US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday differences remain with President Donald Trump's administration on a wide-ranging coronavirus relief package. She is, however, optimistic that legislation could be pushed through before Election Day.

Pelosi said she wanted a bill passed before the US presidential election between Republican Trump and Democrat Joe Biden but acknowledged an agreement would have to come within 48 hours for that to happen.

"I'm optimistic because, again, we've been back and forth on all of this," Pelosi said in an interview with ABC's "This Week."

"They took out 55% of the language that we had there for testing and tracing. And the tracing part is so important because communities of color had been disproportionately affected by this," Pelosi said on ABC.

"We don't have agreement on the language yet. But I'm hopeful."

However, with her negotiating partner, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, in the Middle East until Tuesday, a deal appears to be a long shot.

The White House proposed a $1.8 trillion stimulus last week to help Americans struggling with the economic ravages of the coronavirus pandemic. Pelosi said the offer fell short in a range of areas including tax credits for poor people, aid to state and local governments, worker protections and rent help. She has stuck to her demand for a $2.2 trillion aid and stimulus package.

The Republicans who control the Senate, however, are loath to pass another giant relief bill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate would vote next week on relief measures totaling more than $500 billion to target specific areas of need. Democrats have rejected so-called skinny bills with pared-down funding, saying much more is needed.

After Mnuchin said last week the White House broadly accepted Democrats' language on testing, it was clear the devil was in the details.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday differences remain with President Donald Trump's administration on a wide-ranging coronavirus relief package. She is, however, optimistic that legislation could be pushed through before Election Day.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday differences remain with President Donald Trump's administration on a wide-ranging coronavirus relief package. She is, however, optimistic that legislation could be pushed through before Election Day. Pelosi said she wanted a bill passed before the US presidential election between Republican Trump and Democrat Joe Biden but acknowledged an agreement would have to come within 48 hours for that to happen. "I'm optimistic because, again, we've been back and forth on all of this," Pelosi said in an interview with ABC's "This Week." "They took out 55% of the language that we had there for testing and tracing. And the tracing part is so important because communities of color had been disproportionately affected by this," Pelosi said on ABC. "We don't have agreement on the language yet. But I'm hopeful." However, with her negotiating partner, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, in the Middle East until Tuesday, a deal appears to be a long shot. The White House proposed a $1.8 trillion stimulus last week to help Americans struggling with the economic ravages of the coronavirus pandemic. Pelosi said the offer fell short in a range of areas including tax credits for poor people, aid to state and local governments, worker protections and rent help. She has stuck to her demand for a $2.2 trillion aid and stimulus package. The Republicans who control the Senate, however, are loath to pass another giant relief bill. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Senate would vote next week on relief measures totaling more than $500 billion to target specific areas of need. Democrats have rejected so-called skinny bills with pared-down funding, saying much more is needed. After Mnuchin said last week the White House broadly accepted Democrats' language on testing, it was clear the devil was in the details.

Pelosi sets 48-hour deadline to approve stimulus deal before US election

It is a phrase that has been constantly invoked by Democratic and Republican leaders. It has become the clearest symbol of the mood of the country, and what people feel is at stake in <a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election?page=1">November</a>. Everyone, it seems, is fighting for it.

“This campaign isn’t just about winning votes. It’s about winning the heart and, yes, the soul of America,” Joe Biden said in August at the Democratic National Convention, not long after the phrase “battle for the soul of America” appeared at the top of his campaign website, right next to his name.

Picking up on this, a recent Trump campaign ad spliced videos of Democrats invoking “the soul” of America, followed by images of clashes between protesters and police and the words “Save America’s Soul,” with a request to text “SOUL” to make a campaign contribution.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/i-may-have-to-leave-country-donald-trump-says-about-losing-to-biden-in-us-election-336195">Also read|&nbsp;'I may have to leave country': Donald Trump says about losing to Biden in US election</a>

That the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election?page=1">election</a> has become a referendum on the soul of the nation, suggests that in an increasingly secular country, voting has become a reflection of one’s individual morality — and that the outcome hinges in part on spiritual and philosophical questions that transcend politics: What, exactly, is the soul of the nation? What is the state of it? And what would it mean to save it?

The answers go beyond a campaign slogan, beyond politics and November, to the identity and future of the American experiment itself, especially now, with a pandemic that has wearied the country’s spirit.

“When I think of soul of the nation,” Joy Harjo, the U.S. poet laureate and a Muscogee (Creek) Nation member, said, “I think of the process of becoming, and what it is we want to become. That is where it gets tricky, and that is where I think we have reached a stalemate right now. What do people want to become?”

Harjo said the country’s soul was “at a crucial point.”

“It is like everything is broken at once,” she said. “We are at a point of great wounding, where everyone is standing and looking within themselves and each other.”

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/biden-sets-fundraising-record-with-383-mn-in-september-336026">Also read|&nbsp;Biden sets fundraising record with $383 mn in September</a>

In Carlsbad, California, Marlo Tucker, the state director for Concerned Women for America, has been meeting regularly to pray with a group of a dozen or so women about the future of the country. The group has been working with other conservative Christian women to register voters.

“It really comes down to what do you stand for, and what do you not stand for,” she said.

“I know this is a Christian nation, the Founding Fathers were influenced by the biblical values,” she said. “People are confused, they are influenced by this sensationalism, they are angry, they are frustrated. They are searching for hope again in government, they are searching for leaders who actually care for their problems.”

Framing an entire campaign explicitly around a moral imperative — with language so rooted in Christianity — has been a standard part of the Republican playbook for decades. But it is a more unusual move for Democrats, who typically attract a more religiously diverse coalition.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/new-trump-golf-course-in-scotland-gets-go-ahead-despite-environmental-fears-336118">Also read|&nbsp;New Trump golf course in Scotland gets go ahead despite environmental fears&nbsp;</a>

The soul, and the soul of the body politic, is an ancient philosophical and theological concept, one of the deepest ways humans have understood their individual identity, and their life together.

In biblical Hebrew the words translated as soul, nefesh and neshama, come from a root meaning “to breathe.” The Genesis story describes God breathing into the nostrils of man, making him human.

The meaning echoes through today, in a pandemic that attacks the respiratory system and in police violence against Black people crying out, “I can’t breathe.”

Homeric poets saw the soul as the thing humans risk in battle, or the thing that distinguishes life from death. Plato wrote of Socrates exploring the connection between the soul and the republic in creating the virtue of justice. For St. Augustine, who wrote “The City of God,” the city could be judged by what it loves.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/opinions-blogs/why-trumps-supporters-loved-him-336262">Also read|&nbsp;Why Trump’s supporters loved him</a>

The soul of the nation is “a very ancient trope that is revived when all sorts of cultural ideas are in flux,” Eric Gregory, professor of religion at Princeton University, said. “It reveals something about the current political conversation, in times of crisis and change, a corruption of sickness.”

Often we stress systems and institutions, he said, but in the Trump era there has been a return to ancient concepts about the welfare of the city, where politics is about right relationships. “In ancient politics the health of society had a lot to do with the virtue of the ruler,” Gregory said.

In the United States, the question of who could define the soul of the nation was fraught from the start, from the forced displacement of native people to the enslavement of Africans.

And the state of the soul of the nation has often been tied to the country’s oppression of Black people. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass fought for an “invincible abhorrence of the whole system of slaveholding” to be “fixed in the soul of the nation.” Lyndon B. Johnson said the country found its “soul of honor” on the fields of Gettysburg. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders formed what is now the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, they made their founding motto “to save the soul of America.”

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-and-biden-to-court-early-voters-as-us-campaign-gathers-steam-336224">Also read|&nbsp;Trump and Biden to court early voters as US campaign gathers steam</a>

This year President Donald Trump has positioned himself as the defender of a threatened Christian America under siege. “In America, we don’t turn to government to restore our souls, we put our faith in Almighty God,” he said at the Republican National Convention. Franklin Graham, one of his evangelical supporters, wrote last year that this age is “a battle for the soul of the nation,” as the original “moral and spiritual framework, which has held our nation together for 243 years, is now unraveling.”

For Biden, the soul of the nation came into focus after the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, three years ago. “We have to show the world America is still a beacon of light,” he wrote at the time.

From the start, his campaign message has been one of broader morality, versus specific policy or ideology. When Biden says this is a battle for the soul of the nation, he is not using it religiously but as a synonym for character, said presidential historian Jon Meacham, who has spoken often with Biden about the soul.

“People hear it as light versus dark, service versus selfishness, Trump versus the rest of the world,” he said.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/entertainment/avengers-team-to-reunite-for-joe-biden-virtual-campaign-hosted-by-russo-brothers-336208">Also read|&nbsp;'Avengers' team to reunite for Joe Biden virtual campaign hosted by Russo Brothers</a>

“My sense is, it is much less about an Elizabeth Warren 10-point plan, or a Bernie Sanders revolution than it is a restoration of a politics that is more familiar and not so agitating,” he said. Voters “just want somebody to run the damn thing with a modicum of efficiency and sanity.”

But even amid the lofty questions of the soul, voters have problems they want solved, and systems they want changed.

North of Boston, Andrew DeFranza, executive director of Harborlight Community Partners, an organization that develops affordable housing, reflected on the disastrous impact of the coronavirus pandemic for many people, from essential workers to people with disabilities. The country’s soul is disoriented, adversarial and tired, he said.

“I don’t think Group A is going to beat Group B and everything is going to be fine,” he said of the election. “We are eager to see political leaders at every level regardless of party demonstrate concrete, actionable plans to address these issues of inequity around health and race, and to do so in a way that is concrete and has outcomes to which they can be accountable.”

In East Harlem, Dorlimar Lebrón Malavé leads First Spanish United Methodist Church, a congregation that serves many immigrants and Puerto Rican families.

“Does this country even have a soul?” she asked. “For me, I think the soul of this country has been lost for a long time.”

Though the current moment seems so dystopian, she said, it felt like a new spirit was emerging. She remembered the creation story in Genesis.

“From a religious standpoint, God created out of chaos. There wasn’t something that was existing before and was reformed,” she said. “When people talk about reforming police, there is no reforming police, there is an opportunity to abolish it and to create something new, from scratch.”

Lebrón Malavé sighed when she thought of Biden’s emphasis on restoring the soul with little concrete discussion of policies.

“People want to hear that there is something left to fight for because it is so hard for us to imagine what it would have to be like to dismantle the whole thing,” she said. “He is appealing to a particular mindset of people who were not taught to fathom a possibility of a new world outside of what we already know.”

For others, the soul is where it all begins.

In Kenosha, Wisconsin, not long after a police officer shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, leaving him paralyzed, a group of interfaith clergy held a prayer service in a parking lot, under a clear blue sky.

“The soul of Kenosha is at stake,” Patrick Roberts of First Baptist Church said to the gathering.

He shared his rare experience of being a Black pastor of a majority-white congregation. Sunday morning remains one of the most segregated hours in the country, he said, and healing the soul of the community would require more than simply a social program or a jobs program for the unemployed.

You would know the soul was healed, he said, when a person of any race could walk anywhere in Kenosha and feel safe.

Later, in an interview, he reflected on Biden’s campaign promise.

“We don’t know the policies he will come up with,” he said. “I think he is just talking on basic terms, getting back to terms of human decency, interaction that is respectable, regardless of your income, your ideology, your color.”

“For me,” he said, “that is good enough.”

It is a phrase that has been constantly invoked by Democratic and Republican leaders. It has become the clearest symbol of the mood of the country, and what people feel is at stake in November.

It is a phrase that has been constantly invoked by Democratic and Republican leaders. It has become the clearest symbol of the mood of the country, and what people feel is at stake in November. Everyone, it seems, is fighting for it. “This campaign isn’t just about winning votes. It’s about winning the heart and, yes, the soul of America,” Joe Biden said in August at the Democratic National Convention, not long after the phrase “battle for the soul of America” appeared at the top of his campaign website, right next to his name. Picking up on this, a recent Trump campaign ad spliced videos of Democrats invoking “the soul” of America, followed by images of clashes between protesters and police and the words “Save America’s Soul,” with a request to text “SOUL” to make a campaign contribution. Also read| 'I may have to leave country': Donald Trump says about losing to Biden in US election That the election has become a referendum on the soul of the nation, suggests that in an increasingly secular country, voting has become a reflection of one’s individual morality — and that the outcome hinges in part on spiritual and philosophical questions that transcend politics: What, exactly, is the soul of the nation? What is the state of it? And what would it mean to save it? The answers go beyond a campaign slogan, beyond politics and November, to the identity and future of the American experiment itself, especially now, with a pandemic that has wearied the country’s spirit. “When I think of soul of the nation,” Joy Harjo, the U.S. poet laureate and a Muscogee (Creek) Nation member, said, “I think of the process of becoming, and what it is we want to become. That is where it gets tricky, and that is where I think we have reached a stalemate right now. What do people want to become?” Harjo said the country’s soul was “at a crucial point.” “It is like everything is broken at once,” she said. “We are at a point of great wounding, where everyone is standing and looking within themselves and each other.” Also read| Biden sets fundraising record with $383 mn in September In Carlsbad, California, Marlo Tucker, the state director for Concerned Women for America, has been meeting regularly to pray with a group of a dozen or so women about the future of the country. The group has been working with other conservative Christian women to register voters. “It really comes down to what do you stand for, and what do you not stand for,” she said. “I know this is a Christian nation, the Founding Fathers were influenced by the biblical values,” she said. “People are confused, they are influenced by this sensationalism, they are angry, they are frustrated. They are searching for hope again in government, they are searching for leaders who actually care for their problems.” Framing an entire campaign explicitly around a moral imperative — with language so rooted in Christianity — has been a standard part of the Republican playbook for decades. But it is a more unusual move for Democrats, who typically attract a more religiously diverse coalition. Also read| New Trump golf course in Scotland gets go ahead despite environmental fears The soul, and the soul of the body politic, is an ancient philosophical and theological concept, one of the deepest ways humans have understood their individual identity, and their life together. In biblical Hebrew the words translated as soul, nefesh and neshama, come from a root meaning “to breathe.” The Genesis story describes God breathing into the nostrils of man, making him human. The meaning echoes through today, in a pandemic that attacks the respiratory system and in police violence against Black people crying out, “I can’t breathe.” Homeric poets saw the soul as the thing humans risk in battle, or the thing that distinguishes life from death. Plato wrote of Socrates exploring the connection between the soul and the republic in creating the virtue of justice. For St. Augustine, who wrote “The City of God,” the city could be judged by what it loves. Also read| Why Trump’s supporters loved him The soul of the nation is “a very ancient trope that is revived when all sorts of cultural ideas are in flux,” Eric Gregory, professor of religion at Princeton University, said. “It reveals something about the current political conversation, in times of crisis and change, a corruption of sickness.” Often we stress systems and institutions, he said, but in the Trump era there has been a return to ancient concepts about the welfare of the city, where politics is about right relationships. “In ancient politics the health of society had a lot to do with the virtue of the ruler,” Gregory said. In the United States, the question of who could define the soul of the nation was fraught from the start, from the forced displacement of native people to the enslavement of Africans. And the state of the soul of the nation has often been tied to the country’s oppression of Black people. Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass fought for an “invincible abhorrence of the whole system of slaveholding” to be “fixed in the soul of the nation.” Lyndon B. Johnson said the country found its “soul of honor” on the fields of Gettysburg. When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders formed what is now the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, they made their founding motto “to save the soul of America.” Also read| Trump and Biden to court early voters as US campaign gathers steam This year President Donald Trump has positioned himself as the defender of a threatened Christian America under siege. “In America, we don’t turn to government to restore our souls, we put our faith in Almighty God,” he said at the Republican National Convention. Franklin Graham, one of his evangelical supporters, wrote last year that this age is “a battle for the soul of the nation,” as the original “moral and spiritual framework, which has held our nation together for 243 years, is now unraveling.” For Biden, the soul of the nation came into focus after the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, three years ago. “We have to show the world America is still a beacon of light,” he wrote at the time. From the start, his campaign message has been one of broader morality, versus specific policy or ideology. When Biden says this is a battle for the soul of the nation, he is not using it religiously but as a synonym for character, said presidential historian Jon Meacham, who has spoken often with Biden about the soul. “People hear it as light versus dark, service versus selfishness, Trump versus the rest of the world,” he said. Also read| 'Avengers' team to reunite for Joe Biden virtual campaign hosted by Russo Brothers “My sense is, it is much less about an Elizabeth Warren 10-point plan, or a Bernie Sanders revolution than it is a restoration of a politics that is more familiar and not so agitating,” he said. Voters “just want somebody to run the damn thing with a modicum of efficiency and sanity.” But even amid the lofty questions of the soul, voters have problems they want solved, and systems they want changed. North of Boston, Andrew DeFranza, executive director of Harborlight Community Partners, an organization that develops affordable housing, reflected on the disastrous impact of the coronavirus pandemic for many people, from essential workers to people with disabilities. The country’s soul is disoriented, adversarial and tired, he said. “I don’t think Group A is going to beat Group B and everything is going to be fine,” he said of the election. “We are eager to see political leaders at every level regardless of party demonstrate concrete, actionable plans to address these issues of inequity around health and race, and to do so in a way that is concrete and has outcomes to which they can be accountable.” In East Harlem, Dorlimar Lebrón Malavé leads First Spanish United Methodist Church, a congregation that serves many immigrants and Puerto Rican families. “Does this country even have a soul?” she asked. “For me, I think the soul of this country has been lost for a long time.” Though the current moment seems so dystopian, she said, it felt like a new spirit was emerging. She remembered the creation story in Genesis. “From a religious standpoint, God created out of chaos. There wasn’t something that was existing before and was reformed,” she said. “When people talk about reforming police, there is no reforming police, there is an opportunity to abolish it and to create something new, from scratch.” Lebrón Malavé sighed when she thought of Biden’s emphasis on restoring the soul with little concrete discussion of policies. “People want to hear that there is something left to fight for because it is so hard for us to imagine what it would have to be like to dismantle the whole thing,” she said. “He is appealing to a particular mindset of people who were not taught to fathom a possibility of a new world outside of what we already know.” For others, the soul is where it all begins. In Kenosha, Wisconsin, not long after a police officer shot a Black man, Jacob Blake, leaving him paralyzed, a group of interfaith clergy held a prayer service in a parking lot, under a clear blue sky. “The soul of Kenosha is at stake,” Patrick Roberts of First Baptist Church said to the gathering. He shared his rare experience of being a Black pastor of a majority-white congregation. Sunday morning remains one of the most segregated hours in the country, he said, and healing the soul of the community would require more than simply a social program or a jobs program for the unemployed. You would know the soul was healed, he said, when a person of any race could walk anywhere in Kenosha and feel safe. Later, in an interview, he reflected on Biden’s campaign promise. “We don’t know the policies he will come up with,” he said. “I think he is just talking on basic terms, getting back to terms of human decency, interaction that is respectable, regardless of your income, your ideology, your color.” “For me,” he said, “that is good enough.”

Biden and Trump say they’re fighting for America’s ‘soul.’ What does that mean?

The Trump presidency has been such a five-alarm fire that many people are understandably consumed with trying to put out the flames or simply survive it. But there will come a day, hopefully in the not too distant future, when people have the breathing room to investigate how the fire got started.

It’s tempting to heap scorn and blame on President Donald Trump’s millions of enthusiastic supporters. Without their adoration, he wouldn’t have been able to do the damage he has done. But there are good reasons to refrain. Calling large swaths of the American electorate deplorable turns out to be an ineffective way to gain their backing.

