Trump Election Trail

WhatsHisNuts

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5dimes right now. Okay Wayne, I?ll lay you $2900/$2000.


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Put me down for $1100 if you want to offer $4k. I'll Venmo you directly and you can work the rest out with Wayne. If not, that's cool too.
 

MadJack

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Put me down for $1100 if you want to offer $4k. I'll Venmo you directly and you can work the rest out with Wayne. If not, that's cool too.
:0008

Maybe someone else will step up with the extra $1000 if Wayne insists on a $5000 wager.

:popcorn2
 

JT

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Jack, do you remember what the lines were at this point in 2016? Hillary was polling at 4-5 points then. Considering Joe is 10 points better then that the line is insanely low.
 

MadJack

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Jack, do you remember what the lines were at this point in 2016? Hillary was polling at 4-5 points then. Considering Joe is 10 points better then that the line is insanely low.

I don't remember what I had for dinner last night, so....

Betonline has Biden -175
 

Old School

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Jack, do you remember what the lines were at this point in 2016? Hillary was polling at 4-5 points then. Considering Joe is 10 points better then that the line is insanely low.


True but Trump isn't done being his own worst enemy.

More stupid to come.

Narcissists can't help themselves.
 

MadJack

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5dimes has never missed one day without posting election odds. And if they did it wasn?t on the 2nd. Let?s bet on that too Wayne. Here?s today.

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Old School

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Trump says he won't do next presidential debate after it goes virtual, Biden still wants town hall
Nicholas Wu
Joey Garrison
USA TODAY

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...held-remotely-due-trumps-covid-19/5920908002/

WASHINGTON ? President Donald Trump said Thursday he would not take part in the next presidential debate with former Vice President Joe Biden after it was moved to a virtual format because of COVID-19 safety concerns.

"I'm not going to waste my time doing a virtual debate," he told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, calling it a "joke" and an effort "to protect Biden."

The Commission on Presidential Debates announced Thursday morning the next debate would be remote to "protect the health and safety of all involved" after Trump's positive COVID-19 diagnosis and the subsequent White House outbreak.

Co-chairman Frank Fahrenkopf said the commission would not host a debate with Biden alone if Trump doesn?t budge.

?No, we wouldn?t have it," he said. "You can?t do that under the federal election laws and FEC (Federal Election Commission) rules. You?ve got to balance. You couldn?t have one person going through the debate and the other one not. That wouldn?t be a debate under the law.?

Fahrenkopf said the future of the debate rests with Trump.

?The ball?s in his court,? he said. ?It?s his call. We have to take it the way it comes.?

The debate, which was scheduled to take place Oct. 15, was set to be a town hall format. Debate moderator Steve Scully, C-SPAN's senior executive producer and political editor, and the town hall participants would be based in Miami, and the candidates would participate in "separate remote locations," the commission said.

Biden wants town hall for Oct. 22 debate; commission says no
As Biden headed to Arizona on Thursday for campaign events, he said he didn?t know what to expect.

?I don?t know what the president is going to do. He changes his mind every second,? Biden said.

Kate Bedingfield, communications director for the Biden campaign, said Biden "will find an appropriate place to take questions from voters directly" on Oct. 15 as a result of Trump backing out.

The campaign also called for the third and final debate, set for Nashville, Tennessee, on Oct 22, to be changed to a town hall format.

"Joe Biden was prepared to accept the CPD's proposal for a virtual town hall, but the president has refused, as Donald Trump clearly does not want to face questions from the voters about his failures on COVID and the economy," Bedingfield said. "The voters should have a chance to ask questions of both candidates, directly. Every presidential candidate since 1992 has participated in such an event, and it would be a shame if Donald Trump was the first to refuse."

Fahrenkopf said the commission is moving forward with an in-person ? not virtual ? debate Oct. 22 "even if (Trump) decides to skip" the second debate. But he said the commission intends to keep the originally planned format, not shift to a town hall as requested by Biden.

?They can do what they want to. Right now we?re going forward as originally planned."

Can Trump do that?

Fahrenkopf said there?s ?no law or requirement? that presidential candidates must debate, noting President Jimmy Carter refused to take part in a debate sponsored by the League of Women Voters with Republican nominee Ronald Reagan and independent candidate John Anderson in 1980. The debate went ahead with Reagan and Anderson.

?There?s no way you can force a presidential candidate to debate,? Fahrenkopf told USA TODAY. ?It?s up to them whether they debate or not.?

Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, who tested positive for COVID-19 last week, said Trump would hold a rally instead of participating in the debate.

"President Trump will have posted multiple negative tests prior to the debate, so there is no need for this unilateral declaration," Stepien said, though the date of Trump's last negative test has not been released.

Trump spent three days at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where he was treated for COVID-19. He returned to the White House on Monday, then two days later, he reentered the Oval Office.

Amid concerns about the spread of COVID-19 after the president, top White House staff and Republican allies tested positive for the virus over the past week, plexiglass was installed between Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris at Wednesday night's debate. The two candidates were spaced more than 12 feet apart, though neither candidate wore a face mask during the debate.

Fahrenkopf, chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1983 to 1989, said it?s been the practice for 25 years that the debate commission names the dates, the locations, the formats and the moderators without any consultation with the campaigns.

?I heard this morning, ?Well, they should have consulted us.? We never consult on these sorts of things, and we?ve been saying from the very beginning that we are going to follow the advice of the medical people who are advising us, the Cleveland Clinic,? he said. ?They supported what we are doing. We are doing this for the safety of everyone involved.?


Contributing: David Jackson and Bart Jansen
 

Old School

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Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, who tested positive for COVID-19 last week, said Trump would hold a rally instead of participating in the debate.

I wonder if that upcoming rally will be for "the safety of all"?
 

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Trump insults Harris as 'a monster' morning after vice presidential debate
He's also falsely called her a "communist" in a Fox Business interview.
ByElizabeth Thomas

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/tru...ng-vice-presidential-debate/story?id=73498918

October 8, 2020, 9:52 AM
? 5 min read

President Donald Trump on Thursday attacked Sen. Kamala Harris as "a monster" the day after the vice presidential debate.

"This monster that was on stage with Mike Pence, who destroyed her last night by the way, but this monster, she says no no there won?t be fracking, everything she said is a lie," Trump said in an interview with Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo.

He went on to call her "horrible,? and ?totally unlikeable,? as well as a ?communist."

This is not the first time the president has launched baseless attacks against Harris since she became the Democratic vice presidential candidate.

He's called her "incompetent," a "super liberal," and has painted a dark picture to his supporters of what would happen if Harris had to take over as president.

At a September rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Trump fabricated a White House conversation in which a President Joe Biden was forced to sign documents he didn't understand.

He mimicked Biden as saying: "I'm getting tired. I'd like to rest. I'd like to let Kamala take over as president!"

"That's no way to get into the office, because we're going to have a woman president someday, but you know what? It can't be Kamala," Trump said.

"Never!" a person in the crowd screamed.

Harris' team declined to comment on Trump?s ?monster? comment Thursday morning.

In an exclusive interview with ABC "World News Tonight" Anchor David Muir in August, Harris brushed off insults directed at her by Trump, saying they reflect the president's attempts to "distract the American people."

"President Trump has referred to you as 'nasty,' a sort of 'madwoman,' a 'disaster,' the 'meanest,' 'most horrible,' 'most disrespectful of anybody in the U.S. Senate.' How do you define what you hear from the president?" Muir asked Harris.

The California senator responded, "I think that there is so much about what comes out of Donald Trump's mouth that is designed to distract the American people from what he is doing every day. That is about neglect, negligence and harm to the American people."

Shaunna Thomas, executive director of the organization UltraViolet, which describes itself as a community of one million people "mobilized to fight sexism and create a more inclusive world that accurately represents all women," said that women are "tired" of Trump's "racism and sexism that has caused him to have the greatest gender gap in history."

"Trump is going all in on the racism and sexism that has caused him to have the greatest gender gap in history," Thomas said. "Women are tired of this. We?re done. And we?re going to show up in overwhelming numbers to vote this guy out."
 

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Old School

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Why would Trump rather speak to a rally of his supporters and not to Millions of potential votes in a debate on every major TV Network?

He can't possibe change the course of this election pandering to those who will vote for him anyway.

What is his plan?
 

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Taking Page From Authoritarians, Trump Turns Power of State Against Political Rivals
The New York Times
David E. Sanger
,The New York Times?October 11, 2020

President Donald Trump?s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton?s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joe Biden, takes his presidency into new territory ? until now, occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan.

Trump has long demanded ? quite publicly, often on Twitter ? that his most senior cabinet members use the power of their office to pursue political enemies. But his appeals this week, as he trailed badly in the polls and was desperate to turn the national conversation away from the coronavirus, were so blatant that one had to look to authoritarian nations to make comparisons.

