in the confirmation hearings.
President Trump made a dramatic claim about Covid-19 during Thursday night’s town hall.
“Just the other day, they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks catch it,” Trump said.
It was a repeat of a similar claim he had made two times earlier in the day, citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the source for that number.
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. A CDC study released in September, did not say that 85% of people who wear masks get infected with coronavirus. In fact, it did not even attempt to figure out what percentage of people who wear a mask get infected with the coronavirus.
Rather, the study looked at the behavior of 154 symptomatic people who had tested positive for the coronavirus in July around the country and 160 people who reported symptoms but tested negative in July.
The study found that, of those 154 people, 85% said they had worn a mask either “always” or “often” over the 14 days prior to the onset of their illness. That’s where the 85% figure comes from.
Of the 160 people in the study who had tested negative, however, 88.7% said they had worn a mask either “always” or “often.” So there’s really no difference between people who wore masks and those who didn’t.
And that’s not even the point here.
Trump was suggesting that the CDC found that 85% of all people who wear masks get coronavirus. But the CDC was just looking at the behavior of these 314 symptomatic people who sought out testing at 11 particular sites around the country in July.
Here’s how one of the co-authors, Christopher Lindsell, co-director of the Health Data Science Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, described the study’s data on masks:
Biden on Thursday both defended aspects of the 1994 crime bill, which he authored, and called it a “mistake,” though he blamed some of its most destructive effects on state governments.
From the beginning of the Democratic primary, Biden has sought a middle ground on a law that is now broadly viewed as a root cause of mass incarceration in America.
“The crime bill itself did not have mandatory sentences, except for two things. It had three strikes and you’re out, which I voted against in the crime bill, but it had a lot of things in it that turned out to be both bad and good,” he said, before noting his work on the Violence Against Women Act and an assault weapons ban.
He also pledged again to decriminalize marijuana – a step short of many other Democrats, who want to legalize it on the federal level – and said he wanted to wipe clear the records of anyone who’s been arrested for possession.
When the follow-up questions turned to Biden’s relationship with the police, the former vice president said he still believed – as he did back in 1994 – that more officers on the streets mean less crime. But he qualified that argument, saying it was true only “if, in fact, they’re involved in community policing.”
Biden then said he would convene a “national study group” – including police, social workers and minority communities – to sit down in the White House and work together to sketch out “significant reforms.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee this morning announced it plans to vote to approve Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination next Thursday following her nomination hearings this week where she was grilled on health care, voting rights and abortion.
Democratic senators moved to indefinitely delay the proceedings because millions of Americans are voting for the next president. They argued that there’s never been a Supreme Court justice nominated this close to the election and confirmed before it. The Senate has taken half the average time to consider the nomination.
Republicans disagreed, saying that a Republican president and a Republican-led Senate confirming a conservative justice on the Supreme Court is compliant with the Constitution and the Senate’s history.
Here’s what the confirmation process looks like for the next few days:
Read more here.
President Trump said he is under audit and has been “treated very badly by the IRS.”
Trump’s comments were made in response to questions about his taxes and why he has yet to release his tax records to the public while running for office.
Some context: Trump is personally liable for debts and loans totaling $421 million, The New York Times reported, and most of it comes due in the next four years, an amount that former intelligence officials, Democratic lawmakers and legal experts warn could be used as leverage against him, and in turn, the US itself.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden highlighted his plans to increase funding for low-income schools, help first-time homebuyers make their downpayment and increase small business funding when asked Thursday night why Black people should support him.
A young Black man in ABC’s audience recalled Biden’s flip comment to radio host Charlamagne tha God that if someone was struggling to decide between support him and Trump, “you ain’t Black.”
“Besides ‘you ain’t Black,’” the man asked, how could Biden convince Black voters to take part “in a system that has failed to protect them?”
Biden delivered a lengthy answer that highlighted a number of his economic and educational proposals.
He said he would triple Title I funding for low-income schools from $15 billion per year to $45 billion, as well as provide funding for pre-school options for 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds, and help schools pay for more social workers and psychologists.
Biden also said he would seek a $15,000 credit for first-time homebuyers, telling the man it’s a crucial step toward helping low-income families accumulate wealth.
He pointed to a proposed $70 billion in new funding for historically black colleges and universities, which he said lack the foundational support that other universities with large endowments have.
And he said he would seek to direct funding to young Black entrepreneurs who have trouble obtaining loans.
President Donald Trump didn’t appear to indicate that his recent bout of coronavirus changed his opinion on masks in a contentious exchange during Thursday’s town hall in which he repeatedly invoked misinformation and claimed there were “many different stories” from public health officials.