Another reason: The mess the nation faces is bigger than Donald Trump. If he is voted out in November, the people who cast ballots for him will remain, pining for the policies he promoted. About 40% of American voters want tariffs and a border wall. More than half say it’s important to deport more undocumented immigrants.

Much ink has been spilled about whether Trump supporters voted for him out of economic anxiety or racial anxiety, with plenty of studies concluding the latter. But spend time at a dying factory and you might see how difficult it can be to disentangle the two.

For the past four years, I’ve followed a group of steelworkers in Indiana — men and women, Black and white — who had worked at a factory that moved to Mexico. I watched them agonize about whether to train their Mexican replacements or stand with their union and refuse. I watched them grieve the plant like a parent. I followed them as they applied for new jobs, some of which paid half as much as they made before.

A machinist named Tim carried his steelworker union card in his wallet for years after the factory closed, just to remind himself who he was. Tim grew up in a union household. His dad had been an autoworker; his grandfather, a coal miner.

“We always voted Democrat because they looked after the little man,” Tim told me. “My father went to his grave and I can guarantee you he never voted for a Republican.”

Tim had such faith in Democrats that he didn’t worry when President Bill Clinton pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement over the finish line in 1993. Nor did he worry when Clinton normalized trade with China in 2000. But then the factory where Tim worked moved to Shanghai. And the next one moved to Mexico.

By the time I met Tim, he loathed the Clintons and the Democratic Party. Democrats had gotten in bed with the corporations, while no one was looking. Tim felt betrayed, and politically abandoned — until Trump came along.

College-educated people scoffed at Trump’s promises to bring back the factories. &lt;em&gt;The factories are never coming back&lt;/em&gt;, they insisted. But even false hope is a form of hope, perhaps the most ubiquitous kind.

There is little doubt that Trump is president today because of blue-collar people like Tim who were once a reliable pillar of the Democratic Party. About 55% of voters who expected to support Trump during the 2016 primaries identified as working class, according to a 2015 study by the Public Religion Research Institute. Fewer than a third who backed other Republican candidates identified as such.

In Mahoning County, Ohio, more than a quarter of people who voted in the Republican primary were ex-Democrats, according to The Washington Post. Eighteen members of the county’s Democratic central committee crossed over to cast ballots for Trump, the county’s Democratic chairman told The Post.

Those defections stemmed in part from anger over millions of factory jobs that went to China in the 2000s. Workers who made instrument panels for GM trucks in Michigan, stitched shirts in Pennsylvania and sanded wooden dressers in North Carolina saw alarming increases in child poverty, single motherhood, deaths from alcohol and drugs and reliance on public assistance.

Exposure to trade with China led to “sizable increases in the likelihood of GOP victory in majority-white non-Hispanic congressional districts from 2002-2010,” said a study co-written by David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hillary Clinton would have won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — and thus the presidency — in 2016 had the economic blow of imports from China been half as big, the report concluded.

It is worth noting that many of those same counties that hemorrhaged factory jobs also saw large increases in undocumented immigrants competing for the unskilled jobs that remained — cleaning hotel rooms, slaughtering chickens and mowing lawns. Their arrival fueled still more resentment of the world beyond America’s borders.

Anger about globalization is not confined to the right. It fueled the rise of Bernie Sanders, who won the endorsement of the steelworkers I followed. The same week I met Tim, I interviewed an anarchist facing criminal charges for his role in the disruption of Trump’s inauguration when windows were smashed and a limousine was set on fire. Why had he became an anarchist? NAFTA and the tyranny of global capitalism, he said.

To many, that anger can seem silly or misplaced. Free trade and globalization have undoubtedly made the country richer. But those riches have flowed disproportionately to the few with capital and education, while globalization’s downsides have piled on the shoulders of the most vulnerable Americans.

NAFTA has come to symbolize a world order crafted by elites, for elites. The deal traded away blue-collar factory jobs in exchange for white-collar opportunities to invest in Mexico’s banking and insurance sectors. Today, even its biggest supporters admit that it resulted in a net loss of American jobs.

In hindsight, it seems inevitable that globalization would cause a backlash. During the height of euphoria about free trade in the 1990s, philosopher Richard Rorty predicted that workers “will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported.” At that point, he wrote, parts of the electorate “will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”

In countries from Britain to Brazil, voters have elected leaders who promised to reverse decades of international economic integration. Most of those populist movements are right wing. The rebellion against free trade and globalization has largely taken the left by surprise. Dani Rodrik, an economics professor at Harvard who is perhaps the country’s most prominent skeptic of unfettered globalization, lamented in an article a few months before Trump’s election that left-wing parties around the world had failed to present viable alternatives to protectionism and walls.

Since then, the landscape has changed. Joe Biden, who once wholeheartedly embraced free trade, acknowledges the harm it’s inflicted on the working class. Biden’s economic plan includes a 10% tax on businesses that send manufacturing offshore, and a 10% tax credit for companies that bolster job growth inside the United States. He has also put forth a plan to spend $2 trillion over four years on green energy infrastructure.

“Biden, the nominally centrist candidate, has a platform that is far more progressive than Hillary Clinton’s on economics,” Rodrik told me in an email. “But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and we will see whether Biden will deliver real change if elected.”

Many Americans who longed for a strongman will vote for Trump again. They revere him for tearing up NAFTA (even if the new version looks an awful lot like the old one) and slapping tariffs on Chinese imports and Korean washing machines (even if his unpredictable trade war forced the deepest contraction in the manufacturing sector in a decade).

Yet, working-class voters who look a little deeper will notice something strange about their perceived champion: He is against unions. His first Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, helped erode the ability of unions to collect dues and fees in a landmark case. Another strange thing: The Trump administration’s interim trade deal with China focuses far more on opening up the Chinese banking and insurance sectors than on creating blue-collar jobs.

Also, Trump’s 2017 tax cut favored corporations and shareholders — including those who aren’t American citizens. Money that would have flowed into the U.S. Treasury went instead into their pockets and deep bank accounts. The companies used much of it to buy back their own stock, making their owners richer, instead of hiring and training new workers or increasing pay. The buybacks were so shameless that even Trump couldn’t defend them.

“We thought they would have known better,” he told reporters.

Trump is the one who should have known better. He’s either incompetent or he’s a Trojan horse who used blue-collar workers to get into the White House, only to hand over the keys to the 1%. Now that the Trump administration is trying to kill the Affordable Care Act, which millions of people depend on in the middle of a pandemic, it could not be more clear whose side he is on.

Health care is one of the things that sent Shannon, a steelworker I followed in Indiana, back to the Democrats, even though most people in her family still support Trump.

“He’s bragging that he’s saving all these jobs,” she told me. “But he’s not.”

The Trump presidency has been such a five-alarm fire that many people are understandably consumed with trying to put out the flames or simply survive it. But there will come a day, hopefully in the not too distant future, when people have the breathing room to investigate how the fire got started.

The Trump presidency has been such a five-alarm fire that many people are understandably consumed with trying to put out the flames or simply survive it. But there will come a day, hopefully in the not too distant future, when people have the breathing room to investigate how the fire got started. It’s tempting to heap scorn and blame on President Donald Trump’s millions of enthusiastic supporters. Without their adoration, he wouldn’t have been able to do the damage he has done. But there are good reasons to refrain. Calling large swaths of the American electorate deplorable turns out to be an ineffective way to gain their backing. Another reason: The mess the nation faces is bigger than Donald Trump. If he is voted out in November, the people who cast ballots for him will remain, pining for the policies he promoted. About 40% of American voters want tariffs and a border wall. More than half say it’s important to deport more undocumented immigrants. Much ink has been spilled about whether Trump supporters voted for him out of economic anxiety or racial anxiety, with plenty of studies concluding the latter. But spend time at a dying factory and you might see how difficult it can be to disentangle the two. For the past four years, I’ve followed a group of steelworkers in Indiana — men and women, Black and white — who had worked at a factory that moved to Mexico. I watched them agonize about whether to train their Mexican replacements or stand with their union and refuse. I watched them grieve the plant like a parent. I followed them as they applied for new jobs, some of which paid half as much as they made before. A machinist named Tim carried his steelworker union card in his wallet for years after the factory closed, just to remind himself who he was. Tim grew up in a union household. His dad had been an autoworker; his grandfather, a coal miner. “We always voted Democrat because they looked after the little man,” Tim told me. “My father went to his grave and I can guarantee you he never voted for a Republican.” Tim had such faith in Democrats that he didn’t worry when President Bill Clinton pushed the North American Free Trade Agreement over the finish line in 1993. Nor did he worry when Clinton normalized trade with China in 2000. But then the factory where Tim worked moved to Shanghai. And the next one moved to Mexico. By the time I met Tim, he loathed the Clintons and the Democratic Party. Democrats had gotten in bed with the corporations, while no one was looking. Tim felt betrayed, and politically abandoned — until Trump came along. College-educated people scoffed at Trump’s promises to bring back the factories. The factories are never coming back, they insisted. But even false hope is a form of hope, perhaps the most ubiquitous kind. There is little doubt that Trump is president today because of blue-collar people like Tim who were once a reliable pillar of the Democratic Party. About 55% of voters who expected to support Trump during the 2016 primaries identified as working class, according to a 2015 study by the Public Religion Research Institute. Fewer than a third who backed other Republican candidates identified as such. In Mahoning County, Ohio, more than a quarter of people who voted in the Republican primary were ex-Democrats, according to The Washington Post. Eighteen members of the county’s Democratic central committee crossed over to cast ballots for Trump, the county’s Democratic chairman told The Post. Those defections stemmed in part from anger over millions of factory jobs that went to China in the 2000s. Workers who made instrument panels for GM trucks in Michigan, stitched shirts in Pennsylvania and sanded wooden dressers in North Carolina saw alarming increases in child poverty, single motherhood, deaths from alcohol and drugs and reliance on public assistance. Exposure to trade with China led to “sizable increases in the likelihood of GOP victory in majority-white non-Hispanic congressional districts from 2002-2010,” said a study co-written by David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hillary Clinton would have won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — and thus the presidency — in 2016 had the economic blow of imports from China been half as big, the report concluded. It is worth noting that many of those same counties that hemorrhaged factory jobs also saw large increases in undocumented immigrants competing for the unskilled jobs that remained — cleaning hotel rooms, slaughtering chickens and mowing lawns. Their arrival fueled still more resentment of the world beyond America’s borders. Anger about globalization is not confined to the right. It fueled the rise of Bernie Sanders, who won the endorsement of the steelworkers I followed. The same week I met Tim, I interviewed an anarchist facing criminal charges for his role in the disruption of Trump’s inauguration when windows were smashed and a limousine was set on fire. Why had he became an anarchist? NAFTA and the tyranny of global capitalism, he said. To many, that anger can seem silly or misplaced. Free trade and globalization have undoubtedly made the country richer. But those riches have flowed disproportionately to the few with capital and education, while globalization’s downsides have piled on the shoulders of the most vulnerable Americans. NAFTA has come to symbolize a world order crafted by elites, for elites. The deal traded away blue-collar factory jobs in exchange for white-collar opportunities to invest in Mexico’s banking and insurance sectors. Today, even its biggest supporters admit that it resulted in a net loss of American jobs. In hindsight, it seems inevitable that globalization would cause a backlash. During the height of euphoria about free trade in the 1990s, philosopher Richard Rorty predicted that workers “will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported.” At that point, he wrote, parts of the electorate “will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.” In countries from Britain to Brazil, voters have elected leaders who promised to reverse decades of international economic integration. Most of those populist movements are right wing. The rebellion against free trade and globalization has largely taken the left by surprise. Dani Rodrik, an economics professor at Harvard who is perhaps the country’s most prominent skeptic of unfettered globalization, lamented in an article a few months before Trump’s election that left-wing parties around the world had failed to present viable alternatives to protectionism and walls. Since then, the landscape has changed. Joe Biden, who once wholeheartedly embraced free trade, acknowledges the harm it’s inflicted on the working class. Biden’s economic plan includes a 10% tax on businesses that send manufacturing offshore, and a 10% tax credit for companies that bolster job growth inside the United States. He has also put forth a plan to spend $2 trillion over four years on green energy infrastructure. “Biden, the nominally centrist candidate, has a platform that is far more progressive than Hillary Clinton’s on economics,” Rodrik told me in an email. “But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and we will see whether Biden will deliver real change if elected.” Many Americans who longed for a strongman will vote for Trump again. They revere him for tearing up NAFTA (even if the new version looks an awful lot like the old one) and slapping tariffs on Chinese imports and Korean washing machines (even if his unpredictable trade war forced the deepest contraction in the manufacturing sector in a decade). Yet, working-class voters who look a little deeper will notice something strange about their perceived champion: He is against unions. His first Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, helped erode the ability of unions to collect dues and fees in a landmark case. Another strange thing: The Trump administration’s interim trade deal with China focuses far more on opening up the Chinese banking and insurance sectors than on creating blue-collar jobs. Also, Trump’s 2017 tax cut favored corporations and shareholders — including those who aren’t American citizens. Money that would have flowed into the U.S. Treasury went instead into their pockets and deep bank accounts. The companies used much of it to buy back their own stock, making their owners richer, instead of hiring and training new workers or increasing pay. The buybacks were so shameless that even Trump couldn’t defend them. “We thought they would have known better,” he told reporters. Trump is the one who should have known better. He’s either incompetent or he’s a Trojan horse who used blue-collar workers to get into the White House, only to hand over the keys to the 1%. Now that the Trump administration is trying to kill the Affordable Care Act, which millions of people depend on in the middle of a pandemic, it could not be more clear whose side he is on. Health care is one of the things that sent Shannon, a steelworker I followed in Indiana, back to the Democrats, even though most people in her family still support Trump. “He’s bragging that he’s saving all these jobs,” she told me. “But he’s not.”

Why Trump’s supporters loved him

When Donald Trump said he wanted to buy Greenland, he wasn't kidding. Countries have bought, sold, leased many a time in the past. Can such deals be struck in today's time? Can your country be sold for cash or gold? Palki Sharma has the answer on Gravitas Plus.

Gravitas Plus: Selling your country for cash

Months before the US election, the Democratic President elect Joe Biden's election campaign was targeted by a group of Chinese hackers in&nbsp;a phishing attack.

A Google report by the Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has now claimed that the attack coordinated by a group of Chinese hackers are faking&nbsp;antivirus software McAfee to target the suspects.

This group of hackers appears to be the same group that had earlier targeted the US President Donald Trump in an&nbsp;unsuccessful attack.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/twitter-changes-policy-on-hacking-after-biden-censorship-expose-fiasco-335713">Also read|&nbsp;Twitter changes policy on hacking after Biden censorship expose fiasco</a>

As per the report, the hackers&nbsp;from the Iranian attacker group (APT35) and the Chinese attacker group (APT31) send a prompt asking victims to install the antivirus software and then let the virus silently creep into their systems.

Explaining how the group attacks the victims, Google's report stated, "The targets would be prompted to install a legitimate version of McAfee anti-virus software from GitHub, while malware was simultaneously silently installed to the system."

The tech giant claims that there has been an increase in such attacks in the pandemic, especially with the US elections being a few weeks away.

However, Google also assured that as soon as these attacks are identified, the victim is informed on a priority basis. "When we detect that a user is the target of a government-backed attack, we send them a prominent warning. In these cases, we also shared our findings with the campaigns and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This targeting is consistent with what others have subsequently reported."

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/russia-behind-cyberattack-on-parliament-norway-335097">Also read:&nbsp;Russia behind cyberattack on parliament: Norway</a>

The report also cautioned users to rethink their YouTube activity, explaining that their&nbsp;Trust and Safety teams terminated more than 3,000 YouTube channels. TAG claimed that they have tracked a large spam network — linked to China — that runs an influence operation, especially on YouTube, that targets existing accounts by&nbsp;"posting spammy content in Mandarin such as videos of animals, music, food, plants, sports, and games."

"Such videos frequently feature clumsy translations and computer-generated voices. Researchers at Graphika and FireEye have detailed how this network behaves—including its shift from posting content in Mandarin about issues related to Hong Kong and China’s response to COVID-19, to including a small subset of content in English and Mandarin about current events in the U.S. (such as protests around racial justice, the wildfires on the West Coast, and the U.S. response to COVID-19)," the report continued.

Months before the US election, the Democratic President elect Joe Biden's election campaign was targeted by a group of Chinese hackers in a phishing attack. A Google report by the Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has now claimed that the attack coordinated by a group of Chinese hackers are faking antivirus software McAfee to target the suspects.

Months before the US election, the Democratic President elect Joe Biden's election campaign was targeted by a group of Chinese hackers in a phishing attack. A Google report by the Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has now claimed that the attack coordinated by a group of Chinese hackers are faking antivirus software McAfee to target the suspects. This group of hackers appears to be the same group that had earlier targeted the US President Donald Trump in an unsuccessful attack. Also read| Twitter changes policy on hacking after Biden censorship expose fiasco As per the report, the hackers from the Iranian attacker group (APT35) and the Chinese attacker group (APT31) send a prompt asking victims to install the antivirus software and then let the virus silently creep into their systems. Explaining how the group attacks the victims, Google's report stated, "The targets would be prompted to install a legitimate version of McAfee anti-virus software from GitHub, while malware was simultaneously silently installed to the system." The tech giant claims that there has been an increase in such attacks in the pandemic, especially with the US elections being a few weeks away. However, Google also assured that as soon as these attacks are identified, the victim is informed on a priority basis. "When we detect that a user is the target of a government-backed attack, we send them a prominent warning. In these cases, we also shared our findings with the campaigns and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This targeting is consistent with what others have subsequently reported." Also read: Russia behind cyberattack on parliament: Norway The report also cautioned users to rethink their YouTube activity, explaining that their Trust and Safety teams terminated more than 3,000 YouTube channels. TAG claimed that they have tracked a large spam network — linked to China — that runs an influence operation, especially on YouTube, that targets existing accounts by "posting spammy content in Mandarin such as videos of animals, music, food, plants, sports, and games." "Such videos frequently feature clumsy translations and computer-generated voices. Researchers at Graphika and FireEye have detailed how this network behaves—including its shift from posting content in Mandarin about issues related to Hong Kong and China’s response to COVID-19, to including a small subset of content in English and Mandarin about current events in the U.S. (such as protests around racial justice, the wildfires on the West Coast, and the U.S. response to COVID-19)," the report continued.

Chinese hackers targeting Biden and Trump are faking McAfee software: Google

U.S. President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden will court early voters as their campaigns step up events ahead of their final debate this week.

Concern about crowds at polling stations during the coronavirus pandemic has driven far larger numbers than usual to vote early, ahead of the Nov. 3 Election Day.

Trump will head on Sunday to Nevada, a battleground state where more than 100,000 voters have already cast ballots, according to state data.

The Republican president will campaign every day leading up to Thursday`s debate in Florida, including stops in Arizona and North Carolina, campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said.

Biden heads on Sunday to North Carolina, where 1.2 million voters have cast their ballots, according to state data. His pick for vice president, Kamala Harris, will return to the campaign trail on Monday with a visit to Florida to mark that state`s first day of early, in-person voting.

So far nearly 26 million people have cast a ballot in the election, shattering records, according to the U.S. Elections Project, run by the University of Florida.

