Trump defends ‘patriots’ who surrounded Biden campaign bus – live updates | US news

Kamala Harris was in Georgia, a longtime Republican stronghold that Democrats believe could flip if Black voters show up in force.

She encouraged a racially diverse crowd in a rapidly growing Atlanta suburb to “honor the ancestors” by voting, invoking the memory of the late civil rights legend, longtime Rep. John Lewis.

Biden hasn’t responded to Trump’s recent comment on the supporters who surrounded one of the Democratic nominee’s campaign buses.

But he did just tweet this:

Joe Biden is in Philadelphia today, as he focusses in his final days of campaign on appealing to Black supporters to vote in-person.

Philadelphia is the largest city in Pennsylvania – which is emerging as the most hotly contested battleground in the closing 48 hours of the campaign, AP reports.

Biden participated in a “souls to the polls” event that is part of a nationwide effort to organize Black churchgoers to vote.

“Every single day we’re seeing race-based disparities in every aspect of this virus,” Biden said at the drive-in event, shouting to be heard over the blaring car horns. He declared that Trump’s handling of Covid-19 was “almost criminal” and that the pandemic was a “mass casualty event in the Black community.”

As early voting closes in New York City, the board of elections have published the numbers:

As Trump tweets his support of those “patriots” other Trump supporters have blocked main roads in New York and New Jersey, according to the New York Times.

The Times reports that, “Caravans of President Trump’s supporters blockaded the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge and the Garden State Parkway on Sunday, snarling traffic on two of the busiest highways in the New York metropolitan area just two days before Election Day.”

Democrat state senator David Carlucci, who represents Rockland County, responded on Twitter, calling the behaviour “aggressive, dangerous and reckless”:

Trump has just tweeted again about the Biden bus incident, saying, “In my opinion these patriots did nothing wrong.”

Trucks with Trump signs and flags surrounded a Biden campaign bus on a Texas highway on Friday and attempted to slow the vehicle down and run it off the road, the Biden campaign said on Saturday.

This interview with a nurse in Montana is well worth watching if you haven’t seen it.

“You know at first, I hesitate to tell you this but I was the nurse for the very first patient that passed from Covid in our hospital. I thought I’ve seen this before,” says nurse Joey Traywick. “I’ll come back and check on her regularly. At that point she was moderately lucid. And I came back to the room at one point and she had passed. By herself. And I thought I’m never going to let that happen again.”

He has since been with 23 patients when they have died from coronavirus.

“I’m a good nurse. And the nurses that I work with are good nurses, but we are broken.”

“I’m broken. And my colleagues are broken. And people say It’s not that big a deal and I want to take them by the collar and say, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bloomberg reports on the mixed-messaging about Covid-19 inside the White House:

Donald Trump told his then-chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to “stay the hell home” from a trip to India in February because he didn’t want to be around Mulvaney and his lingering cough, according to people familiar with the trip. Even before the virus, Trump was known to dart to the other side of the room if someone sneezed. He used medical wipes labeled “not for use on skin” to scrub his hands, along with the ever-present Purell.

Yet at the White House he shunned one of the simplest and most effective ways of preventing transmission – wearing a mask. “Take that fucking thing off,” he demanded more than once to aides who showed up wearing masks in the early days of the virus, when he’d been told they weren’t a fail-safe. “It doesn’t look good.”

Fascinating opinion piece in the Washington Post by leading Republican election lawyer, Benjamin L Ginsberg.

Ginsberg writes that Trump’s last-minute attempt to challenge the ballots of individual voters unlikely to support him is as “un-American as it gets.”

These are painful words for me to write. I spent four decades in the Republican trenches, representing GOP presidential and congressional campaigns, working on Election Day operations, recounts, redistricting and other issues, including trying to lift the consent decree…

The truth is that over all those years Republicans found only isolated incidents of fraud. Proof of systematic fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party. People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist.

As he confronts losing, Trump has devoted his campaign and the Republican Party to this myth of voter fraud. Absent being able to articulate a cogent plan for a second term or find an attack against Joe Biden that will stick, disenfranchising enough voters has become key to his reelection strategy.