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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
World
Maanvi Singh (now) and Joan E Greve and Martin Pengelly (earlier)

Coronavirus US live: Trump pushes conspiracy theory and mask politics as death toll approaches 100,000 – as it happened

Donald Trump answers questions from reporters at the White House on Tuesday.
Donald Trump answers questions from reporters at the White House on Tuesday. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Summary

  • Trump again criticized vote by mail, repeating baseless claims that the mailed-in ballots would be particularly vulnerable to voter fraud, which is very rare. Twitter added a fact check feature to some of the president’s recent misleading tweets about mail-in ballots.
  • Trump said he thought it was “very unusual” that Joe Biden wore a face mask yesterday while attending a Memorial Day ceremony. The president has resisted wearing a mask in public, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that Americans cover their faces while out in public and around other people. Biden called Trump a “fool” for discouraging citizens from wearing masks and changed his Twitter avatar to a picture of himself wearing a mask and aviators.
  • Trump will meet with New York governor Andrew Cuomo in Washington tomorrow. Cuomo said he and the president would discuss his proposal to ramp up infrastructure spending to get more New Yorkers back to work amid the coronavirus crisis.
  • The Pentagon’s deputy inspector general resigned. Recently, the president effectively removed Glenn Fine from his role leading a coronavirus relief spending oversight committee, and the defense department official has now become the latest inspector general to step down in recent weeks.
  • The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange was reopened after two months. Cuomo rang the opening bell to cheers from traders, who will still have to wear masks and stay six feet apart from each other when they’re on the floor.

Fact checks: Voter fraud

In a series of misleading tweets, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany presented misleading tweets about mail-in ballots.

Above McEnany is linking to a story about a 2019 settlement between California election officials and a conservative legal group that resulted in LA officials to remove the inactive records of voters who hadn’t voted in repeated elections and were not part of active voter rolls. There was no admission of wrongdoing int he settlement, but the county agreed to update old records.

At the time, Paul Mitchell of the nonpartisan research firm Political Data Inc. told the. AP that this was an insignificant case because it involved inactive voters who “are not getting voting materials, they are not casting ballots, they are not showing up in precincts.”

In Philly, a former judge of elections pleaded guilty to conspiracy to deprive Philadelphia voters of their civil rights by stuffing the ballot boxes for certain judicial candidates. This had nothing to do with mail-in voting. The former judge conducted voter fraud at the voting booth, not through the mail. He “fraudulently stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear,” US attorney William McSwain said in a statement.

The Trump campaign has responded to Twitter adding fact checks to the president’s false tweets about mail-in voting by attacking the social media company.

“We always knew that Silicon Valley would pull out all the stops to obstruct and interfere with President Trump getting his message through to voters,” Trump 2020 campaign manager Brad Parscale said. “There are many reasons the Trump campaign pulled all our advertising from Twitter months ago, and their clear political bias is one of them.“

It is important to note here that Twitter Inc. banned political ads in October 2019 — necessitating that the Trump campaign pull all its advertising from Twitter months ago.

Updated

The US is nearing the bleak milestone of 100,000 confirmed coronavirus deaths. But the actual death toll will probably have hit that figure days before the official tallies reflect it. And despite scientists’ best efforts, that date may forever go unmarked.

Coronavirus was probably spreading through the US before the Trump administration restricted travel from China, before the US had a reliable supply of diagnostic tests, and before the disease caused by the virus was even named. Models of the Covid-19 outbreak estimate that the virus was making its way through America’s major cities, undetected, weeks before a California woman in early February became the first American known to have died of related causes.

Researchers are now doing detective work, revisiting autopsies from early this year and studying how the virus has subtly evolved to try to trace when Covid-19 may have first sickened and killed people in the US. Infectious disease experts caution, however, that finding a “patient zero”, or even figuring out exactly how many Americans were infected and died before testing was available, will be nearly impossible.

Joe Biden has a new Twitter avatar, in which he’s wearing a face mask.

The change came shortly after Biden called Trump a “fool” for discouraging citizens from wearing masks. “Presidents are supposed to lead, not engage in folly and be falsely masculine,” Biden said in an interview with CNN.

Meanwhile, New Mexico will begin allowing restaurants to serve customers at outdoor seating areas, at a reduced capacity.

California is expanding its reopening criteria to include barber shops and hair salons for certain counties, governor Gavin Newsom announced today.

The Guardian’s Vivian Ho reports:

A quick reminder for how it all works in the incredibly large and varied state of California: there is a statewide guidance that applies to all 58 counties and modifies the statewide stay-at-home order for everyone. That went into place 8 May, and allowed for retailers to offer curbside pickup.

The statewide guidance allows for regional variance because parts of California were harder hit by the virus than others. Some counties, like San Francisco and Alameda, home of the Tesla factory, kept stricter restrictions than the rest of the state, much to the dismay of Elon Musk.

Later, Newsom allowed for counties that had not been as affectedby the virus to apply for looser restrictions, such as the go-ahead to reopen some offices, schools and dine-in restaurants. These counties have to meet criteria such as a rate of 8% positive tests over seven days and a hospitalization rate below 5%.

Newsom said Monday that 47 counties have self-attested. These 47 counties will now be allowed to get haircuts, following certain modifications such as wearing face coverings while in the salon and certain sanitation guidelines.

“We’re making progress, we’re moving forward, we’re not looking back, but we are walking into the unknown, the untested, literally and figuratively, and we have to be guided by the data that brought us to this place in the first place,” Newsom warned.
Newsom made the hair salon announcement amid jokes that three of his four children, the oldest age 10, had helped cut his hair this weekend in “a family effort to remove what was described by my wife as, forgive me, a mullet.”

California is now reporting 97,206 positive cases, and 3,777 deaths, but in the last 14 days, the state has seen a 6.7% decline in hospitalizations.

A church in California has asked the Supreme Court to stop enforcement of the state’s social distancing policies.

The South Bay United Pentecostal Church, represented by the Thomas More Society —conservative, pro-life law firm based in Chicago — filed a petition over the weekend, saying that the governor’s shelter-in-place guidelines “arbitrarily discriminate against places of worship in violation of their right to the Free Exercise of Religion under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”

Yesterday, governor Gavin Newsom said houses of worship would be allowed to re-open at 25% capacity.

The Supreme Court has not formally accepted the petition.

Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, did not hold back when asked at his daily briefing on Tuesday about Donald Trump’s comments on mail-in ballots.

The Guardian’s Vivian Ho reports from San Francisco:

Earlier this month, California became the first state to authorize sending every registered voter a mail-in ballot in the upcoming elections, a move that Newsom is calling a matter of public health, not politics.

He started Tuesday citing three studies that essentially found that the cases of voter fraud were few and far between. He noted that there should be sanctions for people that are doing the wrong thing, but the reality is, the overwhelming majority of people are doing the right thing.”

“Utah, hardly a bastion of progressive politics, has been doing mail-only ballots for a number of years,” Newsom said. “Colorado, as well as Oregon, Washington, other states, for years and years. The state of California has been doing it for decades. Many other states across this country have been using absentee ballots, for servicemen and women overseas, using absentee ballots in a secure, safe and honorable manner. It doesn’t skew Democratic, it doesn’t skew Republican.”

He pointed out that by the time the November election rolls around, it will be flu season and “potentially the next Covid-19 season.” “The last thing we want to do is deny you your fundamental, hard-fought right,” Newsom said.

“I don’t want to deny you that right because of public health and that is what this option and the ability to have an architecture of in-person voting options does in the state of California,” he continued. “I think it is a noble cause, I think it is an appropriate cause and I don’t think it’s political in any way, shape or form and I say that from the core of my being. I don’t just say that as a democratic governor of a large blue state, I say that as an American citizen, I say that as someone who believes deeply in democracy and believes in the cause of encouraging people to exercise their right, their privilege, their freedom to vote, for or against, pro/con, whatever one chooses to do, but to do it in a safe manner.”

Fact check: Mail-in ballots

Trump also lied while criticizing voting by mail. “People that aren’t citizens, illegals -- anybody that walks in California is going to get a ballot,” he said of the state’s plan to expand voting options.

This is not true: in California, ballots are being mailed only to registered voters.

The president has often repeated baseless claims about voting by mail, to the. point that Twitter has added a fact-check to the president’s false tweets about the process.

Fact check: Presidential authority

The constitution does not allow the president authority to override state governors’ responses to the pandemic. As University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck has explained before: “The president has no formal legal authority to categorically override local or state shelter-in-place orders or to reopen schools and small businesses. No statute delegates to him such power; no constitutional provision invests him with such authority.”

In the federal government, Congress the power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states” — but not the president. And it’s unclear that houses of worship have any impact on interstate commerce.

Hi there, it’s Maanvi Singh, blogging from the West Coast.

Moments ago, Trump said he has the authority to overrule state governors that refuse to reopen places of worship. “And we have many different ways where I can override them,” the president said.

Trump does not have the authority to override state governors.

Today so far

The president has just concluded his Rose Garden event, and that’s it from me today. My west coast colleague, Maanvi Singh, will take over the blog for the next few hours.