While Trump lags in opinion polls at a national level and in many battleground states, Biden campaign manager Jen O`Malley Dillon said over the weekend that the national figures are misleading because must-win states are close.

"We cannot become complacent because the very searing truth is that Donald Trump can still win this race, and every indication we have shows that this thing is going to come down to the wire," she wrote in a memo to donors.

U.S. presidential elections are determined by electoral votes, allotted to U.S. states and territories based largely on their populations, rather than by a tally of the popular vote nationwide. This makes for a close focus by campaigns on states that could go either way.

Trump campaigned on Saturday in Michigan and Wisconsin, two battleground states he narrowly won in the 2016 election.

In Muskegeon, Mich., he attacked Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, blasting state rules to stop the spread of coronavirus, calling her “dishonest,” and making light of a right-wing plot uncovered by the FBI to kidnap her.

“Hopefully you’ll be sending her packing pretty soon,” Trump said, prompting the crowd to yell back "Lock her up!" several times.

Whitmer responded on Twitter to the chants. "This is exactly the rhetoric that has put me, my family, and other government officials’ lives in danger while we try to save the lives of our fellow Americans," she wrote.

Opinion polls have shown a high level of concern among voters about the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 218,000 people in the United States and hammered the economy.

That includes young people. Among likely voters aged 34 and under surveyed on their top concern in choosing a president, COVID-19 was the top concern for 25%, while jobs and the economy were named by 20%, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between Sept. 29 and Oct. 13.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden will court early voters as their campaigns step up events ahead of their final debate this week.

U.S. President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden will court early voters as their campaigns step up events ahead of their final debate this week. Concern about crowds at polling stations during the coronavirus pandemic has driven far larger numbers than usual to vote early, ahead of the Nov. 3 Election Day. Trump will head on Sunday to Nevada, a battleground state where more than 100,000 voters have already cast ballots, according to state data. The Republican president will campaign every day leading up to Thursday`s debate in Florida, including stops in Arizona and North Carolina, campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said. Biden heads on Sunday to North Carolina, where 1.2 million voters have cast their ballots, according to state data. His pick for vice president, Kamala Harris, will return to the campaign trail on Monday with a visit to Florida to mark that state`s first day of early, in-person voting. So far nearly 26 million people have cast a ballot in the election, shattering records, according to the U.S. Elections Project, run by the University of Florida. While Trump lags in opinion polls at a national level and in many battleground states, Biden campaign manager Jen O`Malley Dillon said over the weekend that the national figures are misleading because must-win states are close. "We cannot become complacent because the very searing truth is that Donald Trump can still win this race, and every indication we have shows that this thing is going to come down to the wire," she wrote in a memo to donors. U.S. presidential elections are determined by electoral votes, allotted to U.S. states and territories based largely on their populations, rather than by a tally of the popular vote nationwide. This makes for a close focus by campaigns on states that could go either way. Trump campaigned on Saturday in Michigan and Wisconsin, two battleground states he narrowly won in the 2016 election. In Muskegeon, Mich., he attacked Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, blasting state rules to stop the spread of coronavirus, calling her “dishonest,” and making light of a right-wing plot uncovered by the FBI to kidnap her. “Hopefully you’ll be sending her packing pretty soon,” Trump said, prompting the crowd to yell back "Lock her up!" several times. Whitmer responded on Twitter to the chants. "This is exactly the rhetoric that has put me, my family, and other government officials’ lives in danger while we try to save the lives of our fellow Americans," she wrote. Opinion polls have shown a high level of concern among voters about the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 218,000 people in the United States and hammered the economy. That includes young people. Among likely voters aged 34 and under surveyed on their top concern in choosing a president, COVID-19 was the top concern for 25%, while jobs and the economy were named by 20%, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between Sept. 29 and Oct. 13.

Trump and Biden to court early voters as US campaign gathers steam

Thousands of women took to the streets of Washington DC & across the United States on Saturday as part of the women march against President Donald Trump's recent nominee to the Supreme Court Amy Coney Barrett.

US: Protest erupt against Donald Trump's Supreme Court pick

Women’s March protesters took to the streets of Washington on Saturday, galvanized by their opposition to President Donald Trump and his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Some women dressed in handmaid’s costumes, while others donned clothing reminiscent of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court regalia, just days before the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Barrett’s nomination, paving the way for her confirmation. Marching less than a month before Election Day, Women’s March participants sought to call attention to the potential impact that a Justice Barrett, and four more years of the Trump presidency, might have on abortion rights and other issues.

“He’s trying to pack the courts with people who will subvert the will of Americans,” Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the Women’s March executive director, said of the president. “The election is all about the Supreme Court. It’s all about health care. It’s all about COVID.”

During the Senate confirmation hearing, Barrett declined to say whether she believed the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. She has a conservative voting record in abortion-related cases, and her Supreme Court nomination has been championed by conservatives.

“It’s really scary, since Justice Ginsburg passed away, what the future of women in this country looks like, especially when the nominee for her replacement doesn’t care about women’s rights,” said Tiffany Jones, a 37-year-old mortgage loan processor who drove to the march from Charleston, West Virginia.

Many marchers traveled far to attend Saturday’s event, despite the risks posed by the pandemic. Cierra Brooks, 19, drove with two college roommates for nine hours from Cullowhee, North Carolina.

“Our futures are totally affected by what happens,” Brooks said.

The crowd in Washington was far smaller than those at previous marches, which organizers attributed to the pandemic. This year, protesters were required to wear masks.

The march was met with a counterprotest in support of Barrett’s nomination, organized by the Independent Women’s Forum at the steps of the Supreme Court.

“The Women’s March does not represent all women,” said Sandy Chiong, a conservative activist. Barrett, she added, “is a role model for young women everywhere, an independent thinker.”

Women’s March protesters took to the streets of Washington on Saturday, galvanized by their opposition to President Donald Trump and his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Women’s March protesters took to the streets of Washington on Saturday, galvanized by their opposition to President Donald Trump and his nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Some women dressed in handmaid’s costumes, while others donned clothing reminiscent of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court regalia, just days before the Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to vote on Barrett’s nomination, paving the way for her confirmation. Marching less than a month before Election Day, Women’s March participants sought to call attention to the potential impact that a Justice Barrett, and four more years of the Trump presidency, might have on abortion rights and other issues. “He’s trying to pack the courts with people who will subvert the will of Americans,” Rachel O’Leary Carmona, the Women’s March executive director, said of the president. “The election is all about the Supreme Court. It’s all about health care. It’s all about COVID.” During the Senate confirmation hearing, Barrett declined to say whether she believed the landmark abortion case Roe v. Wade was correctly decided. She has a conservative voting record in abortion-related cases, and her Supreme Court nomination has been championed by conservatives. “It’s really scary, since Justice Ginsburg passed away, what the future of women in this country looks like, especially when the nominee for her replacement doesn’t care about women’s rights,” said Tiffany Jones, a 37-year-old mortgage loan processor who drove to the march from Charleston, West Virginia. Many marchers traveled far to attend Saturday’s event, despite the risks posed by the pandemic. Cierra Brooks, 19, drove with two college roommates for nine hours from Cullowhee, North Carolina. “Our futures are totally affected by what happens,” Brooks said. The crowd in Washington was far smaller than those at previous marches, which organizers attributed to the pandemic. This year, protesters were required to wear masks. The march was met with a counterprotest in support of Barrett’s nomination, organized by the Independent Women’s Forum at the steps of the Supreme Court. “The Women’s March does not represent all women,” said Sandy Chiong, a conservative activist. Barrett, she added, “is a role model for young women everywhere, an independent thinker.”

Women take a stand in Washington, both for and against Barrett

A record of nearly 15 million Americans have already voted in the #PresidentialElection2020. Should we expect a historic voter turnout on election day? Susan M. Tehrani reports.

Ballots cast at an unprecedented pace | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

Early voting began in Louisiana on Friday, following record turnout this week in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas, competitive states that could decide the election outcome. Voters in Louisiana's capital city Baton Rouge lined up for more than an hour before polls opened to cast their ballots, according to local media, with no widespread problems reported.

US Election 2020: Unprecedented surge in mail-in votes | WION VOA Co-production

Two simultaneous town halls have managed to clearly lay out the stark differences between US President Donald Trump and his challenger Joe Biden. Palki Sharma Upadhyay tells you what happened.

Gravitas: Biden Vs Trump: The story of dueling town halls

Recently I had the chance to watch an online focus group of seven women from swing states who had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but who had become disaffected with him. Convened by Sarah Longwell, a founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, the session was in some ways a deeply depressing experience.

Several of the women said that, because they don’t believe what they hear from mainstream media, they have a hard time distinguishing truth from falsehood. One woman, in North Carolina, cited something she’d heard in a Trump ad as a reason she’s unlikely to vote for Joe Biden, and said she wished Ben Carson would step into the race.

Another from the same state said she was “scared” about the election because she doesn’t trust Kamala Harris. A woman from Florida had already voted for Joe Biden, but a few of the others were considering voting third party.

Yet their disgust with the president was palpable. A well-spoken woman with grown children from central Pennsylvania appeared to have mentally rewritten the history of the last election to justify her vote. She’d opted for Trump, she said, thinking that it would be “refreshing” to have a president with a business background. In her recollection, it was only after he won that he revealed his true character.

“His Twitter, his comments, things that he was recorded saying, his misogyny — I was just, like, horrified and embarrassed,” she said. Looking back, she didn’t think she knew about the “Access Hollywood” tape before she voted: “I certainly hope that I didn’t, because it was a disgusting comment. I would think that had I known that might have given me pause.” She’s now considering voting for the Libertarian candidate, Jo Jorgensen.

I strongly suspect she’s remembering wrong — the “Access Hollywood” story would have been very hard to miss in October 2016. But it’s telling that she can no longer quite imagine how she could have supported Trump after hearing him boast about his penchant for sexual assault. It’s another tiny piece of evidence that 2020 could be the year Trump’s misogyny finally catches up with him.

Four years ago, many of us were counting on right-leaning women to deliver a decisive rebuke to Trump. Lots of journalists, myself included, wrote about the group Republican Women for Hillary. After the appearance of the “Access Hollywood” tape, female Republican governors and members of Congress were far more likely than their male peers to withdraw their endorsements. Katie Packer, deputy campaign manager of Mitt Romney’s 2012 bid, imagined a reckoning in her party after Trump’s loss. “There’s going to have to be a denunciation of this guy,” she told me then.

Needless to say, there wasn’t. Most women did indeed vote for Hillary Clinton, but Trump won either a plurality or an outright majority of white women, enough to give him the presidency. There turned out to be far less of a political penalty for vulgar misogyny than some of us realized.

Four years later, it’s hard not to feel an unnerving sense of déjà vu. Once again, the polls show a potentially historic gender gap in the presidential election. Journalists are reporting on all the women Trump has turned off. Last I checked, FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 13% chance of victory, almost exactly the same odds he had three weeks before the election in 2016. For America to survive as a liberal democracy, this time has to be different. Is it?

Longwell, who has conducted around 50 focus groups over the last three years, most of them with women, believes it is. “I have seen these people moving away in real time,” she says of the participants’ relationship to Trump. And “it dropped off a cliff right around COVID, plus economic downturn, plus George Floyd.”

As Longwell tells it, there were some Trump voters who turned on him almost immediately after the election, but many others who continued to support him despite disliking him personally. “They said he was a narcissist, said he was a bully, but they also don’t like Democrats, don’t like the media, don’t trust anything, and they were hanging in,” she said.

Then Trump’s incompetence came home. “Once the pandemic hit, once there were personal consequences for their lives, there was an absolute shift in how people talked about Donald Trump,” said Longwell.

She started hearing “a ton of pain” in the focus groups. Cancer survivors with suppressed immune systems feared leaving the house because people in their community wouldn’t wear masks. “Or they’ve got young kids that aren’t in school, or somebody in their family is furloughed, or they couldn’t go see their parent who died,” she said.

Women’s job losses due to COVID have been enormously disproportionate; in September alone, around 617,000 women 16 and over left the workforce, nearly eight times the number of men. They’ve borne the brunt of closed schools. As Jessica Grose recently reported in The New York Times, the Pandemic Parenting Study, which is tracking over 100 Indiana mothers, has found growing marital strife over child care.

“Mothers blame themselves for these conflicts and feel responsible for reducing them, including by leaving the workforce, beginning use of antidepressants, or ignoring their own concerns about COVID-19,” said a recent paper drawing on the study’s data. None of this can be separated from the collapse in women’s support for Trump.

If Trump loses, it won’t be just because enough women recognize him as a deranged bigot. It will because he blighted too many of their lives. In the focus group, a Wisconsin woman introduced herself as a full-time mother who, “on top of being at home,” now has to be a full-time teacher. One of her kids is gravely ill, and people who refuse to wear masks infuriate her. “It drives me nuts, people who don’t do it just because they don’t want to,” she said.

She tries to avoid almost all political news, and doesn’t trust what she does come across. Where she lives, she said, she hasn’t seen a single Biden sign, and she knows very little about the former vice president. But she’s planning to vote for him. If women defeat Trump next month, it will be because of everything he’s done to defeat them first.

Recently I had the chance to watch an online focus group of seven women from swing states who had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but who had become disaffected with him.

Recently I had the chance to watch an online focus group of seven women from swing states who had voted for Donald Trump in 2016 but who had become disaffected with him. Convened by Sarah Longwell, a founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, the session was in some ways a deeply depressing experience. Several of the women said that, because they don’t believe what they hear from mainstream media, they have a hard time distinguishing truth from falsehood. One woman, in North Carolina, cited something she’d heard in a Trump ad as a reason she’s unlikely to vote for Joe Biden, and said she wished Ben Carson would step into the race. Another from the same state said she was “scared” about the election because she doesn’t trust Kamala Harris. A woman from Florida had already voted for Joe Biden, but a few of the others were considering voting third party. Yet their disgust with the president was palpable. A well-spoken woman with grown children from central Pennsylvania appeared to have mentally rewritten the history of the last election to justify her vote. She’d opted for Trump, she said, thinking that it would be “refreshing” to have a president with a business background. In her recollection, it was only after he won that he revealed his true character. “His Twitter, his comments, things that he was recorded saying, his misogyny — I was just, like, horrified and embarrassed,” she said. Looking back, she didn’t think she knew about the “Access Hollywood” tape before she voted: “I certainly hope that I didn’t, because it was a disgusting comment. I would think that had I known that might have given me pause.” She’s now considering voting for the Libertarian candidate, Jo Jorgensen. I strongly suspect she’s remembering wrong — the “Access Hollywood” story would have been very hard to miss in October 2016. But it’s telling that she can no longer quite imagine how she could have supported Trump after hearing him boast about his penchant for sexual assault. It’s another tiny piece of evidence that 2020 could be the year Trump’s misogyny finally catches up with him. Four years ago, many of us were counting on right-leaning women to deliver a decisive rebuke to Trump. Lots of journalists, myself included, wrote about the group Republican Women for Hillary. After the appearance of the “Access Hollywood” tape, female Republican governors and members of Congress were far more likely than their male peers to withdraw their endorsements. Katie Packer, deputy campaign manager of Mitt Romney’s 2012 bid, imagined a reckoning in her party after Trump’s loss. “There’s going to have to be a denunciation of this guy,” she told me then. Needless to say, there wasn’t. Most women did indeed vote for Hillary Clinton, but Trump won either a plurality or an outright majority of white women, enough to give him the presidency. There turned out to be far less of a political penalty for vulgar misogyny than some of us realized. Four years later, it’s hard not to feel an unnerving sense of déjà vu. Once again, the polls show a potentially historic gender gap in the presidential election. Journalists are reporting on all the women Trump has turned off. Last I checked, FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 13% chance of victory, almost exactly the same odds he had three weeks before the election in 2016. For America to survive as a liberal democracy, this time has to be different. Is it? Longwell, who has conducted around 50 focus groups over the last three years, most of them with women, believes it is. “I have seen these people moving away in real time,” she says of the participants’ relationship to Trump. And “it dropped off a cliff right around COVID, plus economic downturn, plus George Floyd.” As Longwell tells it, there were some Trump voters who turned on him almost immediately after the election, but many others who continued to support him despite disliking him personally. “They said he was a narcissist, said he was a bully, but they also don’t like Democrats, don’t like the media, don’t trust anything, and they were hanging in,” she said. Then Trump’s incompetence came home. “Once the pandemic hit, once there were personal consequences for their lives, there was an absolute shift in how people talked about Donald Trump,” said Longwell. She started hearing “a ton of pain” in the focus groups. Cancer survivors with suppressed immune systems feared leaving the house because people in their community wouldn’t wear masks. “Or they’ve got young kids that aren’t in school, or somebody in their family is furloughed, or they couldn’t go see their parent who died,” she said. Women’s job losses due to COVID have been enormously disproportionate; in September alone, around 617,000 women 16 and over left the workforce, nearly eight times the number of men. They’ve borne the brunt of closed schools. As Jessica Grose recently reported in The New York Times, the Pandemic Parenting Study, which is tracking over 100 Indiana mothers, has found growing marital strife over child care. “Mothers blame themselves for these conflicts and feel responsible for reducing them, including by leaving the workforce, beginning use of antidepressants, or ignoring their own concerns about COVID-19,” said a recent paper drawing on the study’s data. None of this can be separated from the collapse in women’s support for Trump. If Trump loses, it won’t be just because enough women recognize him as a deranged bigot. It will because he blighted too many of their lives. In the focus group, a Wisconsin woman introduced herself as a full-time mother who, “on top of being at home,” now has to be a full-time teacher. One of her kids is gravely ill, and people who refuse to wear masks infuriate her. “It drives me nuts, people who don’t do it just because they don’t want to,” she said. She tries to avoid almost all political news, and doesn’t trust what she does come across. Where she lives, she said, she hasn’t seen a single Biden sign, and she knows very little about the former vice president. But she’s planning to vote for him. If women defeat Trump next month, it will be because of everything he’s done to defeat them first.

Trump’s misogyny might finally catch up with him

US President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden held simultaneous and separate televised town halls in lieu of the cancelled second presidential debate.

They took questions from pre-selected individuals at sessions moderated by eminent television journalists.

While Trump's town hall was hosted by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in Miami, Florida, that of Biden was held in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) News.

The second presidential debate had originally been scheduled for Thursday night. However, it was cancelled after Trump refused to participate in a virtual format of the presidential debate as amended by the independent debate commission following the president's COVID-19 diagnosis.

A final debate is still scheduled for October 22 in Nashville, Tennessee. The first debate was held on September 29 in Cleveland, Ohio.

During the town hall, Trump defended his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. He also reiterated his stand on tax returns. However, Trump refused to denounce the QAnon conspiracy theory.

When asked by moderator Savannah Guthrie if he would denounce the QAnon theory and "just say it's crazy and not true", Trump said, "I don't know about QAnon."

Biden's during his town hall said he would soon express his position on court packing, an issue that he has avoided so far.

The Democratic presidential nominee said he would come out with a clear position before Election Day about where he stands on expanding the Supreme Court, depending how the rest of the confirmation process of Judge Amy Coney Barrett is handled.

President Trump has selected Judge Barrett to succeed Supreme Court Justice late Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The Senate Judiciary Committee finished its confirmation hearings for Barrett earlier on Thursday. Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said that the committee will vote on Barrett's nomination on October 22. If the committee approves her nomination, which is expected, it would be sent to the full Senate floor.

