…and welcome to another day of coverage of US politics, the election, the coronavirus pandemic and more. Tom Lutz will be here shortly to take over but I’ll be your host for the first hour or so of the day.
ABC News has started to release clips from its joint interview with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, newly minted Democratic nominees for president and vice-president, after what most observers considered a successful virtual convention this week.
The full interview airs Sunday night in the US but in trailed clips Biden sought – obviously – to distinguish himself from Donald Trump, the president he will face at the polls in November.
“I would shut it down,” Biden said, asked if he would close the country again to deal with the pandemic, as Trump has not done. “I would listen to the scientists.
“I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving, until we control the virus. That is the fundamental flaw of this administration’s thinking to begin with. In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus.”
For a reminder, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, the US has now seen more than 5.6m cases of Covid-19, and more than 175,000 deaths. The New York Times thinks the death toll has passed 200,000.
In an earlier, solo interview with ABC, Biden was asked about another subject that will be central to the quickening campaign, as protests over police brutality continue across the US: “President Trump says that you want to defund the police. Do you?”
“No I don’t,” Biden said.
“I don’t want to defund police departments. I think they need more help, they need more assistance, but that, look, there are unethical senators, there are unethical presidents, there are unethical doctors, unethical lawyers, unethical prosecutors, there are unethical cops. They should be rooted out.
“By the way, he proposes cutting a half a billion dollars of local police support,” Biden added. ABC pointed out that was probably a reference to proposed cuts to a federal programme that helps hire local law enforcement officers.
More on Harris’s part in the joint interview to come. Trump, who held a funeral for his brother Robert on Friday, has no events scheduled today till a 7pm reception “celebrating the White House Rose Garden”. So that’s plenty of tweeting time.
In the meantime, here’s some vital further reading from Chris McGreal in Monroe county, Michigan – a key part of Trump’s victory in 2016:
