Donald Trump has started the week by lashing out at Nascar driver Bubba Wallace, statue protesters and China after being criticised for his divisive Mount Rushmore address on Friday, in which he attacked left-wing activists and defended Confederate generals, with senator Tammy Duckworth denouncing him for ignoring the country’s 130,000 coronavirus fatalities.
City mayors in stricken states warned the Sunday talk shows that the pandemic was in danger of getting out of control, with Sylvester Turner of Houston, Texas, telling CBS: “If we don’t get our hands around this virus quickly, our hospitals could be in serious, serious trouble.”
Trump has meanwhile claimed that crime rates are spiralling in New York City and Chicago and offered federal assistance to curtail it while again attacking Fox News for broadcasting “phony suppression polls” showing him trailing Joe Biden in the election race.
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Donald Trump has slammed efforts to rename prominent sports teams amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, suggesting “Indians” must be “very angry” over plans to rename the Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians.
The president wrote in a tweet on Monday: “They name teams out of STRENGTH, not weakness, but now the Washington Redskins & Cleveland Indians, two fabled sports franchises, look like they are going to be changing their names in order to be politically correct.”
He also attacked Elizabeth Warren, who he has previously dubbed “Pocohontas” — a nickname with racial connotations that he gave her after the Massachusetts senator said she had Native American ancestry.
Mr Trump wrote: “Indians, like Elizabeth Warren, must be very angry right now!”
Story to come.
Ms McEnany's boss, Donald Trump, tweeted earlier in the day asking whether Mr Wallace had "apologized to all of those great NASCAR drivers & officials who came to his aid, stood by his side, & were willing to sacrifice everything for him, only to find out that the whole thing was just another HOAX."
"I'm not going to answer a question a sixth time," Ms McEnany said, amid protests from reporters that she had not yet answered the question at all.
Earlier in the day, Ms McEnany explained the president's tweet to Fox News as Mr Trump making "a broader point that this rush to judgment on the facts, before the facts, is unacceptable."
ICYMI: Frank Sinatra ‘loathed’ Trump, says singer’s daughter after president lauded star
Actress and activist Mia Farrow, who was once married to Sinatra, tweeted: “Frank Sinatra would have loathed Donald Trump.”
To which his daughter, Nancy Sinatra, responded: “He actually did loathe him.”
During his 3 July Mount Rushmore speech, the president announced plans for a National Garden of Heroes, saying that a new task force had 60 days to present plans and name a location for the project.
The “vast outdoor park” will feature statues of the founding fathers, civil rights campaigners, political figures and entertainers, many of whom were name-checked in the president’s remarks, including Sinatra.
President continues to lose support in parts of the country where Covid-19 is rapidly spreading
My latest:
Houston hospitals deal with coronavirus spike
Sheri Fink writes: Over the past week, Dr Aric Bakshy, an emergency physician at Houston Methodist, had to decide which coronavirus patients he should admit to the increasingly busy hospital and which he could safely send home.
To discuss questions like these, he has turned to doctors at hospitals where he trained in New York City that were overwhelmed by the coronavirus this spring. Now their situations are reversed.
Thumbing through a dog-eared notebook during a recent shift, Dr Bakshy counted about a dozen people he had treated for coronavirus symptoms. His colleagues in Houston had attended to many more. Meanwhile, friends at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens told him that their emergency department was seeing only one or two virus patients a day.
“The surge is here,” Dr Bakshy said.
As Houston’s hospitals face the worst outbreak of the virus in Texas, now one of the nation’s hot zones, Dr Bakshy and others are experiencing some of the same challenges that their New York counterparts did just a few months ago and are trying to adapt some lessons from that crisis.
Trump's approval rating falls in 500 counties facing rise in Covid-19
Donald Trump’s approval rating has taken a considerable hit amid the coronavirus pandemic, as new research revealed possible connections between the president's plunge in support and a spike in the number of new cases nationwide.
The president’s approval dropped the fastest in 500 counties suffering from 28 deaths resulting from Covid-19 per 100,000 people, according to the latest data from Pew Research Centre.
By late June, his support fell 17 percent among voters who previously said in March they approved of the president — just as the Covid-19 outbreak was declared a national emergency and global pandemic.
According to Pew Research Centre, the dip in support transcended party lines and voting blocs, with an almost-equal split among Democrats and Republicans. Men and women, as well as college graduates and non-graduates, were also reportedly unified in their newfound disapproval of the president — particularly in counties facing a rise in coronavirus infections.
Story to come...
The US president’s campaign team said on Sunday that the “Make America Great Again Rally” was scheduled to take place on Saturday.
The outdoors event, which could see thousands arrive at the international airport in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is Mr Trump’s second big 2020 campaign event since Covid-19 hit the United States in March.