He took a step even Richard Nixon avoided in his most desperate days: openly ordering direct immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his reelection campaign.

?There is essentially no precedent,? said Jack Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department?s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush and has written extensively on presidential powers. ?We have a norm that developed after Watergate that presidents don?t talk about ongoing investigations, much less interfere with them.?

?It is crazy and it is unprecedented,? said Goldsmith, now a professor at Harvard Law School, ?but it?s no different from what he has been saying since the beginning of his presidency. The only thing new is that he has moved from talking about it to seeming to order it.?

Trump?s vision of the presidency has always leaned to exercising the absolute powers of the chief executive, a writ-large version of the family business he presided over. ?I have an Article II,? he told young adults last year at a Turning Point USA summit, referring to the section of the Constitution that deals with the president?s powers, ?where I have the right to do whatever I want as president, but I don?t even talk about that.?

Now he is talking about it, almost daily. He is making it clear that prosecutions, like vaccines for the coronavirus, are useless to him if they come after Nov. 3. He has declared, without evidence, that there is already plenty of proof that Obama, Biden and Clinton, among others, were fueling the charges that his campaign had links to Russia ? what he calls ?the Russia hoax.? And he has pressured his secretary of state to agree to release more of Clinton?s emails before the election, reprising a yearslong fixation despite having defeated her four years ago.

Presidential historians say there is no case in modern times where the president has so plainly used his powers to take political opponents off the field ? or has been so eager to replicate the behavior of strongmen. ?In America, our presidents have generally avoided strongman balcony scenes ? that?s for other countries with authoritarian systems,? Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian, wrote on Twitter after Trump returned from the hospital where he received COVID-19 treatment and removed his mask, while still considered contagious, as he saluted from the White House balcony.

Long ago, White House officials learned how to avoid questions about whether the president views his powers as fundamentally more constrained than those of the authoritarians he so often casts in admiring terms, including Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. They have something in common: Trump?s State Department has criticized all three for corrupting the justice systems in their countries to pursue political enemies.

Pompeo has always bristled when reporters have asked him to explain what the world should believe when it reads Trump?s most authoritarian-sounding tweets. He answers that what distinguishes the United States is that it is a ?rule of law? nation, and then often turns the tables on his questioners, charging that even raising the issue reveals that the reporters are partisans, not journalists, intent on embarrassing Trump and the United States.

But his anger is often wielded as a shield, one that keeps him from publicly grappling with the underlying question: How can Washington take on other authoritarians around the world ? especially China, Pompeo?s nemesis ? for abusing state power when the president of the United States calls for political prosecutions and politically motivated declassifications?

?We?ve never seen anything like this in an American election campaign,? said R. Nicholas Burns, a former undersecretary of state who is now an informal adviser to Biden. ?It reduces our credibility ? we look like the countries we condemn for nondemocratic practices before an election.?

?I have worked for nine secretaries of state,? Burns said. ?I cannot imagine any of them intervening in an election as blatantly as what we are seeing now. Our tradition is that secretaries of state stay out of elections. If they wanted to release Hillary Clinton?s emails, they could have done it in 2017, 2018 or 2019. It is an abuse of power by Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.?

Another career diplomat who served as both ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary of state, William J. Burns, said that what Trump had ordered is ?exactly the kind of behavior I saw so often in authoritarian regimes in many years as an American diplomat.?

?In dealing with Putin?s Russia or Erdogan?s Turkey, we would have protested and condemned such actions,? he said. ?Now it?s our own government that?s engaging in them.

?The result,? said Burns, now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ?is the hollowing out of our institutions at home and deep corrosion of our image and influence abroad.?

In the current cases, it is unclear whether Trump will get his wish ? or whether his loyal appointees will slow-walk his requests. There is some evidence they are already looking for escape hatches.

Pompeo, the administration?s most conspicuous ideologue, Trump?s most vocal loyalist and a lawyer, was clearly taken aback when the president expressed displeasure, saying he was ?not happy? that the State Department had not released emails sent through Clinton?s home server.

?You?re running the State Department, you get them out,? the president told Fox Business in an interview this week. ?Forget about the fact that they were classified. Let?s go. Maybe Mike Pompeo finally finds them.?

Pompeo, one of his aides said Saturday, was in a box: The complaint about Clinton?s home server was that she was risking exposing classified emails by not using the State Department email system ? a system Russia had already infiltrated ? yet Trump was demanding that they be released in full. Just days before, he had announced, over Twitter, that he was using his executive power to declassify all of them, without redactions.

