Kamala Harris and Joe Biden made their first campaign appearance as running mates. Each noted that they had first connected through Biden’s late son Beau — who was a close friend of Harris. After commemorating the historic moment — Harris is the first woman of color to be nominated vice president by a major party — the Democrats vying for the White House tore down Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. “This is what happens when we elect a guy who just isn’t up for the job,” Harris said. “Our country ends in tatters and so does our reputation around the world.”
Trump, at his daily coronavirus update, took to baselessly attacking mail-in voting and stoking racist fears about desegregating the suburbs. The president also repeated false and misleading assertions about the coronavirus pandemic and introduced adviser DrScott Atlas,who has promoted unscientific views on the pandemic and the US response that align with those held by Trump.
Trump campaign said that Harris “completes the radical, leftist takeover of Joe Biden and the entire Democrat party”. But the attack doesn’t quite land on Harris — a policy moderate whose background as prosector has drawn criticism from progressives.
Asked what he meant when he said that a Biden victory in November would lead “invasion” in the suburbs, Trump pitched implicitly racist housing policies in explicitly racist terms.
Biden and Harris are “going to destroy suburbia”, Trump said