In a statement, his campaign team said “there will be ample access to hand sanitiser and all attendees will be provided a face mask that they are strongly encouraged to wear” at Saturday’s event.
“We look forward to so many freedom-loving patriots coming to the rally and celebrating America, the greatest country in the history of the world,” added campaign press secretary Hogan Gidley.
Supreme Court says presidential electors may be forced to support winner of popular vote
Griffin Connolly writes: States can make members of the presidential electoral college honour the results of the popular vote and cast their ballots for their pledged candidates, the US Supreme Court ruled on Monday.
The unanimous ruling allows states to eliminate the possibility of "faithless electors" going rogue and voting for candidates other than the ones who win their state's popular vote and whom they had previously agreed to support.
In the US, a state's popular vote determines which candidate's chosen electors in that state are sent to the electoral college to choose the president.
The vast majority of presidential candidates' pledged electors cast ballots for them during the electoral college vote, but there are often a handful of defectors.
Conservative KW Miller, running for the state's 18th congressional district says the black superstar is really an Italian woman who “keeps Satanist symbols in her bag”.
All righty then.
Gino Spocchia has this report.
Hard to beat this for a contrast between the two candidates.
The US Supreme Court has refused to free "electors" in the complex Electoral College system that decides the presidency from state laws that use penalties to force them to support the candidate who prevails in the state's popular vote.
The justices unanimously declined to endorse the discretionary power of electors just months before the 3 November president election. The justices ruled in favor of Washington state and Colorado, which had imposed penalties on several so-called faithless electors who defied pledges in 2016 to vote for the winner of their states' popular vote, Democrat Hillary Clinton.
"The Constitution's text and the nation's history both support allowing a state to enforce an elector's pledge to support his party's nominee - and the state voters' choice - for President," Justice Elena Kagan wrote on behalf of the court.
Under the system set out in the US Constitution in the 18th century, the winner of a presidential election is determined not by amassing a majority in the national popular vote but by securing a majority of electoral votes allotted to the 50 US states and the District of Columbia.
In 2016, 10 of the 538 electors cast ballots for someone other then their state's popular vote winner, an unusually high number that could have changed the outcome of five of the 58 previous US presidential elections.
The justices on Monday upheld a decision by the Washington state Supreme Court that had found the $1,000 (£800) fines against three faithless electors to be lawful and did not violate the Constitution's provisions that spell out the Electoral College process.
The justices also reversed a 2019 ruling by the Denver-based 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals against Colorado's cancellation of a faithless elector's vote. Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not participate in the Colorado case.
Reuters
Another music icon with some pithy advice for this president is the long-lasting Canadian folk rocker, furious after "Rockin' in the Free World", "Like a Hurricane" and "Cowgirl in the Sand" were played in South Dakota.
Here's Jacob Stolworthy's report.
The president's son had this to say about his girlfriend being taken ill with coronavirus, either gallantly sacrificing himself to take care of her or too dim to understand the threat - depending on your point of view.
Montana Republican congressional representative Greg Gianforte has abandoned in-person campaigning as he tilts for the state's governor's office after his wife Susan and running mate Kirsten Juras came into contact with Guilfoyle.
Don Jr also posted this truly North Korea-standard artwork of his father over the weekend, which deserves a wider audience.
As does this extraordinary photo of papa, since we're talking memes. He picked a hell of a day to quit sniffing hydroxychloroquine!
The president appears to be operating in a completely different reality to the rest of us right now, utterly refusing to address the coronavirus resurgence he has to take some responsibility for after advocating reopening.
Old Blue Eyes, who reportedly once told Trump to "go f*** himself" after he questioned the crooner's appearance fee to sing at the opening of his Atlantic City casino, has nevertheless been nominated for inclusion in the president's National Garden of Heroes.
But Sinatra's ex-wife Mia Farrow and daughter Nancy have been exposing a few home truths on Twitter.
Oliver O'Connell has this report.
For Indy Premium, here's Holly Baxter on the growing - and avoidable - disaster facing the US.
He's angry today my friends.
We've heard his first two grievances before but this attack on Bubba Wallace for opposing the flying of the Confederate battle flag at stock car events is pretty lively.
Still no word on Russia or the coronavirus crisis at home though.
The president's first tweet of the day finds him resuming his "statue wars" distraction, quoting a Breitbart report on a statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass being vandalised in New York state - surely a very unlikely target for Black Lives Matter activists?
Here's Chris Riotta's report.
The president may be raging against Fox on Twitter but the Rupert Murdoch-owned network continues to do him favours, including cutting him out of this picture of the dead billionaire paedophile and Ghislaine Maxwell (while leaving Melania in!)
Note the poster of this tweet is the self-same constitutional law expert who defended Trump during the impeachment hearings last December - suggesting shifting sands in his allegiance.