Here’s where the day stands:

  • Trump said he thought it was “very unusual” that Joe Biden wore a face mask yesterday while attending a Memorial Day ceremony. The president has resisted wearing a mask in public, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that Americans cover their faces while out in public and around other people.
  • Trump will meet with New York governor Andrew Cuomo in Washington tomorrow. Cuomo said he and the president would discuss his proposal to ramp up infrastructure spending to get more New Yorkers back to work amid the coronavirus crisis.
  • The Pentagon’s deputy inspector general resigned. Recently, the president effectively removed Glenn Fine from his role leading a coronavirus relief spending oversight committee, and the defense department official has now become the latest inspector general to step down in recent weeks.
  • The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange was reopened after two months. Cuomo rang the opening bell to cheers from traders, who will still have to wear masks and stay six feet apart from each other when they’re on the floor.
  • Trump again criticized vote by mail, repeating baseless claims that the mailed-in ballots would be particularly vulnerable to voter fraud, which is very rare.

Maanvi will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Trump: We must 'get to the bottom' of debunked Scarborough conspiracy theory

Trump once again refused to denounce a debunked conspiracy theory that alleges MSNBC host Joe Scarborough was involved in the 2001 death of his former staff, Lori Klausutis.

Trump said Klausutis’ death, which was ruled an accident by local Florida police and the medical examiner involved in the case, was “a very suspicious situation.”

When Trump was pressed on the fact that Klausutis’ widower has asked Twitter to remove the president’s tweets on the matter, he said of Klausutis’ family, “I’m sure that ultimately they want to get to the bottom of it.”

The president insisted it would be a “very good thing” to “get to the bottom of it.”

But Klausutis’ widower said Trump “has taken something that does not belong him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain.”

Trump says it was 'very unusual' Biden wore a mask

Trump said he thought it was “very unusual” that Joe Biden chose to wear a mask yesterday while attending a Memorial Day ceremony.

“Biden can wear a mask,” Trump said. “He was standing outside with his wife, perfect conditions, perfect weather – when they’re inside they don’t wear masks. And so I thought it was very unusual he had one on.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended the use of face masks when Americans are in public and in close proximity to other people, but masks are not considered necessary when people are in their own homes.

Trump denied that he was criticizing Biden when he retweeted a Fox News commentator who had questioned the former vice president’s use of the mask.

“I wasn’t criticizing him at all,” Trump said. The infamously combative president added, “Why would I ever do a thing like that?”

Trump also tried to convince a reporter to remove his mask to ask his question. When the reporter chose not to do so, Trump said, “Okay, good, you want to be politically correct.”

Updated

Echoing comments from Trump and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany earlier today, the vice-president boasted about the current coronavirus death rate in the country.

Mike Pence noted that “just 505 Americans succumbed to the coronavirus” yesterday, saying the country has not seen that daily death toll since March.

“We’re getting there, America,” Pence said.

When the vice-president finished speaking, Trump echoed his comments, saying his administration had acted “quickly and smartly” and thus prevented a much higher death toll.

The US coronavirus death toll is expected to reach 100,000 in the coming days, while Trump said last month that he expected 50,000 to 60,000 Americans to die of the virus.

Updated

Trump mused about whether he should use insulin while delivering remarks on protecting seniors with diabetes amid the coronavirus pandemic.

“I don’t use insulin. Should I be? Huh?” the president said of the diabetes medication. “I never thought about it. But I know a lot of people are very badly affected, right? Unbelievable.”

The comment (or maybe it was a joke?) comes just after Trump said he has concluded his regimen of hydroxychloroquine, which he was using to prevent coronavirus, despite the FDA’s guidance that the drug should only be used in a hospital setting.

The AFL-CIO, the largest US federation of unions, has endorsed Joe Biden’s presidential bid, an unsurprising development considering the group has been a staunch Democratic ally.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka applauded Biden as a champion of the labor movement who would be a valuable ally if he wins the White House.

“The path to the presidency runs through the labor movement,” Trumka said. “And with the full force and unmatched reach of our political program, we are ready to pave that road for our friend Joe Biden.”

The group similarly endorsed Hillary Clinton in her 2016 race against Trump.

The justice department is reportedly closing investigations into three senators over insider-trader allegations, but the investigation into senator Richard Burr remains active.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Prosecutors on Tuesday are alerting defense attorneys for Republicans Kelly Loeffler of Georgia and James Inhofe of Oklahoma as well as Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, that they are closing investigations into their trading, the people said.

But the investigation into Burr, who has had his cell phone seized and has temporarily stepped down as chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, remains ongoing.

Burr avoided a significant financial loss earlier this year by selling stocks that later nosedived due to the coronavirus pandemic, raising concerns that he had profited off information from closed briefings.

George Conway, who is married to senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, mocked Trump for his Twitter activity today.

