US Election 2020: Donald Trump starts five-rally day in icy Michigan

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President Donald Trump kicked off his five-rally day in snowy Michigan where it was so cold he joked people should wear face masks.’Today you should wear them anyway,’ Trump said his remarks. 

The president has been reluctant to wear a face covering and his campaign said supporters are free to wear them or not at events.

But several people in Michigan had their face covered with either a scarf or a face mask – including many red ‘MAGA’ ones. The weather was 41 degrees with an even colder wind chill of 26 degrees. 

Snow flakes fell as the president spoke under the cover of a roof. Supporters wrapped themselves in blankets and hopped up and down to keep warm.

‘This is a hell of a day. You guys must love Trump,’ the president said in one of his many references to the blustery day. 

‘That wind is coming right into my face,’ he said as the cold wind blew through the muddy field where he spoke.As the crowd shouted ‘we love you,’ he replied back: ‘I love you too. If I didn’t it wouldn’t be standing here because it’s freezing.’

Ivanka Trump introduced her father, comparing him to Winston Churchill in her short remarks. ‘Winston Churchill said, ‘It was the nation that had the lion’s heart, I just had the luck to give it the roar,’ she said. 

‘How much does this remind you of our president and this movement?’He gave us roar,’ she added. 

The president joked about how short a time she spoke for.

‘We had the luck of having Ivanka here and I’ll tell you it’s the shortest introduction she’s ever given me and now I understand why,’ he said in reference to the weather.

Trump turned most of the sections into his speech into a commentary on the weather – even when he was criticizing his Democratic rivals’ immigration policy.

‘They want to allow virtually unlimited immigration to our country and unlimited access to our country,’ he said of the Biden/Harris ticket.He then joked it was so cold refugees wouldn’t want to come. 

‘It’s freezing up here. I want to go back to Syria,’ he said, roaring with laughter at his own joke.

The president also spent much of his remarks bragging about his economic record.

‘I gave you a lot of auto plants,’ he told the crowd. ‘The auto business is coming back.’

In fact there has been one major assembly plant announced, by Fiat Chrysler in Detroit, which will open next year, and two smaller facilities which will employ under 450 people each. 

He warned with Joe Biden as president: ‘You will have a depression.’ He warned of higher gas prices and higher taxes.

‘Under my leadership our economy is now growing at the fastest rate ever recorded,’ Trump claimed even as the economy struggles to recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

But his thoughts always returned to the weather. ‘This is a true testament. I love the people of Michigan. It’s worth it. It’s worth it,’ he said. 

Before his final campaign swing started – two days, seven states, 10 – rallies, Trump had a special message for Michigan, which is his first stop of the day.

He touted his economic record there after Barack Obama trashed him during campaign stops for Biden in Flint and Detroit on Saturday.

‘When I originally became your all time favorite President, the Great State of Michigan was hemorrhaging car companies and jobs. Plants were closing and moving to Mexico, and other places. No new plants for decades. I stopped the moves, & now many plants are and have been built,’ Trump wrote on Twitter Sunday morning before he left Washington D.C. 

‘The place was a mess and would have lost much more business if I hadn’t come along. Many new plants are starting. Foreign countries and companies now treat the USA, and Michigan, with respect. Big jobs plans. Please remember this when you go to cast your very important vote!,’ he added.   

In a blistering denouncement of his successor on Saturday, Obama criticized Trump’s job record to Michigan voters during a stop in the critical battleground state. 

He pointed out he and Biden fought for the auto industry – which is huge in Michigan – during the economic recession. He said Trump has lost manufacturing jobs.

‘The economic damage inflicted by botching the pandemic response means he’ll be the only president since Herbert Hoover, to actually lose jobs,’ Obama said of Trump. ‘Herbert Hoover. That’s a long time ago.’

Biden leads by seven points in Michigan according to the RealClearPolitics average of polls in the state. Trump was in Michigan on Friday while Biden was there with Obama on Saturday. 

Trump will end his presidential campaign with a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Monday night – the same place he ended his successful 2016 run.

Early voting has begun in the state and more than 2.5 million have already cast their ballot, according to the Election Project, which tracks early voting.

The president is fighting hard to win the state and not afraid to butt heads with his political opposition.