?We?ve got the emails,? Pompeo responded on Fox News. ?We?re getting them out. We?re going to get all this information out so the American people can see it.?

But he also hinted that many of Clinton?s emails, mostly those that were stored on the State Department?s own system, have already been posted on the agency?s website, after an unusually diligent effort by the department to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests from Trump?s supporters. (They are often heavily redacted ? to the point of containing no content ? despite the president?s order to the contrary.)

?We?re doing it as fast as we can,? Pompeo told Dana Perino, a Fox News anchor who once served as President Bush?s press secretary. ?I certainly think there?ll be more to see before the election.?

Pompeo clearly understands the problem: Even if he makes all of them public, they are unlikely to satisfy the president. Last year, the State Department?s own inspector general found that while Clinton had risked compromising classified information, she did not systematically or deliberately mishandle her emails.

William Barr may face an even greater challenge in satisfying the president. No attorney general since John Mitchell, who served Nixon and brought conspiracy charges against critics of the Vietnam War, bent the Justice Department more in a president?s direction. And Nixon himself, while urging the IRS to audit political opponents, stopped short of publicly calling for individual prosecutions. Yet in February, Barr told ABC News that Trump ?has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case.? At the same time, he complained that the president?s tweets about the Justice Department ?make it impossible for me to do my job.?

Now, clearly, the president has asked Barr to act in a criminal case ? and not in a quiet phone call. Instead, he did it on Twitter and Fox News, expressing his deep disappointment with his second attorney general, for essentially the same reason he fired his first one, Jeff Sessions: insufficient blind loyalty.

His complaint appears to have been driven by Barr?s warning to the White House and other officials that there are likely to be no indictments before the election from the investigation being run by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut. Durham is searching for evidence that the inquiry into Russia was a politically motivated effort to undercut his presidency.

Trump says the case is clear-cut. He told Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host to whom he gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the last State of the Union address, that Durham has had ?plenty of time to do it.?

?Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes ? the greatest political crime in the history of our country ? then we?ll get little satisfaction, unless I win,? Trump said on Fox Business.

?If we don?t win,? he said, ?that whole thing is going to be dismissed.?

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
 

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Trump attacks Fauci amid campaign ad feud

The infectious disease expert is featured prominently in an advertisement for the president?s reelection effort.

By QUINT FORGEY

10/13/2020 08:54 AM EDT

Updated: 10/13/2020 11:23 AM EDT

President Donald Trump attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday after the nation?s top infectious disease expert criticized the president?s reelection campaign for featuring him in a political advertisement.

In a tweet Tuesday morning, Trump wrote that ?Tony?s pitching arm is far more accurate than his prognostications,? referring to Fauci?s bungled first pitch on Major League Baseball?s Opening Day in July.

??No problem, no masks?. WHO no longer likes Lockdowns - just came out against,? the president added. ?Trump was right. We saved 2,000,000 USA lives!!!?

While it is true that administration officials did not endorse mask-wearing in the initial stage of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, the CDC began recommending the use of cloth masks when outside the home by early April.

Fauci acknowledged in June that the administration was slow to encourage the mitigation measure because of concerns among the public health community regarding a shortage of personal protective equipment in the U.S.

Trump?s mention of the World Health Organization appears to refer to a statement made last week by a Covid-19 special envoy for the United Nations agency, who urged countries against using lockdowns as the ?primary means of control of this virus.?

The U.S., however, implemented only a scattershot collection of lockdown orders earlier this year ? with Trump declining to issue a nationwide mandate and leaving it to local and state leaders to announce their own restrictions.

Fauci himself told CNN in an interview Monday that officials ?are not talking about shutting down? when advocating public health measures, saying: ?Let?s get that off the table.?

Trump did announce a ban on travel from China in January. But his travel restrictions came after the coronavirus had already begun rampaging across China, and they did not accompany broader federal efforts to prepare the U.S. for the coming pandemic.

Additionally, Trump?s travel ban included exemptions that reportedly allowed nearly 40,000 people to enter the U.S. on direct flights from China.

As for Trump?s assertion that he saved 2 million Americans, British researchers reported in March that the coronavirus could result in the deaths of as many of 2.2 million people in the U.S.

But that model predicted the death toll would only reach such heights if the U.S. took no action whatsoever to halt the disease?s spread, an unrealistic scenario.