The president spent part of his morning tweeting about a debunked conspiracy theory involving Joe Scarborough and his unsubstantiated claim that vote by mail leads to voter fraud.

Trump also suggested it was a success that the US coronavirus death toll was 100,000 rather than a million or more.

Conway responded to a summary of those tweets by saying, “We call this Tuesday.”

Conway has become a frequent critic of the president, and he is one of the leaders of the Lincoln Project, a group made up of former Republicans looking to defeat Trump in November.

Joe Biden’s campaign has named a national voter protection director, as concerns intensify over how the coronavirus pandemic will affect voting access.

The AP reports:

The campaign said Rachana Desai Martin will join its legal team, serving also as senior counsel. Martin, who has a strong background in voter protection work, previously worked as chief operating officer of the Democratic National Committee and the DNC’s director of civic engagement and voter protection.

Some states have pushed to expand absentee voting options, including vote by mail, in light of concerns about spreading coronavirus at in-person polling places.

But Trump has repeatedly criticized vote by mail, claiming mailed-in ballots are particularly susceptible to voter fraud, even though vote fraud is very rare.

As the US coronavirus death toll approaches 100,000, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany praised Trump’s response to the pandemic, saying the death toll could have been much higher.

McEnany repeatedly cited a scientific report suggesting up to 2.2 million Americans could die of coronavirus if the government did not take action to limit the spread of the virus.

“The president made the very hard choice of shutting down the economy, so we avoided that extraordinary number,” McEnany said. “We are far below 2.2 million dead Americans because of the actions of President Trump.”

The president himself made a similar argument in a tweet today, saying, “For all of the political hacks out there, if I hadn’t done my job well, & early, we would have lost 1 1/2 to 2 Million People, as opposed to the 100,000 plus that looks like will be the number. That’s 15 to 20 times more than we will lose.”

But Trump suggested last month that the country’s death toll would be 50,000 to 60,000, so the figure is already twice that of what he predicted just weeks ago.

The number may also continue to steadily climb if states move to quickly reopen their economies, as Trump has encouraged them to do.

Updated

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tried to deflect questions about Trump pushing a debunked conspiracy theory about Joe Scarborough.

The president has suggested the MSNBC host, who has been a frequent Trump critic, may be responsible for the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis, who died as the result of a fall while employed as a staffer to then-congressman Scarborough.

McEnany repeated the president’s tweet this morning that the conspiracy theory, which was been debunked by local Florida police and the medical examiner who was involved in the case, was “not an original Trump thought,” even though the president has repeatedly shared the theory with his 80 million Twitter followers.

The press secretary then tried to turn the situation back on Scarborough and his co-host Mika Brzezinski, saying they should be “held to account for their falsehoods.” She specifically criticized Scarborough for saying people would die by taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug that has been linked to a higher death rate when used to treat coronavirus.

When pressed on the fact that Klausutis’ widower wrote to the CEO of Twitter asking for Trump’s tweets to be removed, McEnany again deflected and tried to shift focus away from her boss.

McEnany dodges a question about Trump's criticism of Biden wearing a mask

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany dodged a question about Trump retweeting criticism of Joe Biden for wearing a face mask in public, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends.

“The president’s excited to see that Joe emerged from the basement,” McEnany said sarcastically, highlighting that it was Biden’s first public appearance since the start of the coronavirus crisis.

She added, “It is a bit peculiar, though, that in his basement right next to his wife, he’s not wearing a mask, but he’s wearing one outdoors, when he’s socially distanced. So I think that there was a discrepancy there.”

When a reporter noted that Biden was thus following the CDC guidance, McEnany said wearing a mask was “recommended” but not “required.”

Trump has resisted wearing a mask in public, and face coverings have become a political issue despite public health experts’ guidance to use them.

Updated

Joe Biden participated in a socially distant interview with CNN host Dana Bash today, which will air on the network at 5 pm ET.

The presumptive Democratic nominee has been largely confined to his Delaware home since the start of the coronavirus crisis.

This weekend marked his first public appearance in months, as he and Jill Biden laid a wreath at a Memorial Day ceremony in Delaware, with both Bidens wearing face masks.

Trump, on the other hand, did not wear a mask during Memorial Day ceremonies yesterday, and the president later retweeted criticism of Biden for wearing a mask, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends doing so.

Pentagon deputy inspector general resigns

Glenn Fine, the defense department’s deputy inspector general, has resigned from his role, just weeks after Trump effectively removed him as the chairman of an oversight committee meant to review coronavirus relief funding.

CNN reports:

One Pentagon official told CNN that [Fine] was not told to resign and did so on his own accord. Still, Trump replaced Fine as the Pentagon’s acting inspector general last month rather than allowing him to remain in the job until a nominee for the permanent role was confirmed, a move that was viewed as an effort to thwart his leadership of the coronavirus accountability review.