He attacked the former Republican governor of Michigan, Rick Snyder, in a tweet late last week after Snyder said he voted for Biden.

‘Failed RINO former Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan was a disaster with respect to the Flint Water CATASTROPHE, and a very bad Governor overall. He hurt so many people with his gross incompetence,’ Trump wrote Thursday evening.

On Saturday, when Obama and Biden were campaigning in the state and criticizing Trump’s record, the president blamed them for the situation in Flint.

He tweeted angrily from Air Force One, saying the notorious water contamination happened ‘on their watch.’ 

In fact the lead poisoning happened when an emergency city manager appointed by Snyder switched the city’s water supply to water from Lake Huron, introducing lead into the supply at dangerous levels. 

Snyder apologized repeatedly for the crisis. 

The president has also battled with the current governor – Democrat Gretchen Whitmer – over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, new COVID cases and deaths are on the rise in Michigan.

On Saturday, Michigan’s 7-day moving average for daily cases was 2,879 – the highest it has ever been. Also on Saturday, Michigan reported a single-day record of new confirmed coronavirus cases: 3,792.

Trump will spend Sunday in Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. He’ll sleep at his golf club in Doral before Monday’s swing to North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Biden will spend Sunday and Monday in Pennsylvania. Trump held four rallies in that state on Saturday. He’ll have daughters Ivanka and Tiffany there on Sunday. 

Both campaigns are spending most of the final few days of the campaign in the Midwest. 

Trump will begin Sunday in Washington, Michigan, where is trying to replicate his 2016 win when the states there put him in the White House. 

Democrats are trying to rebuild their ‘blue wall’ – a set of Midwest states that were reliably in their corner until Trump won them four years ago.

The Trump victory there left the party shocked and stunned – a situation they do not want to revisit this year.  

Those states include Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Trump won them by a point or two, leaving Democrats hopeful that Biden – long a champion of the blue-collar worker – can win them back.  

Biden brought former President Barack Obama to him in Michigan on Saturday where the two made their first joint campaign appearance together with rallies in Flint and Detroit. 

‘Guess what Mr President, I’m coming for you,’ Biden said to cheers from the crowd in Detroit.

Obama made it clear what was at stake on November 3.

‘Three days Detroit. Three days until the most important election of our lifetimes,’ he said. ‘And that includes mine, which was pretty important.’  

Trump will be back in Michigan for two rallies on Monday. Ivanka Trump will also campaign there on Monday.

After his Michigan stop on Sunday, Trump moves to Iowa – a state he won by 10 points in 2016 and wants to keep in his corner.

From there he’ll bounce to Hickory, North Carolina, before moving down to Rome, Georgia and ending the night in Miami. 

Trump’s niece Mary warns of ‘authoritarian state’ if ‘vile’ President is reelected

Mary Trump warned Sunday that if her uncle, President Donald Trump – who she called ‘vile’ – is reelected on Tuesday, the U.S. could be at risk of becoming an ‘authoritarian state.’

According to a ‘panel of experts’ the president’s niece said she put together last week, ‘The message is… Donald has [apparently] done everything in his power to dismantle every institution that comprises the U.S.’

‘We’re looking at an authoritarian state if we allow him to continue unimpeded,’ she told MSNBC’s Joy Reid during an interview on ‘AM Joy’ Sunday morning.

At the same time Mary joined Reid for an interview Sunday, just two days before Election Day, Trump was arriving at his first of five rallies on Sunday in snowy Michigan.

‘As if my blood pressure weren’t high enough,’ Mary said. ‘He is vile. He is actively calling on American citizens to commit violence against other American citizens simply for voicing their opinions.’

‘This is so dangerous,’ she added. ‘He is doing the same thing with his armed supporters to go watch the polls. And we know which neighborhoods he’s sending these people to. So, it can’t be clearer what he is doing. Please understand that he will allow violence to be committed in his name in order to take this election because he knows he can’t win it legitimately.’

Trump has called on his supporters to survey polling locations as he warns Democrats are trying to steal the election.

White House slams Dr. Fauci for ‘playing politics’ after he said he has ‘real problems’ with Trump’s favored Dr. Atlas who ‘doesn’t know what he is talking about’ – and warning the nation is ‘in for a whole lot of hurt’

The White House is said to be irked by the country’s leading infectious-disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci having given a wide-ranging interview in which he ‘appears to play politics’ on the coronavirus outbreak just days before the general election.

