In a survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, overall, just 31 per cent of Americans approve of Trump’s leadership on the pandemic, a significant drop from 44 per cent approval in March, when the virus began sweeping through the United States. (AP Photo)
US Elections 2020 LIVE UPDATES: Republican party on Monday announced the official renomination of Donald Trump and Mike Pence for President and Vice President post. “We go forward confident in our cause of re-electing President & Vice President 70 days from now”, tweeted Ronna McDaniel, Republican National Committee Chair. United States President Donald Trump is promising to outline an optimistic vision for America at this week’s Republican convention but surveys manifest that he’ll be speaking to a public deeply pessimistic about the direction of the country and overwhelmingly dissatisfied with his and the federal government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Most Americans think there isn’t enough being done to help individual Americans, small businesses or public schools as the pandemic stretches on, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Overall, just 31% of Americans approve of Trump’s leadership on the pandemic, a significant drop from 44% approval in March, when the virus began sweeping through the United States.
Republican Party officials say their convention — during which Trump is expected to speak every night in the 10 p.m. hour — will ultimately surpass the Democrats’ telethon-like show, which the president and his allies have repeatedly called “dark,” depressing and thin on policy proposals. “We’re going to have more of it live than what they did,” Trump told Fox News on Thursday. “I think it’s pretty boring when you do tapes.”
Joe Biden and Donald Trump
Republican party announces official renomination of Donald Trump & Mike Pence for President & Vice President of US. "We go forward confident in our cause of re-electing President & Vice President 70 days from now", tweets Ronna McDaniel, Republican National Committee Chair
Video app TikTok said it will wage a legal fight against the Trump administration's efforts to ban the popular, Chinese-owned service over national-security concerns.
TikTok, which is owned by China's ByteDance, insisted Monday that it is not a national-security threat and that the government is acting without evidence or due process. The company said it will file suit against the government later on Monday in federal court in California. A copy of the complaint could not be obtained. President Donald Trump has issued two executive orders in August, first a sweeping but unspecified ban on any 'transaction' with ByteDance, to take effect within 45 days. He then ordered ByteDance to sell assets used to support TikTok in the US.
Over past year, TikTok has tried to put distance between its app, which it says has 100 million US users, and its Chinese owners. It installed a former top Disney executive as its American CEO and named two other Americans chief security officer and general counsel.
In a survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, overall, just 31 per cent of Americans approve of Trump’s leadership on the pandemic, a significant drop from 44 per cent approval in March, when the virus began sweeping through the United States.
Twitter has hidden a tweet by US President Donald Trump criticising the promotion of drop boxes by Democrats as an option for voters, saying it contained "misleading claims" that could "dissuade voters" ahead of the November election. The US president tweeted on Sunday that postal voting could encourage fraud and puts users at risk of contracting coronavirus.
"So now the Democrats are using mail drop boxes, which are a voter-security disaster. Among other things, they make it possible for a person to vote multiple times. Also, who controls them? Are they placed in Republican or Democrat areas? They are not Covid sanitised - a big fraud," Trump wrote. The social media giant said the tweet made "misleading health claims".
"We placed a public interest notice on this tweet for violating our civic-integrity policy for making misleading health claims that could potentially dissuade people from participation in voting," it said. Users must click past a message from Twitter to see the president's tweet. Users are unable to like or comment on the post, Fox News reported. The same post remains available on Facebook, with no warning, but includes a link to additional voting information.
Republicans have begun the process of formally nominating Donald Trump as the party’s 2020 presidential nominee. The party has gathered 336 delegates for the roll call vote at a scaled-down convention kickoff in Charlotte, North Carolina, that begins a weeklong effort to convince the American people that he deserves a second term.
Despite the ongoing pandemic, delegates are holding an in-person roll-call vote at the Charlotte Convention Center. Democrats, who held their convention last week, chose to hold their roll call vote created a video montage from states across the country to avoid a large-scale gathering. Trump is trying to avoid becoming the first incumbent president since George H.W. Bush to lose his reelection bid. (AP)
Donald Trump does not favour mail-in voting. Many Republicans are of the view that mail-in voting will favour Democrats — in essence, they believe that more voters (especially low-income and non-white ones) will mean more votes for Democrats. Trump has alleged that voting by mail will lead to fraud in the election process.
Various studies, in fact, suggest that there is no evidence that mail-in voting leads to greater chances of fraud. A Stanford University study in April said that while mail-in ballots offer greater convenience to voters and may increase voter turnout “modestly”, it had no particular advantages for any party. In 2017, the Brennan Center for Justice estimated the risk of ballot fraud at between 0.00004-0.00009%. READ MORE
Nikki Haley, popular Indian-American Republican politician and former US envoy to the UN, will be among the star speakers on the first day of the Republican National Convention which begins on Monday, according to a list released by the Trump campaign. The four-day RNC will formally nominate 74-year-old incumbent President Donald Trump as the party's candidate for the November 3 US presidential election.
Haley, 48, the two-term Governor of South Carolina, is the only Indian-American leader to be featured in the list of RNC speakers released by the Trump campaign on Sunday. She is considered as one of the potential presidential candidates of the Republican Party post the Trump era.