Fine’s resignation takes effect June 1st, according to DOD IG spokesperson Dwrena Allen.

Fine’s resignation is the latest in a series of departures of inspectors general, raising concerns that the president is attempting to sideline oversight officials.

Dozens of House members have designated a proxy to vote for them this week, after the chamber voted earlier this month to allow remote voting during the pandemic.

At least 34 members have designated proxies, according to a list from the Office of the Clerk. No Republican member appears to have designated a proxy yet, after the caucus expressed opposition to the remote voting proposal.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has suggested he may not consider votes taken by proxy to be valid, but House majority leader Steny Hoyer pushed back against that today.

“They use proxy voting in the Senate all the time,” Hoyer said, referring to recent measures passed by unanimous consent. “What that means is, two people vote for the 100.”

Updated

Republican governors are racing to offer their states to potentially replace North Carolina as the site of the Republican convention, after Trump demanded a “guarantee” from North Carolina’s governor that the convention would be able to take place at “full attendance.”

“Florida would love to have the RNC,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis said. “Heck, I’m a Republican -- it would be great to have the DNC.” DeSantis said hosting a convention would help his state’s economic outlook.

Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, made a similar offer in a tweet this morning.

Again, it is unrealistic for any state to offer Trump such a “guarantee” at this point because it’s unclear what restrictions will be necessary over the summer to limit the spread of coronavirus.

It’s also unclear how many people would choose to attend the convention in person because of the global pandemic, so hosting the event may not bring the same economic boost it has provided cities in past years.

Today so far

Here’s where the day stands so far:

  • New York governor Andrew Cuomo will meet with Trump in Washington tomorrow. Cuomo said he and Trump would discuss ramping up infrastructure projects to help get more New Yorkers back to work amid the coronavirus crisis.
  • The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange was reopened after two months. Cuomo rang the opening bell to cheers from traders, who will still have to wear masks and stay six feet apart from each other when they’re on the floor.
  • Trump again criticized vote by mail, repeating baseless claims that the mailed-in ballots would be very vulnerable to voter fraud, which is extremely rare.

The blog will have more coming up, so stay tuned.

Congressman Jim Clyburn said he “cringed” when he heard Joe Biden say African American voters “ain’t black” if they are still deciding between him and Trump.

But Clyburn, whose endorsement was crucial to helping Biden win the South Carolina primary, said Biden was still the far better alternative to Trump.

“In this instance, Joe did not do as well as I hoped in responding, but I will say this, I go about my business every day comparing Joe Biden, to the alternative, not the Almighty,” Clyburn told “The View.”

“He is not a perfect person. None of us are. So what my decision now is to determine who I feel should be the next president of the United States, and I do that by comparing the candidates to each other, not to the Almighty.”

Biden apologized for the comment on Friday, saying he may have been “much too cavalier” in his earlier interview.

Updated

Katie Miller, the vice president’s press secretary, announced she has recovered from coronavirus and is back at work at the White House.

Miller, who tested positive earlier this month, said she was allowed to return to work at the White House after three negative coronavirus tests.

Miller also announced she and her husband, senior White House adviser Stephen Miller, are expecting a baby. The pair married in February.

Trump and New York governor Andrew Cuomo met in person last month to discuss coronavirus testing and relief funding.

After the meeting, Cuomo said they had had a “a very good conversation,” despite past spats between the two leaders.

“We have a tremendous job that we have to get done and put everything else aside and do the job. And that was the tone of the conversation, was very functional and effective,” the Democratic governor told MSNBC at the time.

Cuomo said he would discuss ramping up infrastructure projects when he meets with Trump tomorrow, but Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell may be the bigger roadblock in getting infrastructure funding approved.

Cuomo to meet with Trump tomorrow

New York governor Andrew Cuomo said he would meet with Trump tomorrow in Washington to discuss, among other things, ramping up infrastructure projects to help the economy.

The Democratic governor argued this was the perfect time to advance long-ignored infrastructure needs in order to get more New Yorkers back to work and cause minimal disruption, as many residents in the state continue to work from home.

“There is no better time to build than right now,” Cuomo said. “Now is the time to do it.”

Congressional Democrats have similarly pushed for a heavy investment in infrastructure, and the president has voiced interest in the idea, but Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has largely dismissed those efforts.

Coronavirus claimed the lives of 73 New Yorkers yesterday, marking the lowest one-day death toll in two months, governor Andrew Cuomo announced at his daily briefing.

Cuomo noted that hospitalizations and intubations are also down, as the state continues to see a steady decline in coronavirus infections.