Despite having not been part of any recent White House press conferences on the pandemic for many months nor having spoken to President Trump directly since the start of October, the doctor has laid bare his frustrations with how the current administration is dealing with the disease. 

The president now favors hearing from a doctor with a different point of view – Dr. Scott Atlas. 

‘We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation,’ Fauci said. ‘All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.’ 

Fauci noted in the interview with the Washington Post that Joe Biden’s campaign ‘is taking it seriously from a public health perspective’, whereas Trump is ‘looking at it from a different perspective. Namely that of the economy and reopening the country.’ 

President Trump has repeated asserted that the country is ’rounding the turn’ on the virus but Fauci disagrees saying the country may soon surpass 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day in what is likely to be a long and potentially deadly winter.

On Friday, 98,000 new infections were recorded across the country with 1,000 deaths a day reported on both Wednesday and Thursday. More than 230,000 have died since the start of the pandemic

Infections are currently climbing in 42 states while the president is spending the closing days of his re-election campaign criticizing public officials and medical professionals who are trying to beat it back.

Trump falsely said doctors earn more money when their patients die of the disease, building on his past criticism of medical experts such as Fauci. 

At one point, Dr. Fauci was the face of the coronavirus response task force team who would host daily briefings on the outbreak.

He has since described the response as cases surge as ‘disjointed’, with the White House solely focussed on getting a vaccine as quickly as possible, despite it not necessarily being the ‘silver bullet’ that completely ends the pandemic.

Fauci revealed to the Post the coronavirus task force meets far less frequently now and has a more limited influence on the president’s decisions as he becomes more focused on reopening the country. 

‘Right now, the public health aspect of the task force has diminished greatly,’ he said. 

At one point during the Post interview, Fauci checked himself and said that he needed to exercise caution in how he was speaking else he could be blocked conducting interviews in the future.  

‘The last time I spoke to the president was not about any policy; it was when he was recovering in Walter Reed, he called me up,’ Fauci said while revealing that the president has a new favorite – Scott Atlas.  

Atlas, a neuroradiologist, is now Trump’s favored adviser on the pandemic because he offered guidance that more closely align with Trump’s own views which is to reopen the country and let the virus spread among young healthy people.

It is not something that Fauci can agree on.

‘I have real problems with that guy,’ Fauci said. ‘He’s a smart guy who’s talking about things that I believe he doesn’t have any real insight or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn’t make any sense.’

There is clearly no love lost between Fauci and Atlas either. On Saturday night Atlas posted a tweet mocking Fauci taking aim at him for giving an interview to the Post.

‘#Insecurity #EmbarrassingHimself #Exposed #CantThrowABall #NoTimeForPolitics,’ he tweeted.

Fauci noted that he has a lot of respect for chief of staff Mark Meadows who was direct and forthright in his answers who said on CNN last weekend that the administration was not going to control the pandemic. 

‘I tip my hat to him for admitting the strategy,’ he said. ‘He is straightforward in telling you what’s on his mind. I commend him for that.’ 

White House spokesman Judd Deere did not take kindly to any of Fauci’s remarks to the Post. 

‘Fauci ‘knows the risks from the coronavirus today are dramatically lower than they were only a few months ago,’ Deere said.

‘It’s unacceptable and breaking with all norms for Dr. Fauci, a senior member of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force and someone who has praised President Trump’s actions throughout this pandemic, to choose three days before an election to play politics,’ he continued. 

‘As a member of the Task Force, Dr. Fauci has a duty to express concerns or push for a change in strategy, but he’s not done that, instead choosing to criticize the President in the media and make his political leanings known by praising the President’s opponent — exactly what the American people have come to expect from The Swamp.’

The president has recently taken to mocking Fauci and at a recent rally essentially called him an idiot.

‘People are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots, all these idiots who got it wrong,’ Trump said as he recounted how the doctor one said face masks were not necessary before flipping on the issue. 

Nevertheless, the White House does not seem to want to make any spat with Fauci public given his overall popularity. 

However, the doctor is not revered among Trump supporters and Fauci has also told how he has experienced a rise in harassment and threats from members of the public. 