At the town hall with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Biden said he is "not a fan" of court packing. When asked by Stephanopoulos if he was open to increasing the number of judges on the court if Barrett is confirmed before the election, Biden said, "I'm open to considering what happens from that point on".

Republicans have repeatedly criticised Biden for not directly giving his view on court packing.

"They do have a right to know where I'll stand and they'll have a right to know where I stand before they vote," Biden said, when asked whether voters had a right to know where he stands on the issue of expanding the court.

Replying to a question on if he would make his position clear before the Election Day, Biden said, "Yes, depending on how they handle this", referring to the Republicans.

Both Trump and Biden campaigns claimed that their candidates won the shows Thursday night.

"Even though the commission cancelled the in-person debate that could have happened tonight, one occurred anyway, and President Trump soundly defeated NBC's Savannah Guthrie in her role as debate opponent and Joe Biden surrogate," said Tim Murtaugh, Trump 2020 communications director.

"President Trump masterfully handled Guthrie's attacks and interacted warmly and effectively with the voters in the room," he said.

"Joe Biden gave thoughtful answers to voters' questions about COVID-19, taxes, racial equity, climate change, and more...1,100 miles away, and in a false, alternate reality of his own making, President Trump was combative and lashed out at voters. He refused to denounce QAnon...He lied about the effectiveness of masks," he said.

"Trump has no answers for his failures to contain COVID-19 and manage our economy. And, after nearly four years in office, Trump still has no vision for how he'll make health care more affordable," Bedingfield said.

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Trump has recovered from a brief spell of COVID-19 after he and First Lady Melania Trump tested positive for the deadly viral infection on October 1. Trump's doctors have now cleared him for his election campaigns.

US President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden held simultaneous and separate televised town halls in lieu of the cancelled second presidential debate.

US President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden held simultaneous and separate televised town halls in lieu of the cancelled second presidential debate. They took questions from pre-selected individuals at sessions moderated by eminent television journalists. While Trump's town hall was hosted by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in Miami, Florida, that of Biden was held in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) News. The second presidential debate had originally been scheduled for Thursday night. However, it was cancelled after Trump refused to participate in a virtual format of the presidential debate as amended by the independent debate commission following the president's COVID-19 diagnosis. A final debate is still scheduled for October 22 in Nashville, Tennessee. The first debate was held on September 29 in Cleveland, Ohio. During the town hall, Trump defended his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. He also reiterated his stand on tax returns. However, Trump refused to denounce the QAnon conspiracy theory. When asked by moderator Savannah Guthrie if he would denounce the QAnon theory and "just say it's crazy and not true", Trump said, "I don't know about QAnon." Biden's during his town hall said he would soon express his position on court packing, an issue that he has avoided so far. The Democratic presidential nominee said he would come out with a clear position before Election Day about where he stands on expanding the Supreme Court, depending how the rest of the confirmation process of Judge Amy Coney Barrett is handled. President Trump has selected Judge Barrett to succeed Supreme Court Justice late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The Senate Judiciary Committee finished its confirmation hearings for Barrett earlier on Thursday. Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham said that the committee will vote on Barrett's nomination on October 22. If the committee approves her nomination, which is expected, it would be sent to the full Senate floor. At the town hall with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Biden said he is "not a fan" of court packing. When asked by Stephanopoulos if he was open to increasing the number of judges on the court if Barrett is confirmed before the election, Biden said, "I'm open to considering what happens from that point on". Republicans have repeatedly criticised Biden for not directly giving his view on court packing. "They do have a right to know where I'll stand and they'll have a right to know where I stand before they vote," Biden said, when asked whether voters had a right to know where he stands on the issue of expanding the court. Replying to a question on if he would make his position clear before the Election Day, Biden said, "Yes, depending on how they handle this", referring to the Republicans. Both Trump and Biden campaigns claimed that their candidates won the shows Thursday night. "Even though the commission cancelled the in-person debate that could have happened tonight, one occurred anyway, and President Trump soundly defeated NBC's Savannah Guthrie in her role as debate opponent and Joe Biden surrogate," said Tim Murtaugh, Trump 2020 communications director. "President Trump masterfully handled Guthrie's attacks and interacted warmly and effectively with the voters in the room," he said. "Joe Biden gave thoughtful answers to voters' questions about COVID-19, taxes, racial equity, climate change, and more...1,100 miles away, and in a false, alternate reality of his own making, President Trump was combative and lashed out at voters. He refused to denounce QAnon...He lied about the effectiveness of masks," he said. "Trump has no answers for his failures to contain COVID-19 and manage our economy. And, after nearly four years in office, Trump still has no vision for how he'll make health care more affordable," Bedingfield said. × Trump has recovered from a brief spell of COVID-19 after he and First Lady Melania Trump tested positive for the deadly viral infection on October 1. Trump's doctors have now cleared him for his election campaigns.

Trump, Biden hold separate town halls in lieu of cancelled second presidential debate

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/joe-biden">Joe Biden</a> marched into adulthood in Bass Weejuns penny loafers.

He was known around the University of Delaware campus as the teetotaling semi-jock with a sweater around his neck — the type who seemed more consumed with date nights than civil rights and expected a certain standard of decorum from his companions, once threatening to break off an evening with a woman who lit a cigarette in his borrowed convertible.

And when Biden and his friends from Syracuse University law school happened upon anti-war protesters at the chancellor’s office — the kind of Vietnam-era demonstration that galvanized so much of their generation — his group stepped past with disdain. They were going for pizza.

More than a half-century later, as Biden seeks the White House with a pledge to soothe the nation’s wounds and lower its collective temperature, he has been left to deflect a curious charge at the center of President Donald Trump’s reelection effort: Biden, the president insists, is eager to do the far-left bidding of violent agitators and other assorted radicals.

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“They’ve got you wrapped around their finger, Joe,” Trump taunted at their first debate.

Biden, a 77-year-old moderate who cites John Wayne movies and long-dead Senate peers, has generally defaulted to a visceral defense: Look at me.

“Ask yourself,” he implored voters in a recent address. “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?”

He does not now, friends from his youth say, and he did not then — in spite of, and perhaps partly because of, the decade in which he came of age.

Amid simmering protests, generational division and defining disputes about the course of American life, Biden was a young man keen on bringing a bit of a 1950s sensibility into the 1960s — a nice-house-on-a-cul-de-sac kind of guy who spent his weekends as a 20-something husband scouting available real estate from his Corvette.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/biden-sets-fundraising-record-with-383-mn-in-september-336026">Also read|&nbsp;Biden sets fundraising record with $383 mn in September</a>

There is a version of these years that Biden prefers to share publicly: how he was captivated by the civil rights movement, coming to understand the racial divide as a teenage lifeguard in a Black neighborhood of Wilmington, Delaware; how he was brokenhearted by the murder of his heroes, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedy brothers; how he was motivated chiefly by an altruistic call to service.

If much of this accounting is plainly true in the abstract, those who knew him say, it also elides some finer points of Biden’s arc: his boundless personal ambition, his canny relationship-building as a political novice and, quite often, his conspicuous psychic distance from the activist fervor of the times as he plotted a path to office.

“He had other priorities,” Gilbert J. Sloan, a longtime supporter who was active in Delaware’s 1960s protest movements, said of Biden’s outlook then. “He was very young and ambitious.”

A review of how Biden navigated this period of national upheaval — drawn from interviews with more than a dozen friends, classmates and others who have known the Democratic nominee across the decades — at once lays bare the implausibility of Trump’s attack and supplies an enduring window into Biden’s own theories of social movements. Incremental progress is still progress, he has long believed, and within-the-system change is still change.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/us-election-2020-how-the-states-vote-for-the-presidential-elections-335430">Also read|&nbsp;US election 2020: How the States vote for the Presidential elections</a>

If today’s activists have at times viewed Biden skeptically through this season of unrest, questioning whether he can connect with the passion in the streets when he has rarely shown passion in the streets himself, his early history would appear to reinforce their doubts.

This is a man whose institutionalist instincts seemed to harden even before he belonged to any political institutions — and who has never shown much patience for protests that turn destructive or unruly.

“That’s the way he views activism,” said Bob Markel, a friend since the 1950s. “Occupying an office of a dean or something like that is not his style.”

It never has been. As the Vietnam War reshaped lives across many less-than-affluent families like his own, with casualties and moral outrage mounting especially among young adults a few years behind him, Biden eluded both the conflict and the attendant anger. He received five student draft deferments during the war and was kept from service after a physical exam in 1968 because he had asthma as a teenager, according to his campaign. (Trump, now 74, received five deferments in all, including a medical deferment for bone spurs.)

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Biden has said he viewed the Vietnam War “in terms of stupidity, not morality,” doubting its wisdom but never feverishly enough to chant about it.

“I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dye shirts,” he told reporters in 1987, distinguishing himself from some politically minded contemporaries. “Other people marched. I ran for office.”

‘Average Irish Guy’

It can be almost impossible now to imagine Biden as a young man — or, at least, a younger man than he was when he first reached Washington, as a 30-year-old senator shattered by the car crash that killed his first wife, Neilia, and their baby daughter.

But to those who met him before his best-known trials and triumphs, the Joe Biden who wandered campus in a tasteful button-down and chinos remains an indelible character, settling into the identity that would become his self-styled political brand: polished but unpretentious, a natural leader with few obvious preternatural gifts.

“He was an average Irish guy. His father was a car salesman, for God’s sake,” said Fred Sears, a friend from the University of Delaware. “A good-looking guy with a gift of gab.”

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/us-election-2020-last-five-presidents-of-the-united-states-of-america-335804">Have a look| US election 2020: Last few Presidents of the United States of America</a>

The glad-handing started early.

An aspiring football running back and amiable freshman in 1961, Biden was elected president of his class, moving quickly to flatter his constituents.

“He came up to me, shook my hand,” recalled Brian Barrabee, a football player who lived in the same dorm, “and he said, ‘Brian, I’d like to thank you for not running for class president because if you had, you would have beaten me.’ It was his way of getting people to feel good.”

By his own account, Biden’s most resonant exposure to the dominant political issues of the day came well off campus. He has said he once walked out of a Wilmington restaurant that refused to serve a Black student from his high school, a recollection that Markel corroborated.

And at 19, Biden worked as a lifeguard in a largely Black section of Wilmington in 1962.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/democrats-have-nothing-but-disdain-for-your-values-says-trump-in-florida-rally-as-crowd-chants-lock-up-bidens-335925">Also read|&nbsp;Democrats have nothing but disdain for your values, says Trump in Florida rally as crowd chants 'Lock up Bidens'</a>

He has said he took the job after absorbing images of the civil rights fight on television and realizing he had few relationships with Black people, suggesting he came to understand injustice most acutely by speaking to swimmers about the prejudices they faced.

“What he learned from us is that we didn’t have what everybody else had,” said Richard Smith, a longtime civil rights activist who met Biden that summer as an adolescent. “He got his schooling at the swimming pool.”

Biden’s formal schooling, friends say, could feel less connected to the wider national tumult.

Barrabee said the campus was not a “hotbed of political activity,” describing much of the student body as “suburban kids from Wilmington, Delaware, southern Delaware area, who just wanted to go to college.”

Biden did not drink — “there are enough alcoholics in my family,” he has said — and he did not smoke. But he had a way of finding trouble.

He has said he was placed on probation for hosing down a resident adviser with a fire extinguisher. He once paid a covert visit to a romantic interest and left a friend, his lookout, to take the fall with the campus police, according to a transcript of Biden’s eulogy for the man in 2004.

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Biden has said his worrisome grades sidelined his football career. Academic struggles kept him from sticking with student government as well, Sears said.

But Biden’s father perhaps inadvertently assisted in his distracting social agenda: Cars were not permitted on campus, Sears said, but the elder Biden’s job allowed his son easy access to loaner vehicles for weekend excursions.

“Every weekend, somehow, Joe ended up with a car,” Sears said of his friend’s advantages in courtship. “It was always a convertible. Besides being very cool and dressing right, showing up in a convertible he had us all beat eight ways from Sunday.”

‘I Wore Sport Coats’

The tilt of Biden’s life changed for good with a last-minute flight to the Bahamas.

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He had driven down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the spring of 1964 for a couple of days with friends when boredom compelled them to consider a more daring beach destination. They booked a round trip to Nassau for about $25.

While there, Biden met Neilia Hunter poolside at an exclusive hotel he had sneaked into by wrapping a guest towel around his waist and walking past the guards with confidence.

“I’ve got the blonde,” he told his friends, beelining to Hunter, an attractive sunbather from a well-to-do family near Syracuse.

She liked him back. And when they returned stateside, the fresh clarity in Biden’s personal life seemed to sharpen his focus on other endeavors, coaxing him to fits of big-picture dreaming.

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He would apply to law school at Syracuse to be near Hunter. He would make sure he was studying enough to get in.

They would get married, have kids (“she wanted five”), buy a house (“a big Tudor-style house with real trees, what the real estate professionals call ‘mature plantings’”). He would work as a trial lawyer, start his own practice, run for office.

“Once I had Neilia with me, it became more of a plan than a daydream,” Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir. “Now I could see the picture whole.”

The early goals in this timeline were accomplished apace: He got into Syracuse. He and Hunter were married in 1966.

Markel, one of Biden’s groomsmen, said Biden’s seriousness extended even to his own bachelor party. The group had rented a motel room around New Castle, Delaware, he recalled, growing rowdier by the hour, with the exception of the non-drinking groom.

“We got kind of sloppy drunk,” Markel said. “Toward the end of the evening, I remember him giving us a lecture: ‘You guys are a disgrace.’”

But Biden was still liable to lose interest in academics quickly, prizing football tailgates or social engagements with Hunter and often copying class notes from a friend. Sometimes, Hunter prepared Biden’s study sheets, inventing mnemonic devices for him to memorize.

In his most damaging bit of carelessness, Biden lifted chunks of a law review article without proper citation — a blemish that damaged his 1988 presidential campaign amid other accusations of plagiarism at the time. Biden has said he did nothing “malevolent” at Syracuse but simply did not understand citation standards because he had not been to class often enough.

“He found out it wasn’t that easy,” said Mike Gelacak, a friend who later worked as a Senate aide to Biden. “His wife explained to him that he had to knuckle down.”

And if the country’s volatility in those years seeped into campus life, classmates say that Biden never much grappled with it in their company.

“I was married,” Biden told reporters during the 1988 campaign, declaring himself “out of sync” with anti-war zeal. “I was in law school. I wore sport coats.”

'The World Had Changed'

His wardrobe remained conservative upon graduation, befitting his new employer: a Wilmington law firm representing insurance companies, railroads and other well-resourced clients.

It was prestigious work, Biden told friends. He was making it. He was on schedule.

In public remarks through the years, Biden has tended to dwell more often on the broader historical record of this period than his own.

During a 2009 speech, he said the violence in Vietnam “pierced America’s consciousness,” recounting a student occupation of the Syracuse chancellor’s office. He did not tell his audience what he thought of those doing the occupying at the time.

In a 2016 address, Biden explained that once he graduated, “the world had changed.”

“Dr. King had been assassinated,” he said. “There were riots throughout America. A significant part of my hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, was burned to the ground.”

This localized distress had perhaps the most lasting effect on Biden. Wilmington was home to a notoriously lengthy National Guard occupation: Troops continued patrolling predominantly Black neighborhoods well after initial unrest following King’s death.

Biden has described the episode, combined with his lifeguard experience, as central to his early understanding of race relations.

He began working as a public defender part time and signed on with another practice that often represented the less prosperous.

“If you’re interested in a political career, you do what he did rather than take a job at a white-shoe law firm,” Markel said.

The less subtle giveaway came during a visit to the Biden residence around this time.

“We sat down in his living room, and two dogs pop out,” Markel remembered. “I said, ‘What are their names?’ He said, ‘Senator and Governor.’”

Steeped in the “Truman Democrat” leanings of his relatives from an early age and repulsed, he has said, by the politics of Richard Nixon, Biden joined a local Democratic group, implicitly (and, often enough, explicitly) announcing himself as a prospective force in the party.

Even then, “he was an institutionalist,” said Sloan, the veteran activist. “He was going to work within the system, which he did.”

When a seat on the New Castle County Council was coming open in 1970, local Democrats assumed that Biden would be eager to claim it.

John Daniello, a party official who would become the Democratic state chairman, approached Biden to feel him out.

“He just had no interest in local government, so county office didn’t turn him on even a little bit,” Daniello said. “I made the pitch that, you know, all politics is local and that you’ve got to start someplace to get name recognition.”

Biden was persuaded in time. He ran and won.

Soon after, he asked Daniello to lunch.

“I thought he wanted to talk about pending issues,” Daniello said.

But Biden had another gambit in mind: What about the U.S. Senate?

Joe Biden marched into adulthood in Bass Weejuns penny loafers. He was known around the University of Delaware campus as the teetotaling semi-jock with a sweater around his neck — the type who seemed more consumed with date nights than civil rights and expected a certain standard of decorum from his companions, once threatening to break off an evening with a woman who lit a cigarette in his borrowed convertible.