The governor said Long Island would be able to start its reopening tomorrow as long as it did not see an increase in hospitalizations and deaths today.

Cuomo also once again underscored the need for New Yorkers to wear masks as their regions start to reopen in order to limit the spread of the virus.

“Wearing a mask is officially cool,” the Democratic governor joked. He added, “You don’t have to have a boring mask like my mask. I’m a boring guy.”

The Trump campaign has announced a pair of promotions, as the president falls behind Joe Biden in polling from key battleground states.

The campaign announced in a statement that Bill Stepien, previously serving as a senior political adviser, will become deputy campaign manager, and Stephanie Alexander, who had been a regional political director, will become the campaign’s chief of staff.

There has been speculation in recent weeks that Trump may push out campaign manager Brad Parscale, who the president reportedly threatened to sue over his sliding poll numbers and criticism tied to the coronavirus response.

But Stepien’s statement about his promotion indicated he would be working alongside Parscale as they try to help Trump win a second term.

“I will continue to support Brad Parscale as he leads the campaign, working with all of our partners in states across the country, and helping to coordinate all of our efforts to ensure the President is re-elected,” Stepien said.

Washington, DC, reported zero coronavirus deaths for the first time since late March, raising hopes that the nation’s capital may soon be able to start easing social distancing restrictions.

DC mayor Muriel Bowser initially said the city would not be able to start its reopening process until June 8 due to concern about the climbing number of coronavirus cases.

But Bowser has since revised that, saying the District could start its reopening later this week if the city continues to see a decline in community spread.

The Democratic mayor is expected to announce a decision on starting the reopening tomorrow.

Georgia’s governor offered up the state as a potential host of the Republican convention after Trump lashed out against the Democratic governor of North Carolina, where the event is currently set to take place.

“I love the Great State of North Carolina, so much so that I insisted on having the Republican National Convention in Charlotte at the end of August,” Trump said in a series of tweets yesterday.

“Unfortunately, Democrat Governor, @RoyCooperNC is still in Shutdown mood & unable to guarantee that by August we will be allowed full attendance in the Arena.”

Brian Kemp, the Republican governor of Georgia, has now weighed in, saying he would be “honored to safely host the Republican National Convention.”

But the president’s demands for a “guarantee” of being able to host tens of thousands of people in a convention center ignores the uncertainty surrounding what coronavirus restrictions will be needed into the summer.

Realistically, no state can make such a “guarantee” at this point in time, and Cooper’s office said in a statement, “North Carolina is relying on data and science to protect our state’s public health and safety.”

Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former acting chief of staff, said this morning that he thinks the country has “overreacted” in its response to coronavirus.

Mulvaney said he flew on an airplane this weekend, and he insisted he “would be completely comfortable sitting in a center seat of an airplane” as long as flyers were consistently wearing face masks.

“I think we’ve sort of lost perspective on this a little bit,” Mulvaney said. “We’ve overreacted a little bit.”

The former White House official went on to note the tens of thousands of people who die from the flu every year, but medical experts have warned against drawing comparisons between the two illnesses and underscored that coronavirus has a much higher death rate.

Twitter has said it will not remove tweets from Trump pushing a baseless conspiracy theory involving Joe Scarborough, despite a plea from the widower of Lori Klausutis to do so.

Timothy J Klausutis wrote a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking him to remove the tweets out of consideration for his wife, who died from a fall in 2001. Trump has suggested Scarborough may be responsible for her death, even though that conspiracy theory has been thoroughly debunked.

“We are deeply sorry about the pain these statements, and the attention they are drawing, are causing the family,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement.

“We’ve been working to expand existing product features and policies so we can more effectively address things like this going forward, and we hope to have those changes in place shortly.”

The spokesperson did not elaborate on what those changes would be or how they might account for the “constant barrage of falsehoods, half-truths, innuendo and conspiracy theories” about Klausutis, as her husband wrote in his letter to Dorsey.

The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange was reopened after two months of closure, another sign of how New York is slowly easing coronavirus restrictions as the city’s death rate slows.

Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has become one of the most recognizable faces in the US response to coronavirus, rang the opening bell to cheers from traders.

However, those on the floor will still have to observe guidelines to help limit the spread of the virus, including wearing a mask and staying six feet apart from each other.

Trump’s tweet pushing a baseless conspiracy theory involving Joe Scarborough comes as the widower of Lori Klausutis has writted to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to implore him to remove the president’s tweets about her death.

“I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain,” Timothy J. Klausutis wrote in his letter, which was first reported on by the New York Times.

“I have mourned my wife every day since her passing. I have tried to honor her memory and our marriage,” he wrote. “As her husband, I feel that one of my marital obligations is to protect her memory as I would have protected her in life.”