Infectious disease experts have provided substantial evidence that wearing a mask is one of the most important mitigation strategies. Trump’s own coronavirus task force has promoted the importance wearing of masks, even during small household gatherings.
“I was good with it, but I’ve heard many different stories on masks,” Trump said, launching into a story in which someone served him a meal but had touched his mask and Trump opted not to eat the meal.
“On the masks, you know, you have two stories: You have a story where they want, a story where they don’t want,” Trump said.
Pressed on the fact that a University of Washington model that projects the expected deaths could be cut in half if everyone wore a mask, Trump referenced his adviser Dr. Scott Atlas, whom he described as “one of the great experts of the world,” who has not recommended mask usage. Atlas is a neuroradiologist but not an infectious disease expert.
Trump also suggested an oft-repeated claim that Dr. Anthony Fauci said not to wear masks. Fauci initially didn’t advocate for the wearing of masks due to the possibility of a shortage for frontline healthcare workers, but has since strongly promoted mask usage.
“I say, wear the mask. I’m fine with it. I have no problem. We’re on the same side,” he ultimately said.
In a heated exchange with NBC News’ Savannah Guthrie during Thursday night’s town hall, President Trump once again refused to denounce the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Guthrie asked Trump if he could state that the conspiracy — centered around the belief Democrats run a satanic pedophile ring and that Trump is an anti-pedophilic savior — was not true.
Trump responded, “I know nothing about QAnon.”
“I just told you,” Guthrie said.
Trump fired back, saying, “What you tell me doesn’t necessarily make it fact.”
The President claimed that all he knows about the conspiracy theory movement, which has had a prevalent presence at his campaign rallies, is that “they are very much against pedophelia” and that he agrees with that sentiment.
The President also tried to separate himself from his recent retweet of a conspiracy theory from an account linked to QAnon, which baselessly claimed that former Vice President Joe Biden orchestrated to have Seal Team Six killed to cover up the fake death of Osama bin Laden.
“I know nothing about it,” Trump claimed. “That was a retweet — that was an opinion of somebody. And that was a retweet. I’ll put it out there. People can decide for themselves.”
But Guthrie responded, “I don’t get that. You’re the President. You’re not like someone’s crazy uncle who can retweet whatever.”
Trump has frequently used his social media platform to promote various QAnon-associated accounts and their theories. In August, he went so far as to embrace their support.
“I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate,” Trump said in August.
He has also defended his decision to endorse a Republican congressional candidate in Georgia with history of promoting QAnon theories and making racist and anti-Semitic remarks.
Watch the exchange:
President Trump is conducting a town hall tonight instead of a debate by his choice. But the result was 20 minutes of contentious live grilling with only himself in the spotlight — a rarity for a President who sticks mostly to a friendly bubble of conservative media.
A lawyer by training, moderator Savannah Guthrie would not let up when Trump evaded questions about his coronavirus diagnosis, whether he was tested the day of the debate, his stance on White supremacy, his ties to QAnon or his view of mail-in voting.
Without a rival on the stage, Trump was alone in fielding the questions. And he had no opponent to pepper with his own attacks.
Instead, Trump found himself on the defensive and increasingly angry — including scoffing at a question Guthrie asked by calling her “cute.”
It’s the type of performance some of Trump’s advisers had hoped to avoid, recognizing it’s that type of behavior that has turned off women voters and senior citizens. Trump has appeared more moderated when answering questions from the town hall participants. But his first 20 minutes were the type of contentious and sustained questioning that have been exceedingly rare during his presidency.
President Trump pledged in 2016 to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but that hasn’t happened. Now, his administration is backing a court challenge that’s scheduled for the Supreme Court just after the election in a case brought by a coalition of Republican state attorneys general and the Trump administration, who argue the law’s individual mandate is unconstitutional, and the entire law must fall.
Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett was grilled by Democrats about the health care law during her confirmation hearings this week. Barrett said she had made no commitments to the President or anyone else about how she might rule on a case aimed at dismantling the Affordable Care Act or on a potential dispute in the upcoming presidential election.
If the court wipes away Obamacare, it would have a sweeping impact on the nation’s health care system and on the lives of tens of millions of Americans — not only for the roughly 20 million people who’ve gained coverage on the Affordable Care Act exchanges and through the expansion of Medicaid to low-income adults.
The law is also what allows parents to keep their children on their health insurance plans until age 26 and obtain free mammograms, cholesterol checks and birth control. And one of its most popular provisions is its strong protections for those with pre-existing conditions, including barring insurers from denying coverage or charging higher premiums based on people’s health histories.
Joe Biden said Thursday that his pledge to eliminate the tax cuts that Donald Trump enacted in his first term were aimed only at tax cuts for the wealthy, not the middle class.