The former US envoy to the UN is close to the Trump family and plans to campaign aggressively in his re-election bid over the next several weeks. In a statement, the Trump campaign said: "Over four nights, President Trump's 2020 Convention will honour the great American story, the American people that have written it, and how President Donald J Trump's 'Make America Great Again' agenda has empowered them to succeed"
The Biden campaign released a list of Republicans endorsing the former vice president Monday.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he would follow public health advisers' advice if they called for a national shutdown should he take office and the coronavirus had not abated. "I would be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives. We cannot get the country moving until we control the virus," Biden said in an interview broadcast Sunday night on ABC News.
Asked specifically whether he'd push a national shutdown if scientists said it was necessary, Biden replied: ?I would shut it down.? The former vice president has previously called for the nation's governors to impose mask mandates in their states, effectively a national mask mandate. But when he made that call, Biden avoided saying he'd attempt to use a nationally applicable executive order himself. The former vice president's remarks came as part of his first joint interview with vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris. The pair accepted their party's nominations during a virtual convention last week. On Monday, Republicans begin their convention to nominate Trump and Vice President Mike Pence for a second term.
Biden laughed when asked about Trump's recent assertion that the only way he'd lose was if the election were rigged, and the Democratic challenger dismissed any notions that Trump wouldn't leave the White House voluntarily if he loses.
Nikki Haley, popular Indian-American Republican politician and former US envoy to the UN, will be among the star speakers on the first day of the Republican National Convention.Haley, 48, the two-term Governor of South Carolina, is the only Indian-American leader to be featured in the list of RNC speakers released by the Trump campaign on Sunday. Haley, who served as US ambassador to the United Nations during the first two years of the Trump administration, is close to the Trump family and plans to campaign aggressively in his re-election bid over the next several weeks.(PTI)
Republicans will aim to recast the story of Donald Trump’s presidency when they hold their national convention, featuring speakers drawn from everyday life as well as cable news and the White House while drawing a stark contrast with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden. Trump is looking to shift his campaign away from being a referendum on a presidency ravaged by a pandemic and economic collapse and toward a choice between vastly different visions of America’s future.(AP)
One of President Donald Trump's most influentual and longest serving advisors, Kellyanne Conway announced Sunday that she would be leaving the White House at the end of this month. Conway, Trump’s campaign manager during the stretch run of the 2016 race, was the first woman to successfully steer a White House bid, then became a senior counselor to the president.
In her resignation letter submitted to the president at the Oval office, Conway cited a need to spend time with her four children. Her husband, George, had become an outspoken Trump critic and her family a subject of Washington’s rumor mill. (AP)
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday headed to the Middle East the first of two senior US officials to travel to the region this week as the Trump administration presses an ambitious Arab-Israeli peace push that President Donald Trump hopes will burnish his foreign policy credentials ahead of Novembers election.
Pompeo is traveling to Israel, several Gulf Arab states and Sudan and will be away when he is scheduled to speak on Tuesday to the Republican National Convention which will nominateTrump for a second term. Should Pompeo appear by remote or recorded video it will break a long tradition of secretaries of state declining to participate in the public political nomination process. (AP)
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he would follow public health advisers’ advice if they called for a national shutdown should he take office and the coronavirus had not abated.“I would be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives. We cannot get the country moving until we control the virus,” Biden said in an interview broadcast Sunday night on ABC News.
Asked specifically whether he’d push to shutter economic activity if scientists said it was necessary, Biden replied: “I would shut it down.” (AP)
Top Democrats and Republicans blamed each other for stalled talks on coronavirus aid legislation on Sunday, a day after the House of Representatives approved $25 billion in new funds for the US Postal Service, a bill that Republicans declared dead.The Democratic-led House passed the bill on Saturday in a special session called by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to prevent dwindling Postal Service funding and planned service cuts from interfering with delivery of mail-in ballots for the November 3 election. But the vote failed to shift a stalemate over the next phase of coronavirus aid since August 6, when talks between the White House and Democratic congressional leaders broke down over funding levels and unemployment benefits. Reuters
He’s broken his pledge never to take a vacation or play golf for pleasure. His plan to update the nation’s infrastructure has become a running punchline and he’s dropped his threat to throw Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl out of a plane without a parachute. But behind the drama, chaos and tumult that has defined President Donald Trump’s administration, the president has fulfilled a wide range of promises he made during his 2016 campaign.
It’s a theme that will play a major role in the upcoming Republican National Convention, as the president tries to convince a weary nation that he deserves a second term, even when millions of Americans have been infected by the coronavirus, the economy is in tatters and racial tensions are boiling over.
“I’m the only candidate that gave you more than I promised in the campaign. It’s true. I’m the only one ever, maybe ever,” Trump said at a rally in battleground Arizona last week. READ MORE
Days after former US Vice President Joe Biden officially accepted his nomination as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate for the upcoming election in November, the Republican Party is set to re-nominate President Donald Trump for the country’s top post at the Grand Old Party’s (GOP) National Convention, scheduled to start on Monday morning, August 24, 9 am EST (6:30 pm IST).
The four-day convention, the overarching theme of which is ‘Honoring the Great American Story’, is scheduled to take place between August 24 and 27. Unlike the Democratic National Convention, which was held entirely virtually due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the Republican Party has opted for a part virtual, part in-person model.
Trump is expected to formally accept his party’s re-nomination from the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday. He is also likely to take part in all four nights of the convention, according to reports. READ MORE