Klausutis said the tweets were a clear violation of Twitter’s community rules and terms and services and argued any other user would be banished from the platform for sending the same tweets.

Twitter has previously been hesitant to go after Trump for his often false and misleading tweets, although the company said earlier this month that it would label misleading tweets about the coronavirus pandemic, even if they came from the president.

This is Joan Greve, taking over for Martin Pengelly.

Trump has been quite active on Twitter this morning, now highlighting a conspiracy theory about MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who has been a frequent target of the president’s ire.

“The opening of a Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough was not a Donald Trump original thought, this has been going on for years, long before I joined the chorus,” Trump wrote in a two-part tweet thread.

“In 2016 when Joe & his wacky future ex-wife, Mika, would endlessly interview me, I would always be thinking ... about whether or not Joe could have done such a horrible thing? Maybe or maybe not, but I find Joe to be a total Nut Job, and I knew him well, far better than most. So many unanswered & obvious questions, but I won’t bring them up now! Law enforcement eventually will?”

The “Cold Case” Trump is referring to is related to the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis, a former staffer to then-congressman Scarborough who died from a fall caused by a previously unknown heart condition.

That conclusion has been confirmed by both the local Florida police and the medical examiner who investigated Klausutis’ death. The president is kicking up a baseless conspiracy theory that has already been thoroughly debunked in order to suggest that one of his foes might be guilty of murder.

Trump again criticizes vote by mail

More from the president, who really doesn’t like mail-in voting:

There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.

“The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!”

The Republican National Committee is suing to try to stop Gavin Newsom’s attempt to mail ballots to all voters ahead of November’s election, and Trump has been to the well before to express the way he feels.

Today’s example is not quite the “saying the quiet part loud” of past Trump remarks about mail-in voting but the bolded lines in the second paragraph above seem to suggest that the president of the US doesn’t like, well, functioning representative democracy.

It’s hard to know quite where to start when Trump gets on to mail-in voting and how it is bad and rigged against him. It isn’t, in short, as many fact-checkers and media outlets will tell you.

So indeed will state Republican parties seeking to organise for an election bound to be fought at the very least in the shadow of the coronavirus outbreak and possibly in the middle of a lethal autumn resurgence.

Here’s an image from a Pennsylvania Republican party email, sent to me by a correspondent…

An email from the Pennsylvania Republican party.
An email from the Pennsylvania Republican party. Photograph: Email

The New York Times’ decision to devote its front page on Sunday to a list of around 1,000 names of the dead is still reverberating around political and non-political America. Here’s David Leonhardt, in the Times’ morning email:

Sometime in the next few days, the official coronavirus death count will likely exceed 100,000. The true count is even higher – probably closer to 130,000. This larger number includes people who had the virus but weren’t diagnosed, as well as those who died for indirect reasons, such as delaying medical treatment for other illnesses.

…On Sunday, The Times devoted its entire front page and a few inside pages to the names of virus victims… the idea came from Simone Landon, an editor on the Graphics desk, who wanted to find a way to note both the scale of the tragedy and the humanity of those lost.

…To list all of the Americans who had died from the virus would have required every page of the Sunday paper — and the paper would have needed to be more than twice as thick as usual.

A former top economic aide to Barack Obama has been advising the Joe Biden campaign that the economy could post a record recovery in the run-up to the November election.

Some Obama alumni are concerned that a temporary economic surge could boost Donald Trump, who currently trails Biden in national polling, to reelection, according to an unnamed source quoted by Politico.

But Jason Furman, a former Obama adviser and now Harvard economics professor, has predicted that “We are about to see the best economic data we’ve seen in the history of this country,” Politico reported.

That prediction dovetails with White House forecasts of a “V-shaped” economic recovery, with businesses reopening this summer and fall and furloughed workers flooding back into old jobs and resuming spending patterns.

Biden said last week that an economic recovery “is a long way away as I see it right now”.

Thousands of US businesses closed in March and April to combat the spread of coronavirus and consumer spending took a nosedive. The official unemployment rate in the US rose to 14.7% in April, the worst since records began.

Top Trump economics adviser Kevin Hassett said at the weekend that unemployment is likely to crest 20%. But he also said a sudden economic recovery is possible, because “our human capital stock” – workers – remains intact.

“Our capital stock hasn’t been destroyed, our human capital stock is ready to get back to work, and so there are lots of reasons to believe that we can get going way faster than we have in previous crises,” Hassett told CNN’s State of the Union.

The US workforce has been devastated in the last 10 weeks by loss of income and in many cases health insurance. Food banks across the country have reported record demand while workers deemed essential have gone on strike to protest a lack of protective gear. The country is approaching a death toll of 100,000 from the virus – the highest in the world.