Republicans have tried to hammer Biden as someone who wants to raise taxes on the middle class because of his pledge to end the tax cuts signed into law by Trump.
Biden implied that most of that change would focus on the corporate tax rate, something that was cut under Trump.“If you raise the corporate tax back to 28%, which is a fair tax, you’d raise over $1 trillion by that one act,” Biden said. “If you made sure that people making over 400 grand paid what they did in the Bush administration. It goes up to… another $92 billion. So, you can raise a lot of money to be able to invest in things that can make your life easier.”
Trump signed a tax overhaul into law in 2017, early in his first term. The law was Trump’s first major legislative victory of his first year in office.
When ABC’s George Stephanopoulos pushed Biden if he would raise the corporate tax rate even when the economy was struggling, Biden said, “Absolutely.”
Joe Biden on Thursday made it clear that he would not hesitate to receive a coronavirus vaccine once the scientific community signs on to its safety and effectiveness.
Biden took the question as an opportunity to remind viewers of some of Trump’s most shocking and ridiculous statements about potential Covid-19 treatments, specifically when he mused, as Biden described it, about “inject(ing) bleach in your arm.”
Asked if he would mandate that others do the same, Biden did not commit to a position, noting that he – if elected – would not have that power.
As to whether he would do his best to pressure others, Biden said, “It depends on the state of the nature of the vaccine when it comes out and how it’s being distributed.”
“We should be thinking about making it mandatory,” he said, adding that, should that be the decision, he would press “every governor” and, failing that, “every mayor” to pursue a mass vaccination policy in their jurisdictions.
President Trump said he denounced White supremacy tonight during a town hall on NBC after he didn’t do so during the first presidential debate.
The President’s stance on White supremacy became a flash point after the first debate when Trump refused to condemn White supremacists for inciting violence at anti-police brutality demonstrations across the country, claiming instead that violence was coming from “the left wing.”
During that debate, the President instead used his allotted time to blame what he called “Antifa and the left” for violence and to tell the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.”
Joe Biden opened his ABC town hall on Thursday night by describing how he would have handled the coronavirus differently, using the comparison to lambast President Donald Trump for his somewhat uneven response to the virus.
“He missed enormous opportunities and kept saying things that weren’t true,” the Democratic nominee said, noting that Trump’s administration said the virus would go away by Easter or be eradicated by the summer heat.
Biden said his administration would have followed the pandemic plan laid out by Barack Obama’s administration before Trump took office, saying his first move would have been sending Americans to China to get the most up to date knowledge on the virus.
Biden said there should have been more national standards earlier in the pandemic and that the President should be pushing all Americans to use masks as a way to stop the spread. Biden said he would lean on governors, as president, to mandate mask use.
“He didn’t talk about what needed to be done because he kept worrying, in my view, about the stock market,” Biden said of Trump. “He worried if he talked about how bad this could be, unless we took these precautionary actions, then, in fact, the market would go down. And his barometer of success of the economy is the market.”
President Trump said he feels “good” after testing positive for Covid-19 weeks ago and couldn’t recall whether he was tested on the day of the first presidential debate.
Asked again whether he took a test in adherence to rules set by the Commission on Presidential Debates, he said, “I probably did and I took a test the day before.”
Asked once more, he said, “Possibly I did, possibly I didn’t.”
Trump’s remarks were made during his town hall on NBC tonight, adding that he has no Covid-19 symptoms “what so ever.”
Trump also discussed how he felt after contracting the virus.
“I didn’t feel good. I didn’t feel strong. I had a little bit of a temperature,” the President said.
Watch the moment:
Both town halls kicked off with questions about coronavirus. NBC’s Savannah Guthrie asked President Trump about his Covid-19 diagnosis and symptoms. Meanwhile, a voter in ABC News’ town hall asked Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden about Trump’s coronavirus response and what policies he would implement if he were president.
The coronavirus pandemic continues to become a key issue of the 2020 election and shape the campaign as Election Day quickly approaches.
Here are key facts you need to know:
Here’s where new cases are rising across the US in comparison to the previous week:
President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden’s dueling town halls have just kicked off.
The candidates are hoping to connect with voters as Covid-19 cases soar across the US and the President looks for a game-changing moment in a shaky reelection bid.
The plans for the two men to meet face-to-face at a town hall where they would take questions from voters evaporated after Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis, amid fears that he could have exposed Biden and others to the virus during the chaotic first debate.
The Commission on Presidential Debates proposed a virtual debate, but Trump refused — leading Biden to make his own plans with ABC for a solo town hall. Trump’s campaign then arranged for the President to do his own town hall with NBC during the same hour.
We’ll be covering both events live here and fact-checking the candidates’ comments.