Trump has repeatedly touted the earlier, more dire forecast of coronavirus deaths to argue his administration?s response has been a success.

Trump?s latest broadside against Fauci represents yet another effort by the White House to cast doubt on the credibility of one of the administration?s most trusted public health officials.

But the tweet from the president also seemingly undermines the 30-second ad his campaign released Saturday, which prominently features Fauci assessing Trump?s handling of the coronavirus.

?I can?t imagine that ? anybody could be doing more,? Fauci says in the ad ? a quote he claimed Sunday was included ?without my permission? and ?taken out of context? from a broader statement about the federal pandemic response.

The Trump campaign has defended its decision to feature Fauci in the ad, as has the president, who tweeted Sunday: ?They are indeed Dr. Fauci?s own words.?

Fauci has continued to express his displeasure with the ad this week, emphasizing Monday that he has never endorsed a political candidate during his more than three decades as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

?To take a completely out of context statement and put it in which is obviously a political campaign ad, I thought was really very disappointing,? he told CNN.

Trump?s feud with Fauci comes as the president?s reelection team is facing pushback for featuring his two highest-ranking Pentagon officials in another campaign ad online.

The ad uses an image of Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley ? seated together in the Situation Room while watching the raid on ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi last October ? to link to the campaign?s voter sign-up page.

The Trump campaign did not seek Milley?s approval to feature him in the ad, POLITICO reported Monday, and the military has strict rules against uniformed service members participating in political campaigns.
 

Old School

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....and there is always the possibility of Trump trying to explain his "Plan" for social reform along with his Health Care for EVERYONE and COVID pandemic "Plan''.

or he could just do nothing.
 

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Trump bashes NBC ahead of town hall, adds it's 'a free hour on television'
Brett Samuels 4 hrs ago

https://thehill.com/homenews/campai...n-hall-but-says-its-a-free-hour-on-television

President Trump on Thursday tore into NBC hours before appearing on the network for a town hall forum, preemptively complaining that he would be treated unfairly.

The president indicated he didn't mind agreeing to do the town hall because it amounted to "a free hour on television." But he previewed the event during a rally in North Carolina by swiping at moderator Savannah Guthrie and other network anchors.

"So you know, I?m being set up tonight, right. I?m doing this town hall with Con-cast," Trump said, mocking the name of NBC's parent company. "So I?m doing it and it?s NBC. The worst."

Trump mocked network anchor Lester Holt and political director Chuck Todd, while lamenting that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's town hall on the network earlier this month was "meant for children."

"And so they asked me if I'd do it, and I figured what the hell, we?ve got a free hour on television," Trump said.

"And we have Savannah Guthrie," he added. "She?s always lovely, isn?t she? But I figure why not."

The president's town hall in Florida will take place at the same time as Biden's town hall in Philadelphia, which is being broadcast on ABC. The dueling events are taking place in lieu of the second presidential debate, which had been scheduled for Thursday night in Miami.

The debate was scrapped after Trump refused to agree to a virtual setup. The Commission on Presidential Debates had announced the debate would be a virtual event after Trump tested positive for COVID-19.

Now, the two men will hold competing events. The overlap has drawn blowback from some NBC talent.

Trump has a long relationship with NBC, which aired "The Apprentice" for 14 seasons. The president has been interviewed by the network's anchors several times since announcing his first White House bid in 2016.

The decision to forgo a debate this week carries risks for Trump, who is trailing Biden in swing-state polls with less than three weeks until Election Day.

"They?re doing him on ABC," Trump said Thursday of Biden's event. "And actually I'd like to watch him because I?d like to see if he can make it through the program."
 

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AP FACT CHECK: Trump sees what others do not in the pandemic
By CALVIN WOODWARD and HOPE YEN, Associated Press 1 hr ago

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/poli...do-not-in-the-pandemic/ar-BB1a7KWK?li=BBnb7Kz

WASHINGTON (AP) ? ?I believe we?re rounding the corner." ?We?re a winner on the excess mortality.? ?We have the vaccines coming and we have the therapies coming.? ?We have done an amazing job.?

President Donald Trump sees in the pandemic what he wants to see. He seemed to acknowledge as much when he was challenged on stage a few days ago for repeatedly and thoroughly misrepresenting a study about masks.

No, the study did not find that most people who wear masks get COVID-19. Most people don't. But, ?that?s what I heard and that?s what I saw, and ? regardless....?