Joe Biden marched into adulthood in Bass Weejuns penny loafers. He was known around the University of Delaware campus as the teetotaling semi-jock with a sweater around his neck — the type who seemed more consumed with date nights than civil rights and expected a certain standard of decorum from his companions, once threatening to break off an evening with a woman who lit a cigarette in his borrowed convertible. And when Biden and his friends from Syracuse University law school happened upon anti-war protesters at the chancellor’s office — the kind of Vietnam-era demonstration that galvanized so much of their generation — his group stepped past with disdain. They were going for pizza. More than a half-century later, as Biden seeks the White House with a pledge to soothe the nation’s wounds and lower its collective temperature, he has been left to deflect a curious charge at the center of President Donald Trump’s reelection effort: Biden, the president insists, is eager to do the far-left bidding of violent agitators and other assorted radicals. Also read| Biden, Harris wish Hindu-Americans on the occasion of Navratri “They’ve got you wrapped around their finger, Joe,” Trump taunted at their first debate. Biden, a 77-year-old moderate who cites John Wayne movies and long-dead Senate peers, has generally defaulted to a visceral defense: Look at me. “Ask yourself,” he implored voters in a recent address. “Do I look like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters?” He does not now, friends from his youth say, and he did not then — in spite of, and perhaps partly because of, the decade in which he came of age. Amid simmering protests, generational division and defining disputes about the course of American life, Biden was a young man keen on bringing a bit of a 1950s sensibility into the 1960s — a nice-house-on-a-cul-de-sac kind of guy who spent his weekends as a 20-something husband scouting available real estate from his Corvette. Also read| Biden sets fundraising record with $383 mn in September There is a version of these years that Biden prefers to share publicly: how he was captivated by the civil rights movement, coming to understand the racial divide as a teenage lifeguard in a Black neighborhood of Wilmington, Delaware; how he was brokenhearted by the murder of his heroes, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedy brothers; how he was motivated chiefly by an altruistic call to service. If much of this accounting is plainly true in the abstract, those who knew him say, it also elides some finer points of Biden’s arc: his boundless personal ambition, his canny relationship-building as a political novice and, quite often, his conspicuous psychic distance from the activist fervor of the times as he plotted a path to office. “He had other priorities,” Gilbert J. Sloan, a longtime supporter who was active in Delaware’s 1960s protest movements, said of Biden’s outlook then. “He was very young and ambitious.” A review of how Biden navigated this period of national upheaval — drawn from interviews with more than a dozen friends, classmates and others who have known the Democratic nominee across the decades — at once lays bare the implausibility of Trump’s attack and supplies an enduring window into Biden’s own theories of social movements. Incremental progress is still progress, he has long believed, and within-the-system change is still change. Also read| US election 2020: How the States vote for the Presidential elections If today’s activists have at times viewed Biden skeptically through this season of unrest, questioning whether he can connect with the passion in the streets when he has rarely shown passion in the streets himself, his early history would appear to reinforce their doubts. This is a man whose institutionalist instincts seemed to harden even before he belonged to any political institutions — and who has never shown much patience for protests that turn destructive or unruly. “That’s the way he views activism,” said Bob Markel, a friend since the 1950s. “Occupying an office of a dean or something like that is not his style.” It never has been. As the Vietnam War reshaped lives across many less-than-affluent families like his own, with casualties and moral outrage mounting especially among young adults a few years behind him, Biden eluded both the conflict and the attendant anger. He received five student draft deferments during the war and was kept from service after a physical exam in 1968 because he had asthma as a teenager, according to his campaign. (Trump, now 74, received five deferments in all, including a medical deferment for bone spurs.) Also read| Jim Carrey plays Joe Biden in the most anticipated season premiere of 'SNL' Biden has said he viewed the Vietnam War “in terms of stupidity, not morality,” doubting its wisdom but never feverishly enough to chant about it. “I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dye shirts,” he told reporters in 1987, distinguishing himself from some politically minded contemporaries. “Other people marched. I ran for office.” ‘Average Irish Guy’ It can be almost impossible now to imagine Biden as a young man — or, at least, a younger man than he was when he first reached Washington, as a 30-year-old senator shattered by the car crash that killed his first wife, Neilia, and their baby daughter. But to those who met him before his best-known trials and triumphs, the Joe Biden who wandered campus in a tasteful button-down and chinos remains an indelible character, settling into the identity that would become his self-styled political brand: polished but unpretentious, a natural leader with few obvious preternatural gifts. “He was an average Irish guy. His father was a car salesman, for God’s sake,” said Fred Sears, a friend from the University of Delaware. “A good-looking guy with a gift of gab.” Have a look| US election 2020: Last few Presidents of the United States of America The glad-handing started early. An aspiring football running back and amiable freshman in 1961, Biden was elected president of his class, moving quickly to flatter his constituents. “He came up to me, shook my hand,” recalled Brian Barrabee, a football player who lived in the same dorm, “and he said, ‘Brian, I’d like to thank you for not running for class president because if you had, you would have beaten me.’ It was his way of getting people to feel good.” By his own account, Biden’s most resonant exposure to the dominant political issues of the day came well off campus. He has said he once walked out of a Wilmington restaurant that refused to serve a Black student from his high school, a recollection that Markel corroborated. And at 19, Biden worked as a lifeguard in a largely Black section of Wilmington in 1962. Also read| Democrats have nothing but disdain for your values, says Trump in Florida rally as crowd chants 'Lock up Bidens' He has said he took the job after absorbing images of the civil rights fight on television and realizing he had few relationships with Black people, suggesting he came to understand injustice most acutely by speaking to swimmers about the prejudices they faced. “What he learned from us is that we didn’t have what everybody else had,” said Richard Smith, a longtime civil rights activist who met Biden that summer as an adolescent. “He got his schooling at the swimming pool.” Biden’s formal schooling, friends say, could feel less connected to the wider national tumult. Barrabee said the campus was not a “hotbed of political activity,” describing much of the student body as “suburban kids from Wilmington, Delaware, southern Delaware area, who just wanted to go to college.” Biden did not drink — “there are enough alcoholics in my family,” he has said — and he did not smoke. But he had a way of finding trouble. He has said he was placed on probation for hosing down a resident adviser with a fire extinguisher. He once paid a covert visit to a romantic interest and left a friend, his lookout, to take the fall with the campus police, according to a transcript of Biden’s eulogy for the man in 2004. Also read| US election 2020: How are votes counted in the presidential election? Biden has said his worrisome grades sidelined his football career. Academic struggles kept him from sticking with student government as well, Sears said. But Biden’s father perhaps inadvertently assisted in his distracting social agenda: Cars were not permitted on campus, Sears said, but the elder Biden’s job allowed his son easy access to loaner vehicles for weekend excursions. “Every weekend, somehow, Joe ended up with a car,” Sears said of his friend’s advantages in courtship. “It was always a convertible. Besides being very cool and dressing right, showing up in a convertible he had us all beat eight ways from Sunday.” ‘I Wore Sport Coats’ The tilt of Biden’s life changed for good with a last-minute flight to the Bahamas. Also read| In record turnout, over 16 million Americans vote ahead of election day on November 3 He had driven down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the spring of 1964 for a couple of days with friends when boredom compelled them to consider a more daring beach destination. They booked a round trip to Nassau for about $25. While there, Biden met Neilia Hunter poolside at an exclusive hotel he had sneaked into by wrapping a guest towel around his waist and walking past the guards with confidence. “I’ve got the blonde,” he told his friends, beelining to Hunter, an attractive sunbather from a well-to-do family near Syracuse. She liked him back. And when they returned stateside, the fresh clarity in Biden’s personal life seemed to sharpen his focus on other endeavors, coaxing him to fits of big-picture dreaming. Also read| US election 2020: Indian-Americans overwhelmingly support Joe Biden, new poll shows He would apply to law school at Syracuse to be near Hunter. He would make sure he was studying enough to get in. They would get married, have kids (“she wanted five”), buy a house (“a big Tudor-style house with real trees, what the real estate professionals call ‘mature plantings’”). He would work as a trial lawyer, start his own practice, run for office. “Once I had Neilia with me, it became more of a plan than a daydream,” Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir. “Now I could see the picture whole.” The early goals in this timeline were accomplished apace: He got into Syracuse. He and Hunter were married in 1966. Markel, one of Biden’s groomsmen, said Biden’s seriousness extended even to his own bachelor party. The group had rented a motel room around New Castle, Delaware, he recalled, growing rowdier by the hour, with the exception of the non-drinking groom. “We got kind of sloppy drunk,” Markel said. “Toward the end of the evening, I remember him giving us a lecture: ‘You guys are a disgrace.’” But Biden was still liable to lose interest in academics quickly, prizing football tailgates or social engagements with Hunter and often copying class notes from a friend. Sometimes, Hunter prepared Biden’s study sheets, inventing mnemonic devices for him to memorize. In his most damaging bit of carelessness, Biden lifted chunks of a law review article without proper citation — a blemish that damaged his 1988 presidential campaign amid other accusations of plagiarism at the time. Biden has said he did nothing “malevolent” at Syracuse but simply did not understand citation standards because he had not been to class often enough. “He found out it wasn’t that easy,” said Mike Gelacak, a friend who later worked as a Senate aide to Biden. “His wife explained to him that he had to knuckle down.” And if the country’s volatility in those years seeped into campus life, classmates say that Biden never much grappled with it in their company. “I was married,” Biden told reporters during the 1988 campaign, declaring himself “out of sync” with anti-war zeal. “I was in law school. I wore sport coats.” 'The World Had Changed' His wardrobe remained conservative upon graduation, befitting his new employer: a Wilmington law firm representing insurance companies, railroads and other well-resourced clients. It was prestigious work, Biden told friends. He was making it. He was on schedule. In public remarks through the years, Biden has tended to dwell more often on the broader historical record of this period than his own. During a 2009 speech, he said the violence in Vietnam “pierced America’s consciousness,” recounting a student occupation of the Syracuse chancellor’s office. He did not tell his audience what he thought of those doing the occupying at the time. In a 2016 address, Biden explained that once he graduated, “the world had changed.” “Dr. King had been assassinated,” he said. “There were riots throughout America. A significant part of my hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, was burned to the ground.” This localized distress had perhaps the most lasting effect on Biden. Wilmington was home to a notoriously lengthy National Guard occupation: Troops continued patrolling predominantly Black neighborhoods well after initial unrest following King’s death. Biden has described the episode, combined with his lifeguard experience, as central to his early understanding of race relations. He began working as a public defender part time and signed on with another practice that often represented the less prosperous. “If you’re interested in a political career, you do what he did rather than take a job at a white-shoe law firm,” Markel said. The less subtle giveaway came during a visit to the Biden residence around this time. “We sat down in his living room, and two dogs pop out,” Markel remembered. “I said, ‘What are their names?’ He said, ‘Senator and Governor.’” Steeped in the “Truman Democrat” leanings of his relatives from an early age and repulsed, he has said, by the politics of Richard Nixon, Biden joined a local Democratic group, implicitly (and, often enough, explicitly) announcing himself as a prospective force in the party. Even then, “he was an institutionalist,” said Sloan, the veteran activist. “He was going to work within the system, which he did.” When a seat on the New Castle County Council was coming open in 1970, local Democrats assumed that Biden would be eager to claim it. John Daniello, a party official who would become the Democratic state chairman, approached Biden to feel him out. “He just had no interest in local government, so county office didn’t turn him on even a little bit,” Daniello said. “I made the pitch that, you know, all politics is local and that you’ve got to start someplace to get name recognition.” Biden was persuaded in time. He ran and won. Soon after, he asked Daniello to lunch. “I thought he wanted to talk about pending issues,” Daniello said. But Biden had another gambit in mind: What about the U.S. Senate?

Joe Biden's non-radical 1960s

Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden on Friday (local time) weighed emphatically in favour of Affordable Care Act, informally known as 'Obamacare' at an event in Michigan.

Michigan is a swing state, that is, one of the states that are not seen to strongly support either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Victory in swing states may prove to be instrumental for both candidates after they win their respective traditional strongholds.

“If I have the honor of becoming your president, we'll build on the Affordable Care Act, no matter what they do," Biden said at an event in Michigan.

Affordable Care Act was passed by Barack Obama administration. The act paved way for millions of Americans to afford healthcare. Republican Party has been against the law from the moment it was passed. Democrats allege that striking down the law is high on the priority list of Republicans. Democratic Party has upped the ante to support the Act especially after Judge Amy Coney Barrett was nominated by Donald Trump to the Supreme Court.

In Michigan, Biden lashed out at Trump for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

"He’ll do anything to distract us from focusing on his failures to deal with this virus to protect the nation," Biden said. "It's not disappearing, in fact it's on the rise again. It's getting worse, as predicted."

Also Read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/democrats-have-nothing-but-disdain-for-your-values-says-trump-in-florida-rally-as-crowd-chants-lock-up-bidens-335925">Democrats have nothing but disdain for your values, says Trump in Florida rally as crowd chants 'Lock up Bidens'</a>

Biden has shown strength with senior voters, many of whom have faulted Trump for his response to the health crisis.

Biden also homed in on another area where Trump has run into regular controversy -- his often lackluster responses when asked to condemn extreme right-wing groups and white supremacists.

He said Trump's comments were a "dog whistle" to such groups.

"Look. Everybody knows who Donald Trump is, let's show them who we are," Biden said at a car rally in Detroit. 
"We choose hope over fear, unity over division, science over fiction and yes, truth over lies."

(With agency inputs)

Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden on Friday (local time) weighed emphatically in favour of Affordable Care Act, informally known as 'Obamacare' at an event in Michigan.

Democratic Party presidential candidate Joe Biden on Friday (local time) weighed emphatically in favour of Affordable Care Act, informally known as 'Obamacare' at an event in Michigan. Michigan is a swing state, that is, one of the states that are not seen to strongly support either Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Victory in swing states may prove to be instrumental for both candidates after they win their respective traditional strongholds. “If I have the honor of becoming your president, we'll build on the Affordable Care Act, no matter what they do," Biden said at an event in Michigan. Affordable Care Act was passed by Barack Obama administration. The act paved way for millions of Americans to afford healthcare. Republican Party has been against the law from the moment it was passed. Democrats allege that striking down the law is high on the priority list of Republicans. Democratic Party has upped the ante to support the Act especially after Judge Amy Coney Barrett was nominated by Donald Trump to the Supreme Court. In Michigan, Biden lashed out at Trump for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. "He’ll do anything to distract us from focusing on his failures to deal with this virus to protect the nation," Biden said. "It's not disappearing, in fact it's on the rise again. It's getting worse, as predicted." Also Read | Democrats have nothing but disdain for your values, says Trump in Florida rally as crowd chants 'Lock up Bidens' Biden has shown strength with senior voters, many of whom have faulted Trump for his response to the health crisis. Biden also homed in on another area where Trump has run into regular controversy -- his often lackluster responses when asked to condemn extreme right-wing groups and white supremacists. He said Trump's comments were a "dog whistle" to such groups. "Look. Everybody knows who Donald Trump is, let's show them who we are," Biden said at a car rally in Detroit. "We choose hope over fear, unity over division, science over fiction and yes, truth over lies." (With agency inputs)

We will build on Obamacare, no matter what they do: Joe Biden in Michigan

According to US Elections Project, over 23 million people have already voted in the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/us-election"> US elections</a> ahead of election day on November 3.

Watch:

<div class="videoWrapper trancodeVideo"><iframe allowfullscreen="" autoplay="1" class="includeVideo" frameborder="0" height="350" src="https://www.wionews.com/videos/us-election-2020-unprecedented-surge-in-mail-in-votes-wion-voa-co-production-335918/embed" style="width:100%;max-width:560px;" width="560"></iframe></div>

The surge in voting has surprised experts as only 6 million had voted at this time during the 2016 elections which was won by <a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/us-election-2020-last-five-presidents-of-the-united-states-of-america-335804">Trump</a>. California, Texas and Florida have witnessed a huge voter turnout with over 2 million votes cast already, according to United States Elections Project, run by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald.&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/democrats-have-nothing-but-disdain-for-your-values-says-trump-in-florida-rally-as-crowd-chants-lock-up-bidens-335925">Also Read: Democrats have nothing but disdain for your values, says Trump as crowd chants 'Lock up Bidens'</a>

The voters have turned up in huge numbers despite the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/coronavirus-cases-cross-8-million-in-united-states-daily-infections-on-the-rise-since-september-335923">coronavirus</a> pandemic sweeping the country even as US President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential hopeful <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/we-will-build-on-obamacare-no-matter-what-they-do-joe-biden-in-michigan-335944">Joe Biden</a> continue to take on each other in various Townhall duels across the country.

Most of the voting so far has taken place through in-person or by mail-in voting. According to Ohio Secretary of State, over 2.4 million mail-in ballots have been requested which is double the number requested in the same period in 2016.

Over a million people have also voted in Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia.

Voters have also chosen their next US president in Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Aziona and Okhalama with a sizeable number of votes cast. &nbsp;

According to reports, the youth in America have turned up in huge numbers so far to vote.&nbsp;

According to US Elections Project, over 23 million people have already voted in the US elections ahead of election day on November 3. Watch: The surge in voting has surprised experts as only 6 million had voted at this time during the 2016 elections which was won by Trump.

According to US Elections Project, over 23 million people have already voted in the US elections ahead of election day on November 3. Watch: The surge in voting has surprised experts as only 6 million had voted at this time during the 2016 elections which was won by Trump. California, Texas and Florida have witnessed a huge voter turnout with over 2 million votes cast already, according to United States Elections Project, run by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald. Also Read: Democrats have nothing but disdain for your values, says Trump as crowd chants 'Lock up Bidens' The voters have turned up in huge numbers despite the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the country even as US President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden continue to take on each other in various Townhall duels across the country. Most of the voting so far has taken place through in-person or by mail-in voting. According to Ohio Secretary of State, over 2.4 million mail-in ballots have been requested which is double the number requested in the same period in 2016. Over a million people have also voted in Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia and Georgia. Voters have also chosen their next US president in Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, Aziona and Okhalama with a sizeable number of votes cast. According to reports, the youth in America have turned up in huge numbers so far to vote.

US Elections: Over 23 million Americans vote ahead of polling day

WASHINGTON — In late September, a Nobel Prize-winning economist emailed Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a White House coronavirus adviser, in what he saw as a last-ditch effort to persuade the Trump administration to embrace a sharp increase in testing and isolating infected patients. The plan, meant to appeal to a president who has complained that positive tests make his administration look bad, would not “generate any new confirmed cases.”

Atlas, a radiologist, told the economist, Paul Romer of New York University, that there was no need to do the sort of testing he was proposing.

“That’s not appropriate health care policy,” Atlas wrote.

Atlas went on to mention a theory that the virus can be arrested once a small percentage of the U.S. population contracts it. He said there was a “likelihood that only 25 or 20% of people need the infection,” an apparent reference to a threshold for so-called herd immunity that epidemiologists have widely disputed.

The call for more widespread testing and isolation, Atlas wrote, “is grossly misguided.”

The exchange highlights the resistance in the White House toward adopting a significantly expanded federal testing program, including efforts to support infected patients in isolation and track the people they have been in contact with, even as cases and deaths continue to rise nationwide. That resistance has become a sticking point in negotiations over a new economic stimulus package, with the administration and top Democrats yet to agree on the scope and setup of an expanded testing plan.

Many public health experts, and some economists like Romer, say that a far more sweeping program would save lives and bolster the economy by helping as many Americans as possible learn quickly if they are infected — and then take steps to avoid spreading the virus.

Atlas and other administration officials playing influential roles in the government’s virus response effectively say the opposite: that more widespread testing would infringe on Americans’ privacy and hurt the economy, by keeping potentially infected workers who show no symptoms from reporting to their jobs.

Congressional Democrats have grown so frustrated with the administration’s testing efforts that as part of any agreement on a new aid package, they insisted on language that would force the government to carry out a far more prescriptive national program for administering and distributing tests.

While White House negotiators resisted those demands for months, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has said he will accept such wording with minor edits. Top Democratic staff, including the top health adviser to Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, walked Mnuchin through the party’s proposal Friday, according to a person familiar with the discussion, but they had yet to announce agreement on language by early evening.

In an interview Thursday, Atlas, who is not involved in the stimulus talks, said that the United States had a “massive” testing program overall but that it should be used strategically to protect vulnerable populations, like nursing home residents — not young, healthy individuals who he said were at low risk of contracting the disease. He said that large-scale government test and isolate programs infringed on civil liberties and that new research had persuaded him that herd immunity might be achieved once 20% or 40% of Americans are infected.

“The overwhelming majority of people who get this infection are not at high risk,” Atlas said in the interview. “And when you start seeking out and testing asymptomatic people, you are destroying the workforce.”

Many congressional Republicans, who prefer to leave testing decisions to states, share Atlas’ concerns about federal testing programs, a complication if Mnuchin and Pelosi do agree on a nearly $2 trillion economic stimulus deal.

Mnuchin said Thursday that the pair had settled on spending an additional $75 billion for testing and tracing. But the sides have not yet reached agreement on the language that Democrats have demanded for a national testing strategy, including timelines and benchmarks for allocating testing supplies and testing communities heavily affected by the virus. Democrats have been wary that the administration would actually spend the money as intended without specific legislative parameters.

Pelosi said she had not received proposed changes from Mnuchin as of early Friday evening, saying in an interview on MSNBC, “We’re making progress — we have to have clarification in language.” The pair are scheduled to speak Saturday evening.

“The devil and the angels are in the detail,” she said, adding that she was opposed to “giving the president a slush fund” instead of “a prescription for what we need, what scientists tell us to need to stop the spread of this virus.”

