Given the age of the two White House contenders, and President Donald Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis, Wednesday’s debate between Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic challenger Kamala Harris is being billed as a critical test in an increasingly acrimonious election campaign.

The televised clash in Salt Lake City, Utah, comes at a precarious moment for the incumbents, less than a week after the president announced he had contracted Covid-19 amid a White House outbreak that has infected numerous high-profile Republicans.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, is ahead of Trump in national polls, enjoying a lead of 12 percentage points in the latest Reuters/Ipsos survey of likely voters, with less than four weeks until the November 3 election.

The traditional view among analysts is that presidential debates are unlikely to dramatically alter the dynamics of a presidential contest – and vice-presidential debates even less so.

Four years ago, only 37 million people tuned in for the debate between Pence and Hillary Clinton’s running mate Tim Kaine, less than half the number of viewers recorded for the first Trump-Clinton face-off.

Source: France 24

President Donald Trump’s positive coronavirus test has undermined his repeated claims that the US is “rounding the turn” in its handling of the pandemic, with just one month to go before the November 3 election.

Trump announced on Friday that he and his wife, Melania, had tested positive for Covid-19, and were going to quarantine at the White House.

Trump is 74 years old, putting him at higher risk of serious complications from the virus.

His physician has said the president is “well” and will continue to perform his duties “without disruption”.

However, even if the president remains asymptomatic, he will likely have to halt in-person campaigning for an unspecified amount of time while he quarantines at the White House.

“It is unclear exactly what that means for a president of the United States, especially for this one who has spent months not wanting to wear a face mask, not wanting to take physical distancing seriously,”

“The White House published a schedule for tomorrow, with various events that he will presumably not be fulfilling. It does beg the question: will he seat a campaign virtually, as his rival Joe Biden has been doing a lot?” Smith added. “Presumably, if Trump is feeling well enough, he would be able to do that.”

Whatever form Trump’s campaign takes in the coming days and weeks, his diagnosis has seriously undermined his attempts to downplay the pandemic and refocus the race on other issues.

In the past, Trump has wrongfully predicted that the coronavirus “is going to disappear”, and even questioned scientists who contradicted his assertions in public.

‘This could be a really significant blow’

Trump has also largely ignored his own government’s public health guidelines, refusing to wear a mask or observe social distancing.

At the first presidential debate in Cleveland, Ohio, earlier this week, Trump even mocked his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, for the size of his mask.

“Every time you see him, he’s got a mask,” Trump said of his opponent. “He could be speaking 200 feet away… And he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.”

With a number of polls showing that a majority of Americans disapprove Trump’s handling of the pandemic — which has claimed at least 207,000 lives in the United States — his diagnosis will likely only compound this opinion.

“This was a day many people feared, many people saw coming, many people thought may well happen, because he was continuing to hold campaign rallies, a couple of them indoors. He was defying often his own public health guidelines on the coronavirus,” Smith said.

Trump’s positive test result certainly complicates his ability to effectively campaign against Biden, who is currently leading in the polls.

“We’ve seen Trump really thrives off the energy of crowds, of holding big events. It gives him a sense of momentum,” Smith said. “This could be a really significant blow to a presidential campaign that is already struggling with Joe Biden well ahead in the polls.”

It is also unclear how Trump’s positive test will affect arrangements for the second presidential debate, which is scheduled for October 15 in Miami, Florida.

Source: France 24

The presidential debate commission says it will soon adopt changes to its format to avoid a repeat of the disjointed first meeting between President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden.

The commission said Wednesday the debate “made clear that additional structure should be added to the format of the remaining debates to ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues.”

One possibility being discussed is to give the moderator the ability to cut off the microphone of one of the debate participants while his opponent is talking, according to a person familiar with the deliberations who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The next presidential debate is a town hall format scheduled for Oct. 15 in Miami.

Moderator Chris Wallace struggled to gain control of the 90-minute debate in Cleveland because of frequent interruptions, primarily by Trump.

Wallace, of Fox News, pleaded for a more orderly debate, at one point looking at Trump and saying, “the country would be better served if we allowed both people to speak with fewer interruptions. I’m appealing to you, sir, to do that.”

“Ask him, too,” Trump said.

“Well, frankly, you’ve been doing more interrupting than he has,” Wallace said.

