Trump names Amy Coney Barrett for supreme court as first debate looms – live | US news

Donald Trump, meanwhile, has spoken to Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth about his supreme court pick, in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

“Mostly, I’m looking for somebody that can interpret the constitution as written,” Trump said. “We say it all the time and [Judge Amy Coney Barrett] is very strong on that.”

He also bragged about his undoubted legacy, a makeover of the federal court system orchestrated by Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and to some extent by Don McGahn, Trump’s first, beleaguered but resilient White House counsel.

“By the end of the term, we’ll have almost 300 federal judges and court of appeals judges, which is a record. So we will have had a great impact on the court system going forward,” Trump said. The actual number is around 200, but there’s time.

If you’re wondering what all this has to do with why Republicans vote for Trump, here’s a report on what the Republican grandee James Baker thinks about that kind of thing, which has persuaded him to keep voting for Trump despite everything Trump has done to his party, and the abuse Trump threw at George HW Bush, Baker’s closest friend whose feet he rubbed while he died:

Trump also discussed Tuesday’s debate, telling Hegseth he had been preparing every day and saying: “When you’re president, you sort of see everything that they’re going to be asking.

“And they may disagree with you, but we’ve done a great job. We created the greatest economy in history. And now it’s coming back. We closed it. We saved millions and millions of lives by doing what I did. And now we’re bringing it back.”

… and welcome to another day of politics in the US, which in this instance means the fallout from Donald Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the supreme court, to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and also the countdown to the first presidential debate, on Tuesday. A countdown and a fallout and it’s not even 9am: the news is explosive these days, after all.

In terms of what’s moving, obviously the polling isn’t yet in terms of what effect Barrett’s nomination, a strict conservative to replace a liberal lion, might have on the presidential race. An ABC News/Washington Post poll out today has Biden 10 points up nationally and the New York Times and Siena College make it eight – which is nice, but as Rick Wilson likes to say, national polls mean nothing. Remember who won the popular vote by nearly 3m in 2016? Not Trump. Remember who won the presidency? Not Hillary Clinton.

The swing state polls show Biden ahead in some, and razor-thin margins in others. Look at Florida, Ohio, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and so on. Keep looking. Whatever Trump might tell you about how he’s going to win New York, or even Virginia where he rallied on Friday night, look where he was rallying on Saturday: Pennsylvania. Not surprising.

Anyway, here’s a sampling of our coverage of the Barrett announcement, for which the White House Rose Garden was tricked out to recall the nomination of RBG. David Smith’s Hamlet-infused sketch, which noted the trolling, follows at the end of this post. Otherwise:

More to come, including more links to polls and remarks from Joe Biden about the supreme court, from Delaware at lunchtime. I also think people should find it as funny as I do that at present the Guardian US Spotlight section features few talking heads, but plenty of stories about buildings and food. Post-punk gag.

Here’s David’s sketch. It’s worth a moment of your time.