Experts from a wide range of fields have repeatedly denounced the lack of testing in the United States. Despite Trump’s repeated affirmations that the country has done more testing than any other nation, researchers have noted that 991,000 or so tests done each day were still not enough to keep in check a virus that has infected more than 8 million people nationwide. Tests can individually diagnose people who might unknowingly carrying the virus. At the population level, they can also help health officials monitor any spread and pinpoint and quash outbreaks before they spin out of control.

Others have cautioned against an overreliance on testing as a preventive measure, noting that, in the absence of standards like physical distancing and mask wearing, testing alone cannot fully contain a virus that spreads wherever people tend to gather, regardless of whether those infected are exhibiting symptoms.

“No testing scheme, no test is perfect. There will always be people who go undetected,” said Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who has researched and written about herd immunity. “The best way to protect the most vulnerable is to reduce the amount of virus that’s in the population that can get through all of those testing schemes and cause destruction.”

Atlas’ position has been challenged by medical advisers around him who have backgrounds in infectious disease response, revealing a significant rift in the White House over the right approach. Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, has pushed for aggressive, broad testing even among young and healthy people, often clashing with Atlas in meetings.

“I would always be happy if we had 100% of students tested weekly,” Birx said Wednesday in an appearance at Penn State University, “because I think testing changes behavior.”

Atlas at one point influenced the administration’s efforts to install new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance that said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of COVID-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus, upsetting Birx and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the CDC director.

The administration’s efforts to fund federal and state testing have long been fraught. In July, as administration officials and top Senate Republicans clashed over the contours of their initial $1 trillion proposal, the White House initially balked at providing billions of dollars to fund coronavirus testing and help federal health agencies.

Since the early days of the pandemic, Romer has argued for a wide-scale testing program, costing as much as $100 billion. He had hoped to persuade Atlas that if officials could quickly identify and isolate people carrying the virus, they would slow its spread and allow normal economic activity to resume more quickly.

In his email, sent to Atlas’ personal account, Romer proposed additional testing and isolation efforts that could allow far more Americans to return to work and shopping, generating economic activity that would be 10 or 100 times larger than the cost of the testing program itself.

In an interview, he said he also “went out on a limb” to propose a version of an expanded testing plan that might appeal to Trump, who said this year that he had instructed federal officials to slow the rate of testing because “by having more tests, we have more cases.”

Romer wrote that an increase in positive test results could be “interpreted as a sign of a policy failure." He said the administration could instead consider a plan to send Americans tests they could administer themselves at home, then allow people to voluntarily self-isolate if they tested positive, which would not officially generate new “confirmed” cases.

Atlas replied that the push for such testing was the result of “a fundamental error of the public health people perpetrated on the world.”

Romer said he was taken aback by the answer: “Atlas just responded in a way that just honestly made it seem like he was in over his head,” he said.

WASHINGTON — In late September, a Nobel Prize-winning economist emailed Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a White House coronavirus adviser, in what he saw as a last-ditch effort to persuade the Trump administration to embrace a sharp increase in testing and isolating infected patients.

WASHINGTON — In late September, a Nobel Prize-winning economist emailed Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a White House coronavirus adviser, in what he saw as a last-ditch effort to persuade the Trump administration to embrace a sharp increase in testing and isolating infected patients. The plan, meant to appeal to a president who has complained that positive tests make his administration look bad, would not “generate any new confirmed cases.” Atlas, a radiologist, told the economist, Paul Romer of New York University, that there was no need to do the sort of testing he was proposing. “That’s not appropriate health care policy,” Atlas wrote. Atlas went on to mention a theory that the virus can be arrested once a small percentage of the U.S. population contracts it. He said there was a “likelihood that only 25 or 20% of people need the infection,” an apparent reference to a threshold for so-called herd immunity that epidemiologists have widely disputed. The call for more widespread testing and isolation, Atlas wrote, “is grossly misguided.” The exchange highlights the resistance in the White House toward adopting a significantly expanded federal testing program, including efforts to support infected patients in isolation and track the people they have been in contact with, even as cases and deaths continue to rise nationwide. That resistance has become a sticking point in negotiations over a new economic stimulus package, with the administration and top Democrats yet to agree on the scope and setup of an expanded testing plan. Many public health experts, and some economists like Romer, say that a far more sweeping program would save lives and bolster the economy by helping as many Americans as possible learn quickly if they are infected — and then take steps to avoid spreading the virus. Atlas and other administration officials playing influential roles in the government’s virus response effectively say the opposite: that more widespread testing would infringe on Americans’ privacy and hurt the economy, by keeping potentially infected workers who show no symptoms from reporting to their jobs. Congressional Democrats have grown so frustrated with the administration’s testing efforts that as part of any agreement on a new aid package, they insisted on language that would force the government to carry out a far more prescriptive national program for administering and distributing tests. While White House negotiators resisted those demands for months, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has said he will accept such wording with minor edits. Top Democratic staff, including the top health adviser to Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, walked Mnuchin through the party’s proposal Friday, according to a person familiar with the discussion, but they had yet to announce agreement on language by early evening. In an interview Thursday, Atlas, who is not involved in the stimulus talks, said that the United States had a “massive” testing program overall but that it should be used strategically to protect vulnerable populations, like nursing home residents — not young, healthy individuals who he said were at low risk of contracting the disease. He said that large-scale government test and isolate programs infringed on civil liberties and that new research had persuaded him that herd immunity might be achieved once 20% or 40% of Americans are infected. “The overwhelming majority of people who get this infection are not at high risk,” Atlas said in the interview. “And when you start seeking out and testing asymptomatic people, you are destroying the workforce.” Many congressional Republicans, who prefer to leave testing decisions to states, share Atlas’ concerns about federal testing programs, a complication if Mnuchin and Pelosi do agree on a nearly $2 trillion economic stimulus deal. Mnuchin said Thursday that the pair had settled on spending an additional $75 billion for testing and tracing. But the sides have not yet reached agreement on the language that Democrats have demanded for a national testing strategy, including timelines and benchmarks for allocating testing supplies and testing communities heavily affected by the virus. Democrats have been wary that the administration would actually spend the money as intended without specific legislative parameters. Pelosi said she had not received proposed changes from Mnuchin as of early Friday evening, saying in an interview on MSNBC, “We’re making progress — we have to have clarification in language.” The pair are scheduled to speak Saturday evening. “The devil and the angels are in the detail,” she said, adding that she was opposed to “giving the president a slush fund” instead of “a prescription for what we need, what scientists tell us to need to stop the spread of this virus.” Experts from a wide range of fields have repeatedly denounced the lack of testing in the United States. Despite Trump’s repeated affirmations that the country has done more testing than any other nation, researchers have noted that 991,000 or so tests done each day were still not enough to keep in check a virus that has infected more than 8 million people nationwide. Tests can individually diagnose people who might unknowingly carrying the virus. At the population level, they can also help health officials monitor any spread and pinpoint and quash outbreaks before they spin out of control. Others have cautioned against an overreliance on testing as a preventive measure, noting that, in the absence of standards like physical distancing and mask wearing, testing alone cannot fully contain a virus that spreads wherever people tend to gather, regardless of whether those infected are exhibiting symptoms. “No testing scheme, no test is perfect. There will always be people who go undetected,” said Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University who has researched and written about herd immunity. “The best way to protect the most vulnerable is to reduce the amount of virus that’s in the population that can get through all of those testing schemes and cause destruction.” Atlas’ position has been challenged by medical advisers around him who have backgrounds in infectious disease response, revealing a significant rift in the White House over the right approach. Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, has pushed for aggressive, broad testing even among young and healthy people, often clashing with Atlas in meetings. “I would always be happy if we had 100% of students tested weekly,” Birx said Wednesday in an appearance at Penn State University, “because I think testing changes behavior.” Atlas at one point influenced the administration’s efforts to install new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance that said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of COVID-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus, upsetting Birx and Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the CDC director. The administration’s efforts to fund federal and state testing have long been fraught. In July, as administration officials and top Senate Republicans clashed over the contours of their initial $1 trillion proposal, the White House initially balked at providing billions of dollars to fund coronavirus testing and help federal health agencies. Since the early days of the pandemic, Romer has argued for a wide-scale testing program, costing as much as $100 billion. He had hoped to persuade Atlas that if officials could quickly identify and isolate people carrying the virus, they would slow its spread and allow normal economic activity to resume more quickly. In his email, sent to Atlas’ personal account, Romer proposed additional testing and isolation efforts that could allow far more Americans to return to work and shopping, generating economic activity that would be 10 or 100 times larger than the cost of the testing program itself. In an interview, he said he also “went out on a limb” to propose a version of an expanded testing plan that might appeal to Trump, who said this year that he had instructed federal officials to slow the rate of testing because “by having more tests, we have more cases.” Romer wrote that an increase in positive test results could be “interpreted as a sign of a policy failure." He said the administration could instead consider a plan to send Americans tests they could administer themselves at home, then allow people to voluntarily self-isolate if they tested positive, which would not officially generate new “confirmed” cases. Atlas replied that the push for such testing was the result of “a fundamental error of the public health people perpetrated on the world.” Romer said he was taken aback by the answer: “Atlas just responded in a way that just honestly made it seem like he was in over his head,” he said.

White House opposes expanded virus testing, complicating stimulus talks

The US President <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Donald Trump</a> on Saturday attacked a longtime congressional critic who warned this week that his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and authoritarian leaders could cause a "Republican bloodbath in the Senate" in the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/us-election?page=1">November 3 elections</a>.

US Senator Ben Sasse is the least effective of the 53 Republican senators, Trump wrote on Twitter, calling him "a liability to the Republican Party, and an embarrassment to the Great State of Nebraska. Other than that, he’s just a wonderful guy."

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...Nomination to run for a second term. Then he went back to his rather stupid and obnoxious ways. Must feel he can’t lose to a Dem. Little Ben is a liability to the Republican Party, and an embarrassment to the Great State of Nebraska. Other than that, he’s just a wonderful guy!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) <a href="https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1317460179223498753?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 17, 2020</a></blockquote>
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Sasse criticized Trump in a town hall with constituents on Wednesday, and questioned whether the president would ultimately drive the country further to the left.

Trump "kisses dictators` butts" and has "flirted with white supremacists," according to a transcript of the virtual town hall. Trump`s leadership through the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/coronavirus">COVID-19 pandemic</a> has not been "reasonable, or responsible, or right," Sasse said.

He added that Trump refused to take the coronavirus seriously for months and had treated it like a news cycle rather that a multi-year public health challenge.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/republican-senator-repeatedly-mispronounces-kamala-harris-name-at-trump-rally-335970">Also read|&nbsp;Republican Senator repeatedly mispronounces Kamala Harris' name at Trump rally</a>

Sasse is a frequent critic of Trump, and said before the 2016 election he would not endorse him. However, he has voted in line with Trump`s positions in Congress nearly 87 per cent of the time, according to a tally of votes through Sept. 24 by the fivethirtyeight.com website.

Senate Republicans are battling to keep their 53-47 majority in the election. Recent polling of Reuters/Ipsos shows Democratic challenger Mark Kelly pulling far ahead of Republican incumbent Martha McSally in Arizona, one of 10 states where Republican incumbents are vulnerable to being unseated.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/trump-heads-to-michigan-wisconsin-in-us-election-campaign-push-336036">Also read|&nbsp;Trump heads to Michigan, Wisconsin in US election campaign push</a>

Several, including Trump`s frequent golfing partner Senator Lindsey Graham, face funding shortfalls. Democrat Jaime Harrison who is running against Graham in South Carolina, has raised nearly $58 million during the three-month period ended Sept. 30, more than twice the $28 million reported by Graham`s campaign.

Democratic candidates in nine hotly contested Senate races amassed&nbsp;more than $240 million in contributions during that period, leaving their Republican opponents far behind in fundraising.

This week Graham expressed worries that Trump, who is behind Democratic candidate Joe Biden in many polls, could lose.

"Y`all have a good chance of winning the White House," Graham told Democratic colleagues during hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, Trump`s nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The US President Donald Trump on Saturday attacked a longtime congressional critic who warned this week that his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and authoritarian leaders could cause a "Republican bloodbath in the Senate" in the November 3 elections.

The US President Donald Trump on Saturday attacked a longtime congressional critic who warned this week that his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and authoritarian leaders could cause a "Republican bloodbath in the Senate" in the November 3 elections. US Senator Ben Sasse is the least effective of the 53 Republican senators, Trump wrote on Twitter, calling him "a liability to the Republican Party, and an embarrassment to the Great State of Nebraska. Other than that, he’s just a wonderful guy." ...Nomination to run for a second term. Then he went back to his rather stupid and obnoxious ways. Must feel he can’t lose to a Dem. Little Ben is a liability to the Republican Party, and an embarrassment to the Great State of Nebraska. Other than that, he’s just a wonderful guy! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 17, 2020 × Sasse criticized Trump in a town hall with constituents on Wednesday, and questioned whether the president would ultimately drive the country further to the left. Trump "kisses dictators` butts" and has "flirted with white supremacists," according to a transcript of the virtual town hall. Trump`s leadership through the COVID-19 pandemic has not been "reasonable, or responsible, or right," Sasse said. He added that Trump refused to take the coronavirus seriously for months and had treated it like a news cycle rather that a multi-year public health challenge. Also read| Republican Senator repeatedly mispronounces Kamala Harris' name at Trump rally Sasse is a frequent critic of Trump, and said before the 2016 election he would not endorse him. However, he has voted in line with Trump`s positions in Congress nearly 87 per cent of the time, according to a tally of votes through Sept. 24 by the fivethirtyeight.com website. Senate Republicans are battling to keep their 53-47 majority in the election. Recent polling of Reuters/Ipsos shows Democratic challenger Mark Kelly pulling far ahead of Republican incumbent Martha McSally in Arizona, one of 10 states where Republican incumbents are vulnerable to being unseated. Also read| Trump heads to Michigan, Wisconsin in US election campaign push Several, including Trump`s frequent golfing partner Senator Lindsey Graham, face funding shortfalls. Democrat Jaime Harrison who is running against Graham in South Carolina, has raised nearly $58 million during the three-month period ended Sept. 30, more than twice the $28 million reported by Graham`s campaign. Democratic candidates in nine hotly contested Senate races amassed more than $240 million in contributions during that period, leaving their Republican opponents far behind in fundraising. This week Graham expressed worries that Trump, who is behind Democratic candidate Joe Biden in many polls, could lose. "Y`all have a good chance of winning the White House," Graham told Democratic colleagues during hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, Trump`s nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy left by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Trump slams Republican critic who warned of November 'bloodbath'

Less than 20 days. It has been a long, hard road to this election. I see fearful faces, those of tormented migrants at the Mexican border, and hate-filled faces, those of the white nationalists in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us.”

Donald Trump has been all about the fear of replacement, or as it’s sometimes called, “the great replacement.” His has been the stand — I am tempted to say the last stand — of whites against nonwhites.

Of America-first nationalists against migrants; of straight people against LGBTQ people; of the gunned-up against the unarmed. Of Trump against all those he believes would replace&nbsp;the likes of him.

All means have been used — lies, brutality, incitement. But fear has been Trump’s main weapon. Fear, which depends on pitting one group against another, is the currency of the Trump presidency. It is therefore no surprise that the America that is about to vote is probably more fractured than at any time since the Vietnam War.

“The great replacement” is a phrase generally attributed to a French writer, Renaud Camus, who said: “The great replacement is very simple. You have one people, and in the space of a generation, you have a different people.”

That, of course, is a good definition of America.

Of its vitality, its churn, its reinvention, its essential openness. The America that Trump would deny. He wants to freeze a white America. Some strange blend of Norman Rockwell and “Mad Men,” in an imaginary United States strutting across a world pliant to its will. Behind “America first” lurks a very un-American credo.

Change can be frightening, which is what the great replacement conspiracy theory hinges on. Camus warns grotesquely of a “genocide by substitution,” the replacement of a white French and European order by Muslim hordes in a plot orchestrated by cosmopolitan elites. In Trump’s case, read a white American order replaced by brown Mexican rapists and Black pillagers.

France is worried about Muslims from North Africa. Germans were once so worried about Jews replacing them that they killed 6 million of them. In a world of mass migration, fear rages: Some idea of the nation will be diluted or lost!

America is particularly susceptible to fear today because the world has changed in unsettling ways. Power has migrated eastward to Asia. America’s recent wars have been unwon. By midcentury, non-Hispanic whites will constitute less than 50% of the population.

It is frightening to see an industry disappear, like coal in Kentucky. Trump understood that he could be the voice of that fear. He would build a wall to keep those brown people out!

He is an impostor. He puffs out his chest, Mussolini-style, but he is a bone-spur coward. A narrow ramp makes his limbs tremble. He is good at getting the blood up. He is good at undoing. He is not good at getting anything constructive done.

Less than 20 days.

America will decide whether to opt for the future or burrow self-destructively into some warped fantasy of the past. It will decide whether to reinvent itself again or turn mean and further inward.

As Edward R. Murrow remarked, “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”

That was in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism. For Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the danger to the Republic came from Communist infiltration of American life. The real danger came from his obsessions. From the purges and blacklists that branded countless Americans as un-American.

Murrow, a great journalist, stood up to McCarthy.

Donald Trump does business the McCarthy way. He deals in specters: immigrants, and Muslims, and brown people, and Black people, and LGBTQ people.

As with McCarthy, however, the real danger comes from Trump’s obsessions, not from these imagined enemies.

American freedom is in decline. The freedom to think, because thought depends on truth. The freedom to dissent, because Trump believes he has “the right to do whatever I want as president.” The freedom to breathe because Trumpism — its nepotism, its cozying to dictators, its incessant volume&nbsp;— is suffocating.

The freedom inextricable from the American idea that I, a naturalized American, hold sacred with an unreasonable ardor.

No, we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. We can only defend those who trample human dignity and human rights. As Trump has done with cavalier abandon.

Is it unreasonable to see renewal in a 77-year-old man, Joe Biden? No. We live in the real world, where the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Indecency demands the restoration of decency. That’s ground zero of this election. The choice was starkly evident in the televised town hall events Thursday as Trump spouted wild far-right conspiracy theories while Biden had the self-deprecating honesty to say that if he lost, it could suggest he’s “a lousy candidate.” Biden is not a lousy candidate; he is a good man, a brave man. I doff my hat to any parent who survives with such dignity the loss of two of his four children.

Of McCarthy, Murrow observed: “He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ ”

The fault is in ourselves. Time for Americans to look in the mirror — and realize their America is irreplaceable if it is lost.

Less than 20 days. It has been a long, hard road to this election. I see fearful faces, those of tormented migrants at the Mexican border, and hate-filled faces, those of the white nationalists in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us.

Less than 20 days. It has been a long, hard road to this election. I see fearful faces, those of tormented migrants at the Mexican border, and hate-filled faces, those of the white nationalists in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” Donald Trump has been all about the fear of replacement, or as it’s sometimes called, “the great replacement.” His has been the stand — I am tempted to say the last stand — of whites against nonwhites. Of America-first nationalists against migrants; of straight people against LGBTQ people; of the gunned-up against the unarmed. Of Trump against all those he believes would replace the likes of him. All means have been used — lies, brutality, incitement. But fear has been Trump’s main weapon. Fear, which depends on pitting one group against another, is the currency of the Trump presidency. It is therefore no surprise that the America that is about to vote is probably more fractured than at any time since the Vietnam War. “The great replacement” is a phrase generally attributed to a French writer, Renaud Camus, who said: “The great replacement is very simple. You have one people, and in the space of a generation, you have a different people.” That, of course, is a good definition of America. Of its vitality, its churn, its reinvention, its essential openness. The America that Trump would deny. He wants to freeze a white America. Some strange blend of Norman Rockwell and “Mad Men,” in an imaginary United States strutting across a world pliant to its will. Behind “America first” lurks a very un-American credo. Change can be frightening, which is what the great replacement conspiracy theory hinges on. Camus warns grotesquely of a “genocide by substitution,” the replacement of a white French and European order by Muslim hordes in a plot orchestrated by cosmopolitan elites. In Trump’s case, read a white American order replaced by brown Mexican rapists and Black pillagers. France is worried about Muslims from North Africa. Germans were once so worried about Jews replacing them that they killed 6 million of them. In a world of mass migration, fear rages: Some idea of the nation will be diluted or lost! America is particularly susceptible to fear today because the world has changed in unsettling ways. Power has migrated eastward to Asia. America’s recent wars have been unwon. By midcentury, non-Hispanic whites will constitute less than 50% of the population. It is frightening to see an industry disappear, like coal in Kentucky. Trump understood that he could be the voice of that fear. He would build a wall to keep those brown people out! He is an impostor. He puffs out his chest, Mussolini-style, but he is a bone-spur coward. A narrow ramp makes his limbs tremble. He is good at getting the blood up. He is good at undoing. He is not good at getting anything constructive done. Less than 20 days. America will decide whether to opt for the future or burrow self-destructively into some warped fantasy of the past. It will decide whether to reinvent itself again or turn mean and further inward. As Edward R. Murrow remarked, “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.” That was in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism. For Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the danger to the Republic came from Communist infiltration of American life. The real danger came from his obsessions. From the purges and blacklists that branded countless Americans as un-American. Murrow, a great journalist, stood up to McCarthy. Donald Trump does business the McCarthy way. He deals in specters: immigrants, and Muslims, and brown people, and Black people, and LGBTQ people. As with McCarthy, however, the real danger comes from Trump’s obsessions, not from these imagined enemies. American freedom is in decline. The freedom to think, because thought depends on truth. The freedom to dissent, because Trump believes he has “the right to do whatever I want as president.” The freedom to breathe because Trumpism — its nepotism, its cozying to dictators, its incessant volume — is suffocating. The freedom inextricable from the American idea that I, a naturalized American, hold sacred with an unreasonable ardor. No, we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. We can only defend those who trample human dignity and human rights. As Trump has done with cavalier abandon. Is it unreasonable to see renewal in a 77-year-old man, Joe Biden? No. We live in the real world, where the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Indecency demands the restoration of decency. That’s ground zero of this election. The choice was starkly evident in the televised town hall events Thursday as Trump spouted wild far-right conspiracy theories while Biden had the self-deprecating honesty to say that if he lost, it could suggest he’s “a lousy candidate.” Biden is not a lousy candidate; he is a good man, a brave man. I doff my hat to any parent who survives with such dignity the loss of two of his four children. Of McCarthy, Murrow observed: “He didn’t create this situation of fear; he merely exploited it — and rather successfully. Cassius was right. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ ” The fault is in ourselves. Time for Americans to look in the mirror — and realize their America is irreplaceable if it is lost.

Trump, or the last stand of White America

With just 16&nbsp;days left for the <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/us-election">US elections</a>, President Donald Trump visited Florida to campaign as he attacked Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Watch:

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"Democrats have nothing but disdain for your values and want to turn America into a Communist country," the US President told a crowd in Macon, Georgia.

"It's time we sent a message to these wealthy liberal hypocrites," the president added.

<a href="https://www.wionews.com/photos/us-election-2020-key-moments-of-donald-trumps-presidential-tenure-335800">Also Read:&nbsp;US election 2020: Key moments of Donald Trump's presidential tenure</a>

The rally is President <a href="https://www.wionews.com/topics/donald-trump">Trump's </a>second in one week in central Florida which was a Republican stronghold in 2016, however, the US president has been trailing in opinion polls to Biden in the state.

"He (Joe Biden) is a servant of the wealthy donors, globalists and special interests who got rich bleeding America dry. And by the way, I could call these guys. Everyone of them would give me millions. I'm president," the President said at the rally.

Trump attacked the media saying: "our media is the enemy of the people".

"I got an emergency call today. They say, ‘Sir, I’m sorry to tell you, but President Obama is going to start campaigning for Sleepy Joe.’ I said, ‘so what’s the problem with that’ … I said, ‘you know, he campaigned harder than Hillary last time, so why do we care?’" Trump said.

The crowd chanted against the Biden family in Macon, Georgia shouting "Lock up the Bidens. Lock up Hillary!" echoing Trump's campaign rally in 2016.

With just 16 days left for the US elections, President Donald Trump visited Florida to campaign as he attacked Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Watch: "Democrats have nothing but disdain for your values and want to turn America into a Communist country," the US President told a crowd in Macon, Georgia.

With just 16 days left for the US elections, President Donald Trump visited Florida to campaign as he attacked Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Watch: "Democrats have nothing but disdain for your values and want to turn America into a Communist country," the US President told a crowd in Macon, Georgia. "It's time we sent a message to these wealthy liberal hypocrites," the president added. Also Read: US election 2020: Key moments of Donald Trump's presidential tenure The rally is President Trump's second in one week in central Florida which was a Republican stronghold in 2016, however, the US president has been trailing in opinion polls to Biden in the state. "He (Joe Biden) is a servant of the wealthy donors, globalists and special interests who got rich bleeding America dry. And by the way, I could call these guys. Everyone of them would give me millions. I'm president," the President said at the rally. Trump attacked the media saying: "our media is the enemy of the people". "I got an emergency call today. They say, ‘Sir, I’m sorry to tell you, but President Obama is going to start campaigning for Sleepy Joe.’ I said, ‘so what’s the problem with that’ … I said, ‘you know, he campaigned harder than Hillary last time, so why do we care?’" Trump said. The crowd chanted against the Biden family in Macon, Georgia shouting "Lock up the Bidens. Lock up Hillary!" echoing Trump's campaign rally in 2016.

Democrats have nothing but disdain for your values, says Trump in Florida rally as crowd chants 'Lock up Bidens'

US President Donald Trump took his re-election push to Michigan and Wisconsin on Saturday before launching a tour of western states.

Trump is in a bit of a precarious situation as national polls show him trailing his Democratic rival Joe Biden.

Days after recovering from COVID-19 and just two and a half weeks before the November 3 election, Trump is holding rallies around the country to try to secure key battleground states that he won four years ago.

He prevailed in Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 but surveys show him running behind Biden, the former vice president, in those states this year.

Trump's advisors have long seen Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as Pennsylvania, as key to his chances of re-election.

Trump lags in opinion polls and the latest figures from his campaign show he is also trailing in fundraising as the race intensifies. Early voting is shattering records, with more than 23 million Americans having already cast ballots.

Biden, who has stepped up travel in recent weeks after keeping a reduced schedule because of the pandemic, plans to remain in his home state of Delaware on Saturday. 
His running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, is also eschewing travel for a few days after an aide came down with COVID-19.

Wisconsin has 10 electoral votes, Michigan has 16 and Arizona has 11. Nevada, where Trump will campaign on Sunday, has six electoral votes.

Trump, who usually avoids wearing a mask and whose rallies include thousands of people without social distancing, said again on Friday that the country is turning the corner on the disease, a day after the number of US cases crossed 8 million, rising by 1 million in less than a month.

But Biden has often criticised Trump sharply for his response to the pandemic, which has killed more than 217,000 people in the United States alone.

Biden said on Friday that Trump had been untruthful and negligent in his response to the virus. He has also criticized the Trump administration for seeking to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

Trump's string of campaign stops comes ahead of a critical week next week. The two candidates will face each other in their second and final debate on Thursday.

US President Donald Trump took his re-election push to Michigan and Wisconsin on Saturday before launching a tour of western states. Trump is in a bit of a precarious situation as national polls show him trailing his Democratic rival Joe Biden.

US President Donald Trump took his re-election push to Michigan and Wisconsin on Saturday before launching a tour of western states. Trump is in a bit of a precarious situation as national polls show him trailing his Democratic rival Joe Biden. Days after recovering from COVID-19 and just two and a half weeks before the November 3 election, Trump is holding rallies around the country to try to secure key battleground states that he won four years ago. He prevailed in Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 but surveys show him running behind Biden, the former vice president, in those states this year. Trump's advisors have long seen Michigan and Wisconsin, as well as Pennsylvania, as key to his chances of re-election. Trump lags in opinion polls and the latest figures from his campaign show he is also trailing in fundraising as the race intensifies. Early voting is shattering records, with more than 23 million Americans having already cast ballots. Biden, who has stepped up travel in recent weeks after keeping a reduced schedule because of the pandemic, plans to remain in his home state of Delaware on Saturday. His running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, is also eschewing travel for a few days after an aide came down with COVID-19. Wisconsin has 10 electoral votes, Michigan has 16 and Arizona has 11. Nevada, where Trump will campaign on Sunday, has six electoral votes. Trump, who usually avoids wearing a mask and whose rallies include thousands of people without social distancing, said again on Friday that the country is turning the corner on the disease, a day after the number of US cases crossed 8 million, rising by 1 million in less than a month. But Biden has often criticised Trump sharply for his response to the pandemic, which has killed more than 217,000 people in the United States alone. Biden said on Friday that Trump had been untruthful and negligent in his response to the virus. He has also criticized the Trump administration for seeking to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Trump's string of campaign stops comes ahead of a critical week next week. The two candidates will face each other in their second and final debate on Thursday.

Trump heads to Michigan, Wisconsin in US election campaign push

Joe Biden has broken his own monthly fundraising record by taking in $383 million in September for his presidential campaign. The flood of donations arrived after his first debate with US President Donald Trump.

Trump lagged far behind last month with $248 million.

The first presidential debate was a chaotic clash in which Trump constantly spoke over and interrupted Biden.

Democratic candidate Biden leads Trump nationally by double digits in the frenzied homestretch to the November 3 election.

Biden campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon said Wednesday the $383 million figure was a record and included $203 million raised from online donors. The campaign now has $432 million to spend on getting Biden elected.

The Trump campaign released its $248 million figure Thursday night.

After progressive Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, small donors enraged by the idea that she could be replaced by a conservative nominated by Trump donated more than $100 million in one weekend to ActBlue, a platform that raises money for Democratic candidates at the presidential, congressional and local level.

Biden had already set a fundraising record with $364.5 million in August.

His figures are far higher than the record set by Barack Obama with nearly $200 million in September 2008.

(with inputs)

Joe Biden has broken his own monthly fundraising record by taking in $383 million in September for his presidential campaign. The flood of donations arrived after his first debate with US President Donald Trump.

Joe Biden has broken his own monthly fundraising record by taking in $383 million in September for his presidential campaign. The flood of donations arrived after his first debate with US President Donald Trump. Trump lagged far behind last month with $248 million. The first presidential debate was a chaotic clash in which Trump constantly spoke over and interrupted Biden. Democratic candidate Biden leads Trump nationally by double digits in the frenzied homestretch to the November 3 election. Biden campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon said Wednesday the $383 million figure was a record and included $203 million raised from online donors. The campaign now has $432 million to spend on getting Biden elected. The Trump campaign released its $248 million figure Thursday night. After progressive Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on September 18, small donors enraged by the idea that she could be replaced by a conservative nominated by Trump donated more than $100 million in one weekend to ActBlue, a platform that raises money for Democratic candidates at the presidential, congressional and local level. Biden had already set a fundraising record with $364.5 million in August. His figures are far higher than the record set by Barack Obama with nearly $200 million in September 2008. (with inputs)

Biden sets fundraising record with $383 mn in September

Americans are in a hurry to cast ballots ahead of the election at an unprecedented pace. More than 23 million American citizens have already cast their vote for the November 3rd general election.

US Election 2020: Rise in early voting numbers; 23 million Americans cast early ballots

President Donald Trump painted a rosy picture of his financial condition during a televised town hall Thursday night, calling his hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due “a peanut” and saying he had borrowed it as a favor to lenders eager to take advantage of his financial strength.

In fact, the loans, and the unusual requirement he had to accept to receive them, illustrate the financial challenges he faces and the long-standing reluctance of banks to deal with him.

Trump had to personally guarantee $421 million in debt, a rare step that lenders only require of businesses that may not be able to repay. The commitment puts his assets on the line and could place his lenders, should he be reelected, in the position of deciding whether to foreclose on a sitting president.

The personal guarantee also speaks to why, despite Trump’s assertion that banks are eager to lend him money, nearly all the money he borrowed in the last decade came from only two institutions.

“When a bank asks for a personal guarantee, it is because the bank isn’t satisfied with the creditworthiness of the borrower,” said Richard Scott Carnell, who served as assistant secretary for financial institutions at the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton and now teaches law at Fordham University. “If the captain gives a personal guarantee for the ship, he will be less likely to sink it.”

Trump was asked about the debt in response to an investigation by The New York Times published last month based on a review of more than two decades of his tax-return data. The investigation found that Trump had personally guaranteed $421 million of his companies’ debts, with more than $300 million coming due within four years.

The Times also found evidence that Trump might have difficulty repaying or refinancing the loans without liquidating assets. His main source of income in recent decades — a total of more than $427 million from entertainment and licensing deals that were fueled by his fame — has all but dried up. That cash enabled a buying spree of failing golf courses, and propped up those businesses as their losses mounted. In recent years, Trump has burned through most of the cash, stocks and bonds at his disposal and has recently explored the sale of some of his holdings, including the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

The investigation revealed that Trump’s finances were under stress, with losses that allowed him to pay just $750 in federal income taxes for 2016 and 2017, and nothing at all in 10 of the previous 15 years. Also hanging over him is a decadelong audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

The tax-return data obtained by The Times does not by its nature identify the lender for most of Trump’s debts. But the borrowing businesses and largest amounts track with the personal financial disclosures he has been required to file with the federal government as a candidate and president.

The bulk of the debt appears to be owed to Deutsche Bank, one of the few lenders that would do business with Trump in the last decade, even after he defaulted on past loans.

The tax records, for example, show that the largest loan balances at the end of 2018 that Trump had personally guaranteed were $160 million on his Washington hotel and more than $125 million on his Doral golf resort. His disclosure forms indicate that Deutsche Bank was the lender on both loans. Trump had also personally guaranteed $60.3 million of debt owed by one of his entities, DJT Holdings. His Chicago tower, another Deutsche Bank borrower, is among the many businesses he controls through that holding company.

Deutsche Bank is the only mainstream financial institution that has been consistently willing to do business with Trump. And even that lender has required him to personally guarantee what he has borrowed.

As The Times has reported, Deutsche Bank and Trump have had a long and fraught relationship, with the bank at times being hesitant to lend to Trump, including refusing to advance him money during his 2016 campaign.

Deutsche Bank has spent billions of dollars trying to transform itself into a global player, a strategy that has pushed it to take outsize risks that have repeatedly landed it in trouble with U.S. regulators. In recent years, the Justice Department has investigated whether the bank has complied with laws meant to stop money laundering and other crimes. And in 2017, the Justice Department completed a deal with the bank that required it to pay $7.2 billion for its sale of toxic mortgage securities in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.

According to Trump’s disclosure forms and property records, the only other significant lender to his businesses since 2012 has been Ladder Capital.

Trump’s reputation among lenders was sealed over the decades that his Atlantic City casinos repeatedly filed for bankruptcy. Ben Berzin, a retired executive vice president and senior credit officer at PNC Bank who dealt with Trump over the casino loans, said banks got “an expensive education,” and the ones that did not demand a personal guarantee got burned.

“They lent on the aura of success,” he said. “And things went really wrong.”

Trump’s most lucrative investment is one run by another company: a 30% share with Vornado Realty Trust in two office buildings, one in Manhattan and the other in San Francisco. Trump withdrew $125.5 million from his share of the partnership’s profits from 2010 through 2018, the records show.

The Times’ totals for Trump’s debts do not include $950 million that the Vornado partnership borrowed on the two buildings in 2012 from four lenders, including Deutsche Bank. Tax records issued to Trump show he is not responsible for any of that debt.

The debt that Trump has personally guaranteed was only part of the total debt and other liabilities shown in his tax records for the end of 2018. Additionally, Trump’s businesses owe more than $200 million for which Trump is not personally responsible.

During the town hall, Trump said that the $421 million in debt was not a concern, apparently clinging to his long-held assertion that his net worth is more than $10 billion.

“What I’m saying is that it’s a tiny percentage of my net worth,” Trump said

“When you look at vast properties like I have, and they’re big and they’re beautiful and they’re well located, when you look at that, the amount of money, $400 million, is a peanut, it’s extremely underlevered,” he added, seemingly using his own version of the financial term “underleveraged.”

In a dire situation, Trump could try to sell some assets or properties to cover a loan coming due. But loans are usually based on the profitability of the business borrowing the money.

Tax records for the businesses on which he borrowed the bulk of the money suggest that refinancing may present a challenge. Doral and his Washington hotel, with more than $300 million in debts coming due, have posted regular losses. And in addition to the debt he owes, Trump has pumped a net of $261.8 million cash into the businesses to help keep them afloat.

And he appears to have spent much of the cash and investments he had on hand just a few years ago, as his income from entertainment and endorsements began a steep decline.

In January 2014, he sold $98 million in stocks and bonds, his biggest single month of sales in at least the last two decades. He sold $54 million more in stocks and bonds in 2015, and $68.2 million in 2016. A financial disclosure released in July shows that he had as little as $873,000 in securities left to sell.

Trump’s businesses reported cash on hand of $34.7 million in 2018, down 40% from five years earlier.

Carnell, the former Treasury official, said Trump’s personal guarantee on the debts put his lenders, primarily Deutsche Bank, in an “awkward” spot, in no small part because banks are subject to federal regulation and Trump has displayed a willingness to push the Justice Department to investigate perceived foes.

“The Donald Trump approach to law is all legal levers would be fair game in pressuring or punishing a bank,” he said.

President Donald Trump painted a rosy picture of his financial condition during a televised town hall Thursday night, calling his hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due “a peanut” and saying he had borrowed it as a favor to lenders eager to take advantage of his financial strength.