Regard for the facts is not a hallmark of Trump's campaign for the Nov. 3 election or of his presidency.

His assurance, heard for weeks, that the U.S. is rounding the corner on the coronavirus is belied by rising infection in the vast majority of states and higher deaths in 30 by week's end, as well as by a surge in Europe. This as the flu season approaches, another layer of risk to health.

As for Trump's claim that he's done an amazing job on the pandemic, that's part of a record in office that voters are judging now and until polls close for the Nov. 3 election. He and Democratic rival Joe Biden bid for late advantage in competing forums that replaced a canceled presidential debate.

Meantime, the Senate vetted Judge Amy Coney Barrett's nomination for the Supreme Court with committee hearings that often seemed to put the Affordable Care Act, also known as ?Obamacare,? on trial.

Some statements from the past week and how they compare with the facts:

THE VIRUS

TRUMP, asked about the many attendees at a White House event who got sick with COVID-19: ?Just the other day they came out with a statement that 85% of the people that wear masks catch it.? ? NBC forum in Miami on Thursday.

NBC'S SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: ?Well, they didn?t say that, I know that study.?

TRUMP: ?Well that's what I heard and that?s what I saw, and -- regardless, but everybody?s tested and they?re tested often.?

THE FACTS: That was at least the third time the same day that he flatly misstated the findings of a federal study and the first time he was called out on it. The study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not find that 85% of mask wearers catch COVID-19. If that were so, the majority of Americans would be infected.

It found something quite different: that 85% of a small group of COVID-19 patients surveyed reported they had worn a mask often or always around the time they would have become infected. Dining in restaurants, where masks are set aside for meals, was one activity suspected of spreading community infection. The study not declare masks ineffective.

Trump told a North Carolina rally earlier in the day: ?Did you see CDC? That 85% of the people wearing a mask catch it, OK?? And to Fox Business News: ?CDC comes out with a statement that 85% of the people wearing masks catch it.?

TRUMP: ?We?re a winner on the excess mortality.? ? Miami forum.

THE FACTS: That marker of mass death is a problematic bragging point.

Excess mortality estimates take a look at how many more people are dying than usual. The estimates help to illustrate that the death toll attributed to COVID-19 understates how many are actually dying from the disease.

As many as 215,000 more people than usual died in the U.S. during the first seven months of the year, suggesting that the number of lives lost to the coronavirus was significantly higher than the official toll, which was then about 150,000. More than half the dead in the excess mortality count were people of color, a higher proportion than their share of the population, according to an analysis by The Associated Press and the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the criminal justice system.

Exactly how many of the abnormally high deaths were from the virus cannot be known, and international comparisons cannot be made with precision.

But the findings don't make the U.S. a ?winner.?

SUPREME COURT

JOE BIDEN: ?This nominee said she wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.? ? remarks to reporters Monday.

BIDEN: ?Why do Republicans have time to hold a hearing on the Supreme Court? ... It?s about finally getting his (Trump?s) wish to wipe out the affordable health care act because their nominee has said in the past that the law should be struck down.? ? to supporters in Ohio on Monday.

THE FACTS: No, Barrett has not said explicitly that she would strike down the health law. Biden may ultimately be right that if she joins the court, she would vote to eliminate the law, but there are also reasons to believe she might not.

Biden is alluding to a 2017 commentary Barrett wrote that included a critique of the Supreme Court?s 2012 ruling upholding parts of the law. Barrett was a University of Notre Dame law professor at the time.

In her critique, she specifically took issue with Chief Justice John Roberts? reasoning that the penalty attached to one part of the law ? the mandate that everyone get health coverage ? be considered a tax and therefore within the powers of Congress to enforce. She said he stretched the law ?beyond its plausible meaning? to uphold it in the 5-4 vote.

That?s not necessarily the same as her wanting to trash the entire law. It?s difficult to take what a prospective jurist wrote about a complex law and use it to state as fact how she might rule years later when some circumstances have changed. But Biden and other Democrats didn't hesitate to do so.

All that is certain is that Barrett criticized how her potential colleagues on the high court ruled on the law eight years ago.

FROM NORTH CAROLINA

TRUMP, reacting to news that several people associated with the Biden campaign on a recent flight with Biden's running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, tested positive for COVID-19: ?We extend our best wishes, which is more than they did to me, but that?s OK.? ? North Carolina rally Thursday.

THE FACTS: That?s false.