Competing town halls tonight will have President Trump and his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, facing tough questions from voters, but viewers at home will be forced to choose which one to watch live.
At 8 p.m. ET, Trump is set to take questions from voters on NBC. Biden will be doing so at the same time on ABC. The Trump town hall lasts an hour; Biden’s lasts 90 minutes.
They were scheduled after the Commission on Presidential Debates canceled Thursday night’s planned town hall-style debate between Biden and Trump in the wake of Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis. The commission sought to shift that debate to a virtual format; Trump rejected the change.
Here are things to watch tonight:
Read more here.
For the first time on camera since her campaign broke the news, Sen. Kamala Harris acknowledged during a virtual voter mobilization event for North Carolina the positive Covid-19 cases of two people in the campaign’s orbit.
The Biden-Harris campaign halted her travel this morning through the weekend after her communications director Liz Allen and a non-staff flight crew member tested positive last night.
Harris was meant to travel to the state today, making two stops in-person— this event included. The campaign rescheduled this event to be virtual and Harris joined today from her home.
Harris, who did two virtual fundraisers earlier today, thanked the crowd for accommodating their last minute change.
“I’m on the road virtually as you can see. I just left Wisconsin to join you in North Carolina and I’ll be back physically on the road on Monday. But I want to thank you all for accommodating the change in schedule and for all that you do. And I remind everybody let’s adhere to the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidelines and be safe and as an extension of loving thy neighbor.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said Thursday that his comments featured out of context in a campaign ad for President Trump were really about the White House coronavirus task force.
Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, appears in the ad about Trump’s coronavirus response saying, “I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more.”
“We were talking about the task force team that in the beginning, way back when things were really on fire – we were working 24 hours a day, day and night – and in that context, I said ‘I don’t think we could have possibly done anything more,’” Fauci explained during a Yahoo News Interview.
Fauci said he’s concerned about his words being taken out of context because he wants to remain entirely apolitical.
“The way that ad went where they quoted me at the end, it was certainly in the context that looked very much like a political endorsement, and I’ve assiduously avoided that for so many years – like, decades,” he said.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden tested negative for coronavirus today.
“Vice President Biden underwent PCR testing for COVID-19 today and COVID-19 was not detected,” the campaign said.
Biden is set to participate in a town hall shortly with ABC at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
A Texas judge on Thursday struck down Gov. Greg Abbott’s order limiting ballot dropboxes to one per county, injecting more uncertainty into the ongoing battle over mail-in voting in the state.
Judge Tim Sulak, a state judge based in Austin, said Abbott’s order “would likely needlessly and unreasonably increase risks of exposure to COVID-19 infections” and “substantially burden potential voters’ constitutionally protected rights to vote, as a consequence of increased travel and delays, among other things.”
The state lawsuit was brought by liberal-leaning groups in Texas.
Some context: The impact of the ruling is unclear. Earlier this week, a federal appeals court upheld Abbott’s order. The state court ruling on Thursday is a separate case, focused on state law.
Elizabeth Lewis, a spokesperson for the Harris County Clerk’s office, told CNN that because of the ongoing legal wrangling, the county is not currently planning to reopen the 11 dropbox locations that it closed after Abbott’s one-dropbox-per-county order went into effect earlier this month.
The office will continue to focus on the sole dropbox location at NRG Stadium in Houston, Lewis said.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton quickly filed a notice of appeal on Thursday, and said the appeal would temporarily pause the new ruling.
Abbott and Paxton are both Republicans, and have defended Texas’ mail-in voting laws, which are among the most restrictive in the country.
Alabama’s attorney general is asking the Supreme Court to step in and put on hold a lower court opinion that blocked the state’s ban on curbside voting during the pandemic.
A federal district court found that the challengers in the case “have shown that the curbside voting ban imposes a significant burden on vulnerable voters during the COVID-19 pandemic.” The district court ruled that the state of Alabama had not provided legitimate reasons to justify the limitation, and an appeals court affirmed the decision.
The lawsuit was brought by a group of elderly and disabled voters as well as the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, and Black Voters Matter. The Alabama secretary of state and attorney general, who are defending the curbside voting ban, are both Republicans.
Lawyers for the state argued in the earlier proceedings that the “spread of the virus has not given unelected federal judges’ a roving commission to rewrite state election codes.”
President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden are participating in competing town halls tonight. The events take place the same day both presidential candidates were originally scheduled to debate.
The second presidential debate was canceled after Trump objected to the virtual format announced by the Commission on Presidential Debates put forward following his positive coronavirus diagnosis.
Here are key things to know about tonight’s events:
You can follow CNN for live coverage of both town halls. CNN.com will have live coverage, analysis and fact checking of the competing town halls all in one place.