President Donald Trump painted a rosy picture of his financial condition during a televised town hall Thursday night, calling his hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due “a peanut” and saying he had borrowed it as a favor to lenders eager to take advantage of his financial strength. In fact, the loans, and the unusual requirement he had to accept to receive them, illustrate the financial challenges he faces and the long-standing reluctance of banks to deal with him. Trump had to personally guarantee $421 million in debt, a rare step that lenders only require of businesses that may not be able to repay. The commitment puts his assets on the line and could place his lenders, should he be reelected, in the position of deciding whether to foreclose on a sitting president. The personal guarantee also speaks to why, despite Trump’s assertion that banks are eager to lend him money, nearly all the money he borrowed in the last decade came from only two institutions. “When a bank asks for a personal guarantee, it is because the bank isn’t satisfied with the creditworthiness of the borrower,” said Richard Scott Carnell, who served as assistant secretary for financial institutions at the Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton and now teaches law at Fordham University. “If the captain gives a personal guarantee for the ship, he will be less likely to sink it.” Trump was asked about the debt in response to an investigation by The New York Times published last month based on a review of more than two decades of his tax-return data. The investigation found that Trump had personally guaranteed $421 million of his companies’ debts, with more than $300 million coming due within four years. The Times also found evidence that Trump might have difficulty repaying or refinancing the loans without liquidating assets. His main source of income in recent decades — a total of more than $427 million from entertainment and licensing deals that were fueled by his fame — has all but dried up. That cash enabled a buying spree of failing golf courses, and propped up those businesses as their losses mounted. In recent years, Trump has burned through most of the cash, stocks and bonds at his disposal and has recently explored the sale of some of his holdings, including the Trump International Hotel in Washington. The investigation revealed that Trump’s finances were under stress, with losses that allowed him to pay just $750 in federal income taxes for 2016 and 2017, and nothing at all in 10 of the previous 15 years. Also hanging over him is a decadelong audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million. The tax-return data obtained by The Times does not by its nature identify the lender for most of Trump’s debts. But the borrowing businesses and largest amounts track with the personal financial disclosures he has been required to file with the federal government as a candidate and president. The bulk of the debt appears to be owed to Deutsche Bank, one of the few lenders that would do business with Trump in the last decade, even after he defaulted on past loans. The tax records, for example, show that the largest loan balances at the end of 2018 that Trump had personally guaranteed were $160 million on his Washington hotel and more than $125 million on his Doral golf resort. His disclosure forms indicate that Deutsche Bank was the lender on both loans. Trump had also personally guaranteed $60.3 million of debt owed by one of his entities, DJT Holdings. His Chicago tower, another Deutsche Bank borrower, is among the many businesses he controls through that holding company. Deutsche Bank is the only mainstream financial institution that has been consistently willing to do business with Trump. And even that lender has required him to personally guarantee what he has borrowed. As The Times has reported, Deutsche Bank and Trump have had a long and fraught relationship, with the bank at times being hesitant to lend to Trump, including refusing to advance him money during his 2016 campaign. Deutsche Bank has spent billions of dollars trying to transform itself into a global player, a strategy that has pushed it to take outsize risks that have repeatedly landed it in trouble with U.S. regulators. In recent years, the Justice Department has investigated whether the bank has complied with laws meant to stop money laundering and other crimes. And in 2017, the Justice Department completed a deal with the bank that required it to pay $7.2 billion for its sale of toxic mortgage securities in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. According to Trump’s disclosure forms and property records, the only other significant lender to his businesses since 2012 has been Ladder Capital. Trump’s reputation among lenders was sealed over the decades that his Atlantic City casinos repeatedly filed for bankruptcy. Ben Berzin, a retired executive vice president and senior credit officer at PNC Bank who dealt with Trump over the casino loans, said banks got “an expensive education,” and the ones that did not demand a personal guarantee got burned. “They lent on the aura of success,” he said. “And things went really wrong.” Trump’s most lucrative investment is one run by another company: a 30% share with Vornado Realty Trust in two office buildings, one in Manhattan and the other in San Francisco. Trump withdrew $125.5 million from his share of the partnership’s profits from 2010 through 2018, the records show. The Times’ totals for Trump’s debts do not include $950 million that the Vornado partnership borrowed on the two buildings in 2012 from four lenders, including Deutsche Bank. Tax records issued to Trump show he is not responsible for any of that debt. The debt that Trump has personally guaranteed was only part of the total debt and other liabilities shown in his tax records for the end of 2018. Additionally, Trump’s businesses owe more than $200 million for which Trump is not personally responsible. During the town hall, Trump said that the $421 million in debt was not a concern, apparently clinging to his long-held assertion that his net worth is more than $10 billion. “What I’m saying is that it’s a tiny percentage of my net worth,” Trump said “When you look at vast properties like I have, and they’re big and they’re beautiful and they’re well located, when you look at that, the amount of money, $400 million, is a peanut, it’s extremely underlevered,” he added, seemingly using his own version of the financial term “underleveraged.” In a dire situation, Trump could try to sell some assets or properties to cover a loan coming due. But loans are usually based on the profitability of the business borrowing the money. Tax records for the businesses on which he borrowed the bulk of the money suggest that refinancing may present a challenge. Doral and his Washington hotel, with more than $300 million in debts coming due, have posted regular losses. And in addition to the debt he owes, Trump has pumped a net of $261.8 million cash into the businesses to help keep them afloat. And he appears to have spent much of the cash and investments he had on hand just a few years ago, as his income from entertainment and endorsements began a steep decline. In January 2014, he sold $98 million in stocks and bonds, his biggest single month of sales in at least the last two decades. He sold $54 million more in stocks and bonds in 2015, and $68.2 million in 2016. A financial disclosure released in July shows that he had as little as $873,000 in securities left to sell. Trump’s businesses reported cash on hand of $34.7 million in 2018, down 40% from five years earlier. Carnell, the former Treasury official, said Trump’s personal guarantee on the debts put his lenders, primarily Deutsche Bank, in an “awkward” spot, in no small part because banks are subject to federal regulation and Trump has displayed a willingness to push the Justice Department to investigate perceived foes. “The Donald Trump approach to law is all legal levers would be fair game in pressuring or punishing a bank,” he said.

$421 million in debt: Trump calls it ‘a peanut,’ but challenges lie ahead

President Donald Trump clashed with his own party Thursday over a stimulus package to stabilize the economy, calling for a big-spending plan of the kind envisioned by Democrats even as the top Republican leader declared that such a measure had little support within the party.

Trump declared he “would go higher” than the latest $1.8 trillion framework the White House has put forward in negotiations with Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, faulting his own Treasury secretary for failing to offer enough money in the talks.&nbsp;

A short time later, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, all but ruled out such a deal, saying senators in his party would never support a package of that magnitude.

“He’s talking about a much larger amount than I can sell to my members,” McConnell told reporters in Kentucky, a refrain he reiterated in multiple appearances across the state. Instead, he plans next week to try to advance a scaled-down $500 billion package, which is likely to fail without Democratic support.

The stark division between the top two Republicans in Washington was the latest indication of the dim preelection prospects for enactment of a broad pandemic recovery package that economists have said is badly needed.&nbsp;

Tens of millions of Americans have slipped into poverty, and the country’s economic recovery has faltered without federal assistance.

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The public divisions also further undercut Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in his attempts to reach an accord with Pelosi, who remains unmoved from the latest Democratic offer of $2.2 trillion.

Trump said in an interview with Fox Business that her proposal was so littered with Democratic priorities that his “pride” would not allow him to accept, but he also took aim at Mnuchin, saying he should “go big or go home.”

“So far he hasn’t come home with the bacon,” the president said.

His comments directly contradicted Republicans’ efforts to foist blame onto Pelosi and Democrats as the impasse has dragged on for months.

“Pelosi is holding up STIMULUS, not the Republicans!” he posted on Twitter on Thursday.

But it was Trump who abruptly pulled the plug on the talks last week, courting political risk before reversing course under pressure from alarmed Republicans.

In his most recent public concession to Pelosi, Mnuchin announced the administration would accept a key Democratic demand for carrying out a national testing strategy. “We’ll fundamentally agree with their testing language, subject to some minor issues,” he said on CNBC.

In a nearly 90-minute phone conversation with Pelosi, Mnuchin reiterated his willingness to accept Democratic language with “minor” edits and said he would provide a proposal Friday, Drew Hammill, a spokesperson for Pelosi, said in a statement summarizing the conversation. “The speaker looks forward to reviewing.”

But a number of unresolved differences remain, such as how much money to provide to state and local governments and lapsed federal unemployment benefits.

Investors, who have been following the stimulus talks closely, seemed unmoved by statements from Trump and Mnuchin on Thursday, with stocks on Wall Street dropping for a third consecutive day.&nbsp;

And Senate Republicans, who have grown increasingly frustrated with Mnuchin’s willingness to buck their narrow proposals and capitulate to Pelosi’s demands for a sweeping relief package, were equally reticent about the prospects of a deal before Nov. 3.

“I’m proposing what we think is appropriate,” McConnell said after voting in Louisville, Kentucky, when asked about the targeted bill he was preparing.&nbsp;

At later events in the state, he noted that the administration had not yet successfully reached a deal and said he felt “it was important to indicate to the American people before the election — not after — that we were not in favor of a stalemate, that we were not in favor of doing nothing.”

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McConnell, who has not formally unveiled legislation before an expected vote next week, said it would be similar to a scaled-down package that Senate Republicans proposed in September, which failed to meet the 60-vote threshold.

While some Democrats have pushed for Pelosi to accept a smaller relief package, she has insisted that the toll of the pandemic merits another broad package.&nbsp;

With the original Democratic offer costing about $3.4 trillion, the speaker has repeatedly argued that she has been more than willing to compromise with her Republican counterparts, counseling Democrats in a private phone call Tuesday that “I don’t think our leverage has ever been greater than it is now.”

“The disdain that they have for the state and local, the contempt that they have for science by not wanting to have a national strategic plan, and again, the unfairness when it comes to America’s workers is a tough nut to crack,” Pelosi said in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday. “Still and all, we want to try and find our common ground.”

During the phone call, Pelosi raised McConnell’s comments in Kentucky and Mnuchin “indicated that the president would weigh in with Leader McConnell should an agreement be reached,” Hammill said.

In the CNBC interview, Mnuchin did not directly address the lack of support for a bill among Republicans, though he acknowledged that they preferred a more targeted relief bill that would provide a fraction of the new funding he and Pelosi were discussing.

And after conceding Wednesday that it would be difficult to pass and enact a deal in the next three weeks, Mnuchin continued to push for Congress to give him the authority to repurpose about $300 billion in unused relief money from the $2.2 trillion legislation that was passed in March.

Pelosi and Democrats have largely resisted voting on stand-alone bills.

President Donald Trump clashed with his own party Thursday over a stimulus package to stabilize the economy, calling for a big-spending plan of the kind envisioned by Democrats even as the top Republican leader declared that such a measure had little support within the party.

President Donald Trump clashed with his own party Thursday over a stimulus package to stabilize the economy, calling for a big-spending plan of the kind envisioned by Democrats even as the top Republican leader declared that such a measure had little support within the party. Trump declared he “would go higher” than the latest $1.8 trillion framework the White House has put forward in negotiations with Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, faulting his own Treasury secretary for failing to offer enough money in the talks. A short time later, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader, all but ruled out such a deal, saying senators in his party would never support a package of that magnitude. “He’s talking about a much larger amount than I can sell to my members,” McConnell told reporters in Kentucky, a refrain he reiterated in multiple appearances across the state. Instead, he plans next week to try to advance a scaled-down $500 billion package, which is likely to fail without Democratic support. The stark division between the top two Republicans in Washington was the latest indication of the dim preelection prospects for enactment of a broad pandemic recovery package that economists have said is badly needed. Tens of millions of Americans have slipped into poverty, and the country’s economic recovery has faltered without federal assistance. Also Read | US election 2020: Joe Biden halts Kamala Harris' travel after campaign staffers test positive The public divisions also further undercut Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in his attempts to reach an accord with Pelosi, who remains unmoved from the latest Democratic offer of $2.2 trillion. Trump said in an interview with Fox Business that her proposal was so littered with Democratic priorities that his “pride” would not allow him to accept, but he also took aim at Mnuchin, saying he should “go big or go home.” “So far he hasn’t come home with the bacon,” the president said. His comments directly contradicted Republicans’ efforts to foist blame onto Pelosi and Democrats as the impasse has dragged on for months. “Pelosi is holding up STIMULUS, not the Republicans!” he posted on Twitter on Thursday. But it was Trump who abruptly pulled the plug on the talks last week, courting political risk before reversing course under pressure from alarmed Republicans. In his most recent public concession to Pelosi, Mnuchin announced the administration would accept a key Democratic demand for carrying out a national testing strategy. “We’ll fundamentally agree with their testing language, subject to some minor issues,” he said on CNBC. In a nearly 90-minute phone conversation with Pelosi, Mnuchin reiterated his willingness to accept Democratic language with “minor” edits and said he would provide a proposal Friday, Drew Hammill, a spokesperson for Pelosi, said in a statement summarizing the conversation. “The speaker looks forward to reviewing.” But a number of unresolved differences remain, such as how much money to provide to state and local governments and lapsed federal unemployment benefits. Investors, who have been following the stimulus talks closely, seemed unmoved by statements from Trump and Mnuchin on Thursday, with stocks on Wall Street dropping for a third consecutive day. And Senate Republicans, who have grown increasingly frustrated with Mnuchin’s willingness to buck their narrow proposals and capitulate to Pelosi’s demands for a sweeping relief package, were equally reticent about the prospects of a deal before Nov. 3. “I’m proposing what we think is appropriate,” McConnell said after voting in Louisville, Kentucky, when asked about the targeted bill he was preparing. At later events in the state, he noted that the administration had not yet successfully reached a deal and said he felt “it was important to indicate to the American people before the election — not after — that we were not in favor of a stalemate, that we were not in favor of doing nothing.” Also Read | Two Americans, 240 Yemen rebel supporters freed in apparent prisoner exchange McConnell, who has not formally unveiled legislation before an expected vote next week, said it would be similar to a scaled-down package that Senate Republicans proposed in September, which failed to meet the 60-vote threshold. While some Democrats have pushed for Pelosi to accept a smaller relief package, she has insisted that the toll of the pandemic merits another broad package. With the original Democratic offer costing about $3.4 trillion, the speaker has repeatedly argued that she has been more than willing to compromise with her Republican counterparts, counseling Democrats in a private phone call Tuesday that “I don’t think our leverage has ever been greater than it is now.” “The disdain that they have for the state and local, the contempt that they have for science by not wanting to have a national strategic plan, and again, the unfairness when it comes to America’s workers is a tough nut to crack,” Pelosi said in an interview on MSNBC on Wednesday. “Still and all, we want to try and find our common ground.” During the phone call, Pelosi raised McConnell’s comments in Kentucky and Mnuchin “indicated that the president would weigh in with Leader McConnell should an agreement be reached,” Hammill said. In the CNBC interview, Mnuchin did not directly address the lack of support for a bill among Republicans, though he acknowledged that they preferred a more targeted relief bill that would provide a fraction of the new funding he and Pelosi were discussing. And after conceding Wednesday that it would be difficult to pass and enact a deal in the next three weeks, Mnuchin continued to push for Congress to give him the authority to repurpose about $300 billion in unused relief money from the $2.2 trillion legislation that was passed in March. Pelosi and Democrats have largely resisted voting on stand-alone bills.

Republicans clash on stimulus as Trump says ‘Go Big’ and McConnell demurs

2 Presidential candidates, 2 Town Halls, 2 news channels. NBC News & ABC News will air dueling town hall events with Donald Trump & Joe Biden on the same night at the same time. Both the live events will air on the scheduled night for the cancelled #PresidentialDebate.

Who will win the television battle? | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

A tight poll with just 20 days to election day, Donald Trump reached IOWA to appeal to rural voters. Thousands of largely 'MASKLESS' supporters attended Trump's 90-minute address at the Des Moines International Airport. Can Trump win IOWA again?

Can Trump close the gap with Biden? | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

A number light hearted moments provided a much-needed comic relief to the marathon grilling session. From Audio glitches to dripping sarcasm & a glass of wine, here are a few funny moments from the #SCOTUS hearing.

Dripping sarcasm & a glass of wine | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

At the final stretch of campaigning in the most polarised #PresidentialElection2020, Donald Trump took his campaign to North Carolina. WION reports.

Can undecided voters rescue Trump? | U.S. Election 2020 New York Direct

US President Donald Trump shared&nbsp;a satirical article Friday&nbsp;about Twitter shutting down to slow the spread of negative news on his election rival Joe Biden, apparently unaware that it was a joke.

Trump, who often rails against "fake news" while retweeting misinformation to his 87 million followers, tweeted a link to the tall tale headlined: "Twitter Shuts Down Entire Network To Slow Spread Of Negative Biden News."&nbsp;

"Wow, this has never been done in history," Trump tweeted -- correctly, as it turns out, because Twitter had done no such thing.

"This includes his really bad interview last night. Why is Twitter doing this."

The story Trump shared was from the Babylon Bee, a satirical news site with the motto "Fake news you can trust" clearly visible on its Twitter page.

Trump's tweet came after he rebuked Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday for blocking links to a New York Post article purporting to expose corrupt dealings by Biden and his son in Ukraine.

The social media giants said they had stopped linking to the article because the provenance of the information was questionable.&nbsp;

Trump has tweeted articles from the Babylon Bee in the past and the site told The New York Times&nbsp;earlier in October that it was "assured" Trump knew it was satire.

The website's chief executive officer Seth Dillon&nbsp;offered his own lighthearted take soon after attracting Trump's attention, proudly declaring: "The Babylon Bee is the president's most trusted news source."

Trump's propensity for sharing wild, unfounded accusations has not been diminished by his political career, which was forged in the cauldron of the racist "birtherism" conspiracy theory alleging that his predecessor Barack Obama was not born in the US.

Only this week, he shared a bizarre claim originating from the emergent QAnon movement that Biden was involved in a conspiracy to fake the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.

At a televised town hall event in Miami on Thursday, Trump defended his retweets, saying "people can decide for themselves" if the outlandish theories he shares have any merit.

"I don't get that," NBC interviewer Savannah Guthrie retorted. "You're the president, you're not like someone's crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever."

US President Donald Trump shared a satirical article Friday about Twitter shutting down to slow the spread of negative news on his election rival Joe Biden, apparently unaware that it was a joke.

US President Donald Trump shared a satirical article Friday about Twitter shutting down to slow the spread of negative news on his election rival Joe Biden, apparently unaware that it was a joke. Trump, who often rails against "fake news" while retweeting misinformation to his 87 million followers, tweeted a link to the tall tale headlined: "Twitter Shuts Down Entire Network To Slow Spread Of Negative Biden News." "Wow, this has never been done in history," Trump tweeted -- correctly, as it turns out, because Twitter had done no such thing. "This includes his really bad interview last night. Why is Twitter doing this." The story Trump shared was from the Babylon Bee, a satirical news site with the motto "Fake news you can trust" clearly visible on its Twitter page. Trump's tweet came after he rebuked Facebook and Twitter on Wednesday for blocking links to a New York Post article purporting to expose corrupt dealings by Biden and his son in Ukraine. The social media giants said they had stopped linking to the article because the provenance of the information was questionable. Trump has tweeted articles from the Babylon Bee in the past and the site told The New York Times earlier in October that it was "assured" Trump knew it was satire. The website's chief executive officer Seth Dillon offered his own lighthearted take soon after attracting Trump's attention, proudly declaring: "The Babylon Bee is the president's most trusted news source." Trump's propensity for sharing wild, unfounded accusations has not been diminished by his political career, which was forged in the cauldron of the racist "birtherism" conspiracy theory alleging that his predecessor Barack Obama was not born in the US. Only this week, he shared a bizarre claim originating from the emergent QAnon movement that Biden was involved in a conspiracy to fake the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011. At a televised town hall event in Miami on Thursday, Trump defended his retweets, saying "people can decide for themselves" if the outlandish theories he shares have any merit. "I don't get that," NBC interviewer Savannah Guthrie retorted. "You're the president, you're not like someone's crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever."

Trump shares joke story on Biden, Twitter in earnest

President Donald Trump was evasive when asked whether he took a coronavirus test on the day of the first debate. Trump's comments came in the opening moments of Thursday night's town hall-style meeting on NBC. His Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, was appearing at a similar event at the same time on another network. Watch report.

Trump vs Biden at competing town halls: Trump evasive on testing for COVID-19 before debate

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