Hours after Trump?s early morning announcement on Oct. 2 that he had tested positive, both Biden and Harris sent their wishes for a quick recovery via Twitter.

?Jill and I send our thoughts to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump for a swift recovery,? Biden wrote. ?We will continue to pray for the health and safety of the president and his family.?

Harris tweeted a similar message ?wishing President Trump and the First Lady a full and speedy recovery. We?re keeping them and the entire Trump family in our thoughts.?

The Biden campaign at the time also said it would stop running negative ads, with the candidate tweeting that ?this cannot be a partisan moment? when Trump was going to a hospital for treatment of his coronavirus infection. Biden?s camp resumed the advertising after Trump was released.
 

Old School

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GOP v. ?OBAMACARE?

SEN. TED CRUZ: ?'Obamacare' has doubled the profits of the big health insurance companies, doubled them. ?Obamacare? has been great corporate welfare for giant health insurance companies at the same time, according to the Kaiser foundation, premiums ? average families? premiums ? have risen more than ? have risen $7,967 per year on average. That is catastrophic that millions of Americans can?t afford health care. It is a catastrophic failure of ?Obamacare.?? ? Barrett nomination hearing Wednesday.

THE FACTS: No, family premiums for health insurance have not risen by $7,967 per year, as Cruz asserted. Nowhere close.

That figure comes from the Kaiser Family Foundation but it captures the increase over 11 years ? 2009 to 2020 ? not per year, as the Republican senator from Texas put it. In addition, the figure applies to the cost of premiums for employer-provided coverage, not for ?Obamacare? or for health insurance overall.

Kaiser?s Larry Levitt says the cost of employer coverage wasn?t much affected by the health law and ?the increase in premiums is largely due to changes in underlying health care costs over this period.?

The law's premiums for a standard ?silver? individual plan purchased by a hypothetical 40-year-old went up from an average of $273 a month nationally in 2014, to $462 this year.

Levitt said there?s not a clear equivalent for a family premium in the health law's marketplaces; what a family pays is the sum of each member?s individual premiums.

Cruz?s take on insurer profits also missed the mark. Some major insurers lost money for a time selling ?Obamacare? coverage, and several companies exited the health law?s markets. The law actually has a provision that in effect limits insurer profits.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM: ?Under the Affordable Care Act, three states get 35% of the money, folks. Can you name them? I?ll help you, California, New York and Massachusetts. They?re 22% of the population. ... Now, why did they get 35% of the money when they are only 22% of the population?" ? Barrett confirmation hearing Tuesday.

THE FACTS: The South Carolina senator's suggestion that Democrats designed the health law to benefit Democratic states is misleading.

Big states with higher premiums and more enrollment in the health insurance marketplaces get more federal money. But that?s driven by differences in premiums between states and by the number of people who sign up for taxpayer-subsidized coverage.

Moreover, some states such as South Carolina get much less federal money under the health law because they chose not to expand Medicaid, where the federal government picks up 90% of the cost.

THE UNDEBATE

ECONOMY

TRUMP: ?We had the greatest economy in the history of our country.? ? Miami forum.

THE FACTS: The numbers show it wasn?t the greatest in U.S. history.

Did the U.S. have the most jobs on record before the pandemic? Sure, the population had grown. The 3.5% unemployment rate before the recession was at a half-century low, but the percentage of people working or searching for jobs was still below a 2000 peak.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer looked at Trump?s economic growth record this month. Growth under Trump averaged 2.48% annually before the pandemic, only slightly better than the 2.41% gains achieved during Barack Obama?s second term. By contrast, the economic expansion that began in 1982 during Ronald Reagan?s presidency averaged 4.2% a year.

So Trump is wrong.

CRIME

BIDEN: ?The crime bill itself did not have mandatory sentences, except for two things, it had three strikes and you?re out, which I voted against in the crime bill.? ? ABC forum in Philadelphia on Thursday.

THE FACTS: That?s misleading. Biden is understating the impact of the Clinton-era bill and the influence he brought to bear in getting it passed into law.

Biden wrote and voted for that sweeping 1994 crime bill, which included money for more prisons, expanded the use of the federal death penalty and called for a mandatory life sentence for three-time violent offenders ? the so-called three strikes provision.

He did call the three-strikes rule ?wacko? at one point, even as he was helping to write the bill. Whatever his reservations about certain provisions, he ultimately voted for the legislation, which included the three-strikes rule and has come to be seen in the Black Lives Matter era as a heavy-handed and discriminatory tool of the justice system.

