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Good Morning.
Donald Trump is eager to get back into the election campaign, despite declining to say whether he has still tested negative for Covid-19 since he was released from the hospital. In a rambling and cough-spattered call to Sean Hannity of Fox News Thursday night, the president said he was planning a rally in Florida on Saturday.
In an earlier telephone interview with the Fox Business channel, the president suggested he may have contracted the disease from the families of fallen American soldiers, criticized his own attorney general for failing to indict Joe Biden and Barack Obama, and announced that he would not participate in the second presidential debate whether the event was to be a virtual affair with the candidates showing up remotely.
Trump says golf partner’s drug ‘cured’ coronavirus
Trump attributes what he claims was his rapid recovery from Covid-19 to an experimental antibody cocktail from the pharmaceutical company Regeneron, whose CEO is a member of the president’s golf club. Doctors say demand for the drug has increased since the president touted it as a possible “cure” for the coronavirus, despite its development using human cells obtained from an elective abortion, a practice he has repeatedly denounced.
Trump has made the unlikely claim that the drug will soon be available for free to all Americans with the disease. As Amanda Holpuch reports, the president’s treatment was markedly different from what the average 74-year-old American can expect if he contracts a serious illness.
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China has joined the Covax global vaccine initiative, which aims to distribute 2 billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines worldwide by the end of 2021, leaving the US increasingly isolated in its refusal to sign on to the plan.
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Administration’s handling of the pandemic is ‘dangerously incompetent’, according to an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine, which took the unprecedented step of urging its readers to vote for Trump to leave office.
Pelosi says president is suffering ‘disengagement from reality’
Democrats are launching a Congressional commission to assess whether Trump is still capable of fulfilling his presidential duties, or whether he should be removed from office under the 25th Amendment. Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Nancy Pelosi said the president’s erratic tweets and interviews in recent days suggest that he is “in an altered state right now,” adding: “Dissociation from reality would be fun if not it was so deadly. “
A right-wing militia planned to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer
Six people with ties to the right-wing militia group Wolverine Watchmen have been charged with conspiring to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. His plan, which was made public in an FBI affidavit on Thursday, involved snatching the governor from her second home in northern Michigan and then staging a moot trial for treason.
Whitmer, who has become a focal point for right-wing anti-government sentiment during the pandemic, told reporters Thursday that Trump had encouraged those groups by urging the Proud Boys to “stand up” in the presidential debate. from last week:
The hate groups heard the president’s words not as a reprimand but as a battle cry, as a call to action.
In other election news …
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Utah Senator Mike Lee has insisted that the United States “is not a democracy.” in tweets that drew criticism at a time when Republicans have been accused of voter suppression. In a later tweet, Lee explained: “Democracy is not the goal; freedom, peace and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that. “
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Facebook has removed hundreds of fake profiles linked to Turning Point USA, saying the conservative group had tried to influence public conversations by flooding news articles with pro-Trump comments and disinformation.
Statistics of the day
There are 35 seats for re-election in November, but expert observers say that control of the United States Senate is reduced to five key careers. Tom McCarthy and The Guardian imaging team discuss how Democrats could win back the upper house.
Don’t miss this
A group of filmmakers producing pro-Biden trailers and advertisements, which are designed to go viral on Twitter, say their videos’ popularity is being strategically strangled by “an army of Trump supporters online, a mix of humans and bots. ”. Peter Savodnik reports for Vanity Fair.
View from the right
Trump’s refusal to participate in the second presidential debate came a day after his controversial adviser Roger Stone advised the president to skip the event in an article for the Spectator, claiming the format was rigged against him.
It is important to note that the so-called ‘Presidential Debate Commission’ is not appointed by the President, it is not a commission and its real purpose is to limit the debate.
Last thing: this west wing gathering is Covid safe
Nearly 15 years after its end, the cast of The West Wing gathers for a staged reading of a classic episode of the beloved political drama, airing on October 15, with Sterling K Brown replacing the late John Spencer as the White House. . Chief of Staff Leo McGarry. HBO Max has released a trailer for the election special, which was organized to benefit the non-profit group When We All Vote.
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