More Americans are casting their ballots early than ever before. If that correlates with higher turnout overall — and polling suggests it will — it will be good for democracy.
The higher early voting could also, however, very much affect when we’ll know the winner in key swing states and how soon the election could be called by the major news networks.
States have different deadlines for when absentee or mail ballots must be submitted and when they can be processed. Both of those factors can affect how long it will take for states to count their votes.
It’s no different in the closest six swing states that President Trump won in 2016: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Former Vice President Joe Biden likely needs to win at least two, if not three, of these states to win the presidency.
Based upon the current laws and past trends, of these states, Florida’s probably the one where I think with a reasonable degree of certainty we’ll know who won on election night.
Why? It comes down to when mail ballots must be received and when they can be processed.
Of those six, the law currently states that most ballots must be received by Election Day in Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin.
While the lionshare of the mail votes in each of those states is likely to be submitted long before Election Day, some voters may very well wait it out. A recent Fox News poll in Pennsylvania found, for example, that 10% of likely voters said they’d be voting by mail and submitting their ballot on Election Day.
If the total ends up being that high and the election is close, it will be hard to know who has won in any of those three (Michigan, North Carolina or Pennsylvania) states without seeing the final votes.
Read the full analysis here.
CNN analyst Harry Enten laid out how he plans to watch President Trump and Joe Biden’s dueling town halls tonight:
If you’re looking for more ways to follow the town halls at 8 p.m. ET tonight, here’s how:
Follow CNN for live coverage of both town halls. CNN.com will have live coverage, analysis and fact checking of the competing town halls all in one place.
The Biden town hall will air on ABC, and will stream on ABC News Live, which is available on Hulu, Roku, YouTube TV, Amazon Fire tablets and TV stick, Xumo, Sling TV, Facebook, Twitter, ABCNews.com and the ABC News and ABC mobile apps.
The Trump town hall will air on NBC and across MSNBC, CNBC, NBC News Now and Telemundo’s digital platforms.
The election is only 19 days away, and tonight’s competing town halls will be an opportunity for President Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to answer questions from voters.
The CNN Poll of Polls tracks the national average in the race for president between Trump and Biden. The poll of polls includes the most recent national telephone polls which meet
CNN’s standards for reporting and which measure the views of registered or likely voters. The poll of polls does not have a margin of sampling error.
As of today, this is where the candidates stand in head-to-head polling:
An administrative member of the aviation company that charters Joe Biden’s plane tested positive for Covid-19, according to campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon.
The campaign says that Biden was “not in close contact, as defined by the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], with this individual at any time” and that there is no need for Biden to quarantine.
According to the campaign, the person traveled on the plane during the former vice president’s trip to Ohio on Monday and Florida on Tuesday, and was stationed in the last row of the 737 aircraft — over 50 feet away from Biden — throughout all of the flights.
This distance is well beyond the standard two rows (in front and behind) of distance the CDC generally uses when conducting contact investigations on aircraft for infectious diseases.
Biden tweeted about the member of the company that charters his plane testing positive for Covid-19, saying the discovery was made during the campaign’s contact tracing.
Biden reiterated that the individual was more than 50 feet away and noted as CNN reported earlier, that he was tested for Covid-19 on Wednesday night and it came back negative.
Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff underwent PCR testing for Covid-19 Thursday and Covid-19 was not detected, according to a Harris aide.
Some context: Earlier today the campaign announced that a Harris staffer, as well as non-staff flight crew member, tested positive for the virus.
Greenville, North Carolina — Both Republicans and Democrats who lined up to vote here on Thursday said they decided to come out on the first day of early voting in North Carolina because they harbored serious misgivings about the safety of voting by mail.
The comments come as President Trump attempts to raise questions about the election because of the adoption of mail-in voting due to the coronavirus pandemic. Many of Trump’s comments about mail-in voting are almost entirely unfounded.
But those in line here in Greenville, just a mile from where Trump rallied with supporters, the skepticism crossed party lines.
“I thought it was very important to get out here and vote because I wasn’t sure about mail in voting,” said Teronica Felton from Pitt County. “Things get lost in the mail.”
Felton, a 38-year old Black woman who was voting for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, said she had never voted by mail and wanted “to go with what I knew.”
The line continued to grow for much of the morning at the AG Center in Greenville. Some voters chose to get out of their cars to wait in line and vote in person, while others opted for a drive thru lane that allowed them to stay in their vehicles.
James Brown, a 57-year man who works in food services, declined to say who he planned to vote for, but did say his decision to stand in line on Thursday was motivated by doubts about mail-in voting.
“I don’t believe in mail-in ballots,” he said, adding that he worries that they will actually be counted.