 Biden on Wednesday called the debate “a national embarrassment.” But despite some suggestions that the final two presidential encounters be canceled, both campaigns said they expected their candidate to attend.

ABC News’ Martha Raddatz, who moderated one of the three debates between Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, said Wallace was put in nearly an impossible situation. Faced with the same behavior, she said she might have called a full stop to the debate for a moment to recalibrate.

She never had the option, technically, to cut off the microphone of a candidate four years ago, she said. It also wasn’t in the rules that were agreed to in advance by the candidates and commission.

“To say, ‘he’s not going to follow the rules so we aren’t, either?’ It’s an unprecedented situation,” Raddatz said. “That was so out of control.”

Twitter was ablaze with criticism for Wallace early in the debate for losing control of the proceedings. That was illustrated by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, who tweeted “what is Chris Wallace doing? He has no control over the debate. He asks a question and let’s Trump continue yelling. This is a disgrace.”

By the time he was on “Morning Joe” the next morning, Scarborough had cooled off. He called on the debate commission to act.

“While it was extraordinarily frustrating, I think all of us need to walk a mile in his shoes before saying the morning after, ‘he could have done this, he could have done that,’” Scarborough said.

Some of the president’s supporters felt that Wallace was too hard on their candidate. Trump himself suggested he was also debating Wallace, “but that’s no surprise.”

Wallace even got some criticism from opinion personalities on his own network. “Trump is debating the moderator and Biden,” prime-time host Laura Ingraham tweeted during the debate.

Another Fox colleague, Geraldo Rivera, expressed more sympathy.

“The guy signed up to moderate a debate and he ended up trying to referee a knife fight,” he said.

Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday,” was not immediately made available for comment by Fox.

Wallace is the only presidential debate moderator this cycle with prior experience, after receiving praise for handling the final Clinton-Trump debate in 2016. The other two moderators are Steve Scully of C-SPAN and Kristen Welker of NBC News.

Scully moderates the Miami debate, which will be a town hall format where citizens get to ask questions. That format may make interruptions more difficult.

“Having prepared for these, the town hall is a completely different event in the debate Olympics,” tweeted David Plouffe, an adviser to former President Barack Obama. “If Trump brings the same nastiness to Florida, it will be doubly painful to watch but it will be doubly painful for him politically.”

The Nielsen company’s estimate on how many people watched Tuesday’s debate was expected later Wednesday.

(AP)

The first debate between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden was an “embarrassment” to the United States, says Anthony Scaramucci, who briefly served as Trump’s White House communications chief.

Their 90-minute debate, the first of three debates ahead of the 2020 presidential election in November, was held in a venue in Cleveland, Ohio. The other two debates are scheduled on Oct. 15 and Oct. 22. 

During the debate, the two politicians kept interrupting each other and trading insults, with the moderator, Fox News’ Chris Wallace, struggling to maintain control over the debate proceedings.

“I don’t think anybody won. That debate, you know, was a little bit of an embarrassment to the country, frankly,” Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of Skybridge Capital, told CNBC’s “Capital Connection” on Wednesday.

“I didn’t like it, I think most people didn’t like that debate,” he said, noting that there must be a better system to control how upcoming debates are held.

Although US stock futures fell following the debate, Scaramucci said what the markets thought of the debate will only become clearer the next morning.

“I just think it’s a little fickle right now,” said the former White House communications director fired by Trump in 2017 less than two weeks into the job.

“We all saw the debate, it was a nasty debate, it was an interrupting match if you will,” he added. “I don’t think the polls are going to move that much and if the markets have moved because of the debate, it will settle out over the next open if you will.”

Scaramucci, who has previously thrown his support behind Biden, told CNBC that he still believes the former vice president will win the race for the White House.

He said he did not think that Americans are better off in comparison to four years ago when Trump was first elected due to the health and economic crises that resulted from the coronavirus pandemic.

He went on to say that even though Trump cannot be blamed for the pandemic, “you can blame him for the way he’s handled it.”

Scaramucci also described Biden a more likeable figure compared to Trump. “The vice president has the momentum and he’s less polarizing than Donald Trump,” said Scaramucci. “I think the vice president’s gonna beat him.”

Source: Presstv

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)