A low point between Fauci and Trump was reached last month after the Trump campaign appeared to take the doctor’s works out of context for a political advert that appeared to show him praising the president’s response to the pandemic. 

The Trump campaign used his image without his permission and twisted his words to make it seem like he was endorsing the president. 

‘Together we rose to meet the challenge, protecting our seniors, getting them life-saving drugs in record time, sparing no expense. President Trump tackled the virus head on, as leaders should.’ Fauci is then shown saying: ‘I can’t imagine that anybody could be doing more,’ creating the impression he is referring to Trump.  

Fauci said his words were taken out of context from a statement he made in March.  

‘In my nearly five decades of public service, I have never publicly endorsed any political candidate,’ he said in a statement.

‘The comments attributed to me without my permission in the GOP campaign ad were taken out of context from a broad statement I made months ago about the efforts of federal public health officials.’  

The 79-year-old doctor has frequently had to walk a fine line in attempting to clarify – or correct – the president’s often incautious assertions about the disease or the treatments and vaccines being developed against Covid-19.

Fauci has at times aroused Trump’s ire, as when the president in April retweeted a message containing the hashtag #FireFauci – before publicly insisting the doctor was doing a great job.     

Overall, the anonymous sources have told the Post that the White House is essentially overwhelmed by the pandemic and feel completely helpless as they wrestle with the complete inability to curb its spread while also attempting see the economy bounce back, all the while promoting the president’s re-election.  

‘We need to plan now for how we turn the corner in 2021, and one thing we should be doing is laying the foundation to get public schools reopened in the late winter or early spring,’ said Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Scott Gottlieb. ‘If we don’t plan now, we’ll lose the opportunity to prioritize opening what should be most important to us, just as we lost that chance in the fall because we didn’t plan appropriately this summer.’   

Fauci’s warnings on how the virus will proceed have been blunt despite Trump continuing to hold maskless rallies and insisting that life is returning to normal.

Trump told reporters he was not concerned that supporters who flock to his events might contract the virus, even though he, his family and many White House staffers have battled the disease in recent weeks.

The president criticized Democratic officials in Minnesota for enforcing social-distancing rules that limited his rally to 250 people. ‘It’s a small thing, but a horrible thing,’ he said. 

No longer speaking to the president daily, Fauci believes it is his duty to conduct as many interviews as possible with local media in cities across the nation. 

‘The thing we can do is to try to get the message out,’ Fauci said.  

‘All of a sudden, they didn’t like what the message was because it wasn’t what they wanted to do anymore,’ Fauci explains. ‘They needed to have a medical message that was essentially consistent with what they were saying.

‘And one of the ways to say the outbreak is over is to say it’s really irrelevant because it doesn’t make any difference. All you need to do is prevent people from dying and protect people in places like the nursing homes. The only medical person who sees the president on a regular basis is Scott Atlas.’   

‘He insists he’s not somebody who’s pushing for herd immunity,’ Fauci says of Atlas. ‘He says, ‘That’s not what I mean.’ [But] everything he says — when you put them together and stitch them together — everything is geared toward the concept of “it doesn’t make any difference if people get infected. It’s a waste of time. Masks don’t work. Who cares,” and the only thing you need to do is protect the vulnerable, like people in the nursing homes,’ Fauci said.

Fauci said that one major concern is that many who contract the virus often suffer from long term health problems.

‘The idea of this false narrative that if you don’t die, everything is hunky dory is just not the case,’ he said. ‘But to say, “Let people get infected, it doesn’t matter, just make sure people don’t die” — to me as a person who’s been practicing medicine for 50 years, it doesn’t make any sense at all.’ 

‘Even though we’re getting challenged with more cases, the medical system is much better prepared to take care of seriously ill people, so that’s the reason why I think the surge of cases is going to be counterbalanced by better experience,’ Fauci said to the Post.

Fauci expressed concern over the possible surge that is likely to come this winter that not all areas of the country will be able to handle – especially in Midwestern and Western states who have a limited number of intensive care beds and nurses. 

‘It’s much more about some of the states like Utah, Nevada, South Dakota, North Dakota, where … they never had a pretty good reserve of intensive care beds and things like that. I hope they’ll be okay, but it’s still a risk that, as you get more surging, they’re going to run out of capacity,’ Fauci said.