ELECTION FRAUD

TRUMP: ?When I see thousands of ballots dumped in a garbage can and they happen to have my name on it? I?m not happy about it.? ? Miami forum.

THE FACTS: Nobody has seen that. Contrary to Trump?s repeated, baseless attacks on voting security, voting and election fraud is vanishingly rare. No cases involving thousands of ballots dumped in the trash have been reported in this election.

Trump has cited a case of military ballots marked for him being thrown in the trash in Pennsylvania as evidence of a possible plot to steal the election. But he leaves out the details: County election officials say that the seven ballots, along with two unopened ones, were accidentally tossed in an elections office in a Republican-controlled county by a single contract worker and that authorities were swiftly called.

The Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 ranked the risk of ballot fraud at 0.00004% to 0.0009%, based on studies of past elections.

In the five states that regularly send ballots to all voters, there have been no major cases of fraud or difficulty counting the votes.

TRUMP: ?We have the vaccines coming and we have the therapies coming.? ?Miami forum.

THE FACTS: That's the expectation, but not a certainty. The intense effort to develop vaccines and treatments has had both advances and setbacks.

Despite Trump?s repeated promises of an imminent vaccine, scientists say it's unlikely that data showing a leading shot actually works would come before the election. Promising therapies are being tried.

A new study led by the World Health Organization suggests that the antiviral drug remdesivir ? among the drugs given to Trump ? did not help hospitalized COVID-19 patients. But that's not the final word on a medicine that became the standard of care in many countries after a U.S. study found it sped recovery.

FROM PENNSYLVANIA

FRACKING

TRUMP: ?One of the most important issues for Pennsylvania is the survival of your fracking industry. Joe Biden has repeatedly pledged to abolish fracking. He?s a liar. He?s a liar.? ? remarks Tuesday at a rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

THE FACTS: That?s false. Biden has repeatedly pledged not to abolish fracking. None of that has dissuaded the president from wholly distorting Biden?s position.

At one of the Democratic primary debates, Biden misspoke when he addressed the subject, saying that if he became president, there would be ?no more ? no new ? fracking.? Biden?s campaign quickly corrected his mistake.

Biden?s actual position is that he would ban new gas and oil permits, including for fracking, on federal lands only. The vast majority of oil and gas does not come from federal lands.

He?s hewed closely to that middle-of-the-road position, going so far as to tell an anti-fracking activist that he ?ought to vote for somebody else? if he was in a hurry to see fracking abolished.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, opened up a years long oil and gas boom in parts of the Southwest, High Plains and Northeast, including battleground Pennsylvania. The technique went into widespread use during the Obama-Biden administration.

Some liberal Democrats wish Biden were taking a tougher line against fracking now. But he isn?t.

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION

TRUMP: ?The World Health Organization just admitted that I was right. Lockdowns are killing countries all over the world. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself. Open up your states, Democrat governors. Open up New York. A long battle, but they finally did the right thing!? ? tweet Monday.

WHITE HOUSE: ?Over the weekend, the World Health Organization officially changed their policy and strongly stated that prolonged lockdowns must end because of their significant harms.? ? White House official in call Monday with reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.

THE FACTS: They?re twisting words out of context. The WHO has not shifted its position that national stay-at-home orders or ?lockdowns? should be considered a measure of last resort to contain the virus. Nor did it ever declare that Trump ?was right? on his COVID-19 response.

Trump appeared to be referring to comments made last week by Dr. David Nabarro, one of six special envoys to the WHO on COVID-19. He told the British magazine The Spectator that lockdowns should be considered as just one measure among many to control the virus, with an aim to give countries ?breathing space? to roll out other, better anti-COVID measures.

?We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,? Nabarro said. He added that lockdowns can only be justified ?to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted. But by and large, we?d rather not do it.?

Since declaring the coronavirus a pandemic in March, the WHO has said that if countries decide to go into lockdown, it should be considered temporary and they should use the time to implement measures such as testing, tracing, informing local populations and promoting physical distancing.

The United Nations body has been inconsistent at times with its recommendations, such as mask wearing that it first opposed for the general public. It has also lagged governments in pushing border closings. But on ?stay at home? lockdown measures, it hasn?t changed.

Associated Press writers Amanda Seitz, David Klepper, Jude Joffe-Block, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Bill Barrow, Josh Boak, Darlene Superville, Kevin Freking and Jamey Keaten contributed to this report.


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