Bernie and Elaine Pittman, two grandparents who are backing Trump, said that they put their concerns about the virus aside when coming to vote.
“We just feel more comfortable coming to the polls,” said Bernie Pittman.
“A lot of it is that we have never done that before, so some of that is we are not comfortable with it. We are older and it is not what we are used to doing,” said Elaine Pittman, who was trying to count 6 feet between people in line. “It’s something psychological.”
CNN’s got answers to your questions about voting — and how Covid-19 is impacting the process. Read up here.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has tested negative for Covid-19 again, his campaign said in a statement.
Biden will be taking questions from voters during an ABC town hall tonight. President Trump will also be participating in a competing town hall tonight on NBC. Both town halls start at 8 p.m. ET.
The Trump town hall lasts an hour; Biden’s lasts 90 minutes.
With 19 days until Election Day, more than 17 million ballots have already been cast in 44 states and the District of Columbia, according to survey of voting data from CNN, Edison Research and Catalist.
Almost 10 million of those votes come from the 16 states that CNN rates the most competitive in the presidential election.
Today is the first day of early voting in the critical state of North Carolina, but mail-in ballots started going out more than a month ago.
Here’s a look at who’s voted so far in the Tar Heel State, according to voting information provided by Catalist, a company that provides data, analytics and other services to Democrats, academics and nonprofit issue-advocacy organizations and is giving new insights into who is voting before November.
Democrats currently hold a wide advantage over Republicans in ballots returned, despite making up nearly 36% of registered voters compared to Republicans’ 30%. Half of North Carolina’s ballots so far have come from Democrats, and only 18% have come from Republicans.
This also marks a sharp difference compared to this point in 2016, when Republicans held a five-point lead over Democrats in their share of pre-election ballots cast.
This data does not predict the outcome of any race, as polling around the country shows Democrats prefer to vote early or by mail, and Republicans prefer to vote in-person on Election Day.
What we know: North Carolina’s voters so far are a more diverse group than they were at this point four years ago.
White voters make up over three-quarters of those who have already voted, and Black voters make up about 17%. Hispanic and Asian voters comprise about 2% of early voters, respectively. Compared to 2016, White voters currently make up a smaller share of those who have voted so far, while Black voters make up a larger share.
The breakdown by age is also different this cycle compared to four years ago. The oldest voters make up a smaller share of the early voting electorate, and the youngest voters make up a larger share.
At this point in 2016, voters 65 or older made up 60% of those who had cast votes; now they make up only 49%. Meanwhile, voters 18-21 made up about a tenth of a percent of those who had already cast ballots in 2016, but now they make up about 3%. Voters 30-39, 40-49 and 50-64 also make up larger shares of the electorate so far, while the share of votes from those 22-29 has dropped slightly from four years ago.
One piece of the early voting breakdown in North Carolina that hasn’t changed much from 2016? Gender.
Women make up about 56% of those who have already cast ballots. At this time four years ago, that number was 57%.
When NBC set out to schedule a television town hall with President Trump, the top priorities were safety and parity with Trump’s challenger Joe Biden.
The network’s Biden town hall went off without a hitch in Miami, Florida on Oct. 5.
NBC’s plans for Trump are almost identical: The same outdoor venue in Miami, the same 8 p.m. time slot, the same 60-minute allotment of time.
But there is one big difference: ABC already announced it will be holding a town hall with Biden at the same time on the same night.
So now NBC is “giving Trump exactly what he wants,” in the words of one exasperated senior staffer: a made-by-TV rivalry between the President and Biden.
NBC is hearing a chorus of criticism for its scheduling decision — from liberal activists, working journalists, professors, former NBC executives, and even some current NBC Entertainment stars.
Some staffers inside NBC News and MSNBC are also perturbed by the decision, with some likening it to collusion between the Trump campaign and the network, sources said. No one from the news division has publicly criticized the move.
The dueling town halls will air tonight at 8 p.m. ET, on the same night that the Commission on Presidential Debates was originally scheduled to hold a town hall-style debate between Trump and Biden.
Now, instead, the two men will talk past each other on competing networks.
“Having dueling town halls is bad for democracy,” former NBC “Today” show star Katie Couric tweeted Wednesday. “Voters should be able to watch both and I don’t think many will. This will be good for Trump because people like to watch his unpredictability. This is a bad decision.”
Read more here
In an interview with “Good Morning Orlando” Thursday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he would stay on as a top US diplomat if President Trump wins re-election.
“Just as a yes or no if you can: President wins reelection – will you stay on as Secretary of State if he wants you to?” he was asked.
For a second day in a row, more than 100,000 voters cast their votes in Harris County, Texas, according to County Clerk Chris Hollins.
“It turns out when you make it easier for people to cast their ballots, they’re more likely to vote. And so we saw a shattering of our early voting records on first day of elections. Just yesterday we topped 100,000 again. We’re seeing no signs of slowing down here. We have nearly 15,000 that have voted just this morning in an hour and a half. And those lines are still moving,” he said.
The precinct commissioner has asked for more voting machines.
“We have machines in our inventory that we are deploying out to locations that need more of them,” Hollins said.
The voter turnout comes as a federal appeals court on Saturday granted a temporary administrative stay, allowing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive for one location per county for ballot drop boxes to remain in place for now.
This has led to voter suppression concerns, and Hollins said the Supreme Court is the only place to appeal this decision right now, but it doesn’t look promising.
“Frankly, it’s unlikely that we’re going to prevail in this matter,” he said. “It’s deeply unfortunate, it’s abuse of the governor’s power to make a county like Harris County, larger than the size of Rhode Island, to have a single drop-off point for our seniors and people with disabilities to be able to drop off their mail ballots. But we’re working to accommodate those voters.”
He added:
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office confirmed to CNN that the state’s elections software vendor, New Orleans-based Civix, had increased bandwidth Wednesday afternoon, resulting in immediate improvements on wait times that were reported by many counties.
There has been a statewide “capacity problem” with Georgia’s eNet system, the database of digital data records of voter registrations, that is used at early voting poll locations to check voters in.
According to Raffensperger’s office, wait times fell from more than three hours to about one hour Wednesday afternoon at several early voting sites in metro Atlanta.
They said there were 377,477 ballots cast in person during the early voting tally as of Wednesday after the polls closed, the third day of early voting in the state.
On Oct. 19, 2016, the end of the third day of early voting four years ago, there were 258,900 ballots cast in person across Georgia.
President Trump said he is “not tested every day” but is “tested a lot” — comments that come as the White House still refuses to say when he last tested negative for Covid-19 before his coronavirus diagnosis.
Asked whether he was tested every day, Trump said this:
He went on to praise his Regeneron treatment, which he again referred to as a “cure.”
Joe Biden will still participate in his scheduled ABC town hall tonight following news that a staffer for his running mate tested positive for Covid-19.
The Biden campaign said the former vice president has not been exposed and will return to in-person campaigning tomorrow. He will still participate in the ABC town hall this evening.
Sen. Kamala Harris was set to travel to North Carolina today, with campaign stops in Asheville and Charlotte. But the trip was called off at the last minute – pool reporters were already on the ground in Asheville when they were informed that Harris will not be traveling there after all, per pool reporters.
Earlier today the campaign announced Harris is suspending travel until Sunday after her communications director, Liz Allen, and a non-staff flight crew member tested positive for coronavirus.
Harris herself has taken two PCR tests since Oct. 8, and her last negative PCR test was October 14th, per O’Malley Dillon.
The campaign said both Allen and the non-staff individual were on a flight with Sen. Harris on October 8. On this flight, the campaign said Harris was wearing an N-95 mask and that she was not within six feet of those two people for more than 15 minutes. Before and after the flight, both individuals tested negative, the campaign said.
Harris County, Texas, has reported more than 240,00 ballots were cast in-person during the first two days of early voting.
Numbers released by the county clerk’s office show that 128,186 votes were cast in person on Wednesday, with an additional 114,996 cast on Thursday.
As CNN previously reported, the number of people casting ballots on Thursday broke a record for the highest number of votes cast on the second day of early voting.
The previous record was in 2016, when 73,542 people voted on the second day.
Between the in-person votes and absentee ballots sent through the mail, the county clerk said a total of 287,531 votes have been cast in the first two days of early voting.
Harris County said nearly 2.4 million people are registered to vote in the county, and the ballots cast so far represent nearly 12% of the registered voter base
There are 122 polling locations open in Harris County, which includes the Houston-metro area.
Early voting in Texas ends on Oct. 30.
Joe Biden’s campaign announced that two people involved in the campaign have tested positive for coronavirus, including vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris’ communications director.
Harris was “not in close contact, as defined by the CDC, with either of these individuals during the two days prior to their positive tests,” the campaign said, adding that because of that, the senator does not need to quarantine.
Regardless, “out of an abundance of caution and in line with our campaign’s commitment to the highest levels of precaution, we are canceling Senator Harris’s travel through Sunday, October 18th,” the campaign said.
Harris has spent the past few days participating in the confirmation hearing of President Trumps’ Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett. Instead of attending in-person in the hearing room, she has video conferenced in.
Neither Allen nor the flight crew staffer have had contact with Biden or Harris since testing positive, his campaign said.
As early voting kicks off in North Carolina, voters are coming to vote in person and many say it’s because they don’t trust the absentee ballot system.
So far, more than 1.3 million North Carolina voters have requested an absentee ballot. Almost 40% of them have already been returned. But state data shows that nearly 7,200 are still under review — meaning the vote hasn’t yet been accepted.
Black voters make up only 16% of the total statewide ballot returns but they account for almost 40% of the ballots listed as pending.
Vincent Gager returned his ballot along with his 83-year-old father’s ballot weeks ago. He has been voting by mail for years, he says. But he was shocked to find out that their ballots have not yet been accepted.
Lee Zacharias submitted her application for an absentee ballot on August 20 in person at the Board of Elections office but she still hasn’t received her ballot. She is hoping to vote by mail for the first time this year.
“It makes me angry,” she said.
Election workers are supposed to notify a voter if they find a problem in their ballot as they review. Most issues can be fixed or cured without having to fill out a new ballot. But due to a slew of lawsuits surrounding what to do with ballots that are missing witness information, the state board told counties to do nothing and just wait for court guidance.
This has left thousands of voters in limbo as Election Day approaches.
“People are losing confidence. They’re losing trust in the election cycle,” says T. Anthony Spearman, a member of the North Carolina Board of Elections.
The White House coronavirus task force expressed concern about virus spread stemming from small household gatherings as coronavirus cases rise across the country and colder months approach.
The warnings come as President Trump continues ignoring precautions as he gathers thousands of mostly maskless supporters at rallies across the country in the final sprint before the election.
Mitigation efforts — wearing a mask, social distancing — in retail settings such as stores and restaurants are working, the task force suggested in its weekly report released to states Tuesday. But the same precautions aren’t being taken as smaller groups of friends and family gather in private home settings, which could be cause for alarm ahead of the winter months and the Thanksgiving holiday.
That messaging was communicated in reports released from the task force to each state this week. The White House has declined to make the reports public but CNN has obtained reports from several states.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told Good Morning America’s George Stephanopoulos on Thursday that he isn’t contemplating further action after being used in an ad for President Trump.
He clarified what he meant when he said the ad could backfire, saying he has “stated without any equivocation” that he is an apolitical person, and he doesn’t like to be associated with anything political – “certainly any political party campaign.”
He said the way the ad juxtaposed him made it look “very much” like he was part of a political campaign.
On Sunday, Fauci told CNN he did not consent to being featured in the Trump team’s new advertisement and that his words were taken out of context.
Dr. Fauci reacts to Trump ad: This is disappointing
Last year, before we even knew who would be the Democratic presidential nominee, the Commission on Presidential Debates scheduled the second of three presidential debates for tonight.
But last week, the commission canceled the event between President Trump and Joe Biden after the President declined to do a virtual debate despite concerns over his Covid-19 diagnosis, organizers said.
Instead of meeting on the same debate stage and directly taking on each other, Biden and Trump will hold individual town halls — both at 8 p.m. ET. Trump’s will air at NBC and Biden’s will be on ABC.
Here’s how we got here: The Commission on Presidential Debates last week announced it was shifting to a virtual debate due to concerns about coronavirus, particularly after Trump’s positive diagnosis with the virus.
Shortly after, the President announced he would not participate in a virtual debate. The Trump campaign then proposed delaying the the town hall debate a week, and pushing the third and final debate a week as well. Biden’s campaign rejected that proposal, and in the meantime, Biden booked a town hall on ABC.
After Trump released letters from his doctor clearing him to resume public activity, his campaign pushed for the in-person debate to be reinstated.
The commission officially canceled the debate last Friday. NBC on Wednesday announced it would hold a town hall with Trump at the same time as Biden’s ABC event.
President Trump will participate in a town hall with NBC News tonight, the network announced yesterday. The event, scheduled for 8 p.m. ET in Miami, will compete with an ABC town hall featuring Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, which is set to begin at the same time.
Biden’s town hall will be held in Philadelphia and moderated by ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos moderated a town hall with President Trump at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia last month.
How we got here: Trump and Biden were originally scheduled to participate in the second presidential debate Thursday night, but the event was eventually canceled after Trump objected to the virtual format announced by the Commission on Presidential Debates in light of Trump’s positive coronavirus diagnosis.
“The event is set to take place outdoors and in accordance with the guidelines set forth by health officials, also consistent with all government regulations,” Hoda Kotb said on NBC’s “Today” show Wednesday ahout Trump’s town hall.
National Institutes of Health Clinical Director Clifford Lane said in a statement to NBC News that they have concluded, via PCR test analysis, “with a high degree of confidence” that Trump is “not shedding infectious virus.”