“All the signs of economic recovery are going to be raging everywhere,” Hassett said, though he also warned that unemployment could remain in double digits through the November election:

The Shining is 40, so in tribute, Heeeeeeere’s Donny…

The president’s first tweet of the day is an attack on his presumptive opponent at the polls in November which of course does not cite which “polls on the matter” he means.

Trump likes to attack Biden and Barack Obama over H1N1, or the swine flu, which hit the US in 2009. Here’s more on the matter from factcheck.org, a project from the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania which, as it happens, is Trump’s alma mater:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were about 60.8 million cases of infection with the novel type of influenza virus in the US between April 2009 and April 2010, with a total of approximately 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths.

While that death toll may sound high, it’s over an entire year and, in fact, ended up being far lower than was initially expected.

The CDC currently puts cases of the novel coronavirus in the US since the turn of the year at more than 1.6m and there have been nearly 100,000 deaths.

Most observers suggest stronger and swifter action by the Trump administration could have lessened that toll significantly.

There’s a press briefing on the White House schedule today, with Kayleigh McEnany in the Brady Briefing Room at 2pm. Trump’s fourth press secretary is at loggerheads with some reporters already.

Kayleigh McEnany
Kayleigh McEnany Photograph: REX/Shutterstock

On Friday, McEnany pushed back at questions about Trump’s attempt to order states to reopen houses of worship. On Sunday Fox News host Chris Wallace, not one of the president’s favourites, said: “I spent six years in the White House briefing room covering Ronald Reagan. I have to say, I never – and in the years since too, I never saw a White House press secretary act like that.”

Jonah Goldberg, editor of The Dispatch, added: “What Donald Trump wants in a press secretary is a Twitter troll who goes on attack. Doesn’t actually care about doing the job they have, and instead wants to impress really an audience of one and make another part of official Washington another one of these essentially cable news and Twitter gladiatorial arenas.”

For schadenfreude fans, here’s our report on something else that happened in the briefing room on Friday:

At 4pm today, meanwhile, Trump is due to deliver remarks in the Rose Garden, “on Protecting Seniors with Diabetes”. To be minorly and possibly inappropriately facetious, it’s not yet clear if he thinks hydroxychloroquine can help.

At lunchtime, meanwhile, Trump will carry out the swearing-in of John Ratcliffe, the former Republican congressman who is his new Director of National Intelligence and whose confirmation to the role, in the Senate, was … not exactly bipartisan.

Updated

Good morning…

…and welcome to another day of coverage of the coronavirus outbreak in the US, and the politics around it.

The death toll is still inching towards 100,000. After demanding that churches be allowed to reopen, Donald Trump spent Saturday and Sunday of the Memorial Day weekend playing golf and raging at his enemies on Twitter. Among many other things, some absurdly offensive, he threatened to move the Republican convention from North Carolina if the governor does not reopen the state and allow a packed arena. Others took note.

The New York Times calculates that the pandemic has been a much deadlier problem in blue, Democratic states than red, Republican ones. Masks are becoming a political issue: Trump didn’t wear one in public on Memorial Day, Joe Biden did. Trump retweeted criticism of Biden by a Fox News personality.

“This might help explain why Trump doesn’t like to wear a mask in public,” Brit Hume wrote, accompanying a picture of Biden in a mask and sunglasses.

Elsewhere, the Republican governor of North Dakota was near tears as he pleaded with people not to shame people who do wear them. In Virginia, a Democratic governor who said masks save lives went to the beach … without one.

The push to reopen the economy goes on, of course, as summer begins and public health experts keep on warning that reopening too soon could contribute to a deadly second wave of the virus. The Wall Street Journal reports: “We’re past the trough in terms of peak damage.”

But Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett told CNN on Sunday unemployment was headed past 20% and would likely be in double figures still come the election in November. Hassett also referred to America’s “human capital stock” being ready to go back to work, which didn’t go down too well on Twitter. Plus, polling shows even red states are reluctant to reopen too soon, however their governors, pushed by Trump, continue to push the pace.

A Washington Post headline: “In crucial Florida, some senior voters cast a skeptical eye toward Trump’s re-election.”

Another thing: this morning’s Politico Playbook email, an essential item for politics tragics everywhere, is headlined: “When powerful people think the rules aren’t for them”. But the travails of Dominic Cummings, aide to British prime minister Boris Johnson, are only its second item. The first is Gretchen Whitmer’s husband reportedly “pulling the ‘don’t-you-know-who-I-am’ card with a vacation boat dock worker in the middle of a pandemic that has killed thousands of people in his state”. The state is Michigan and Whitmer is on Joe Biden’s running mate short list. So that part of the campaign has begun.

Here’s Lauren Gambino on how it gets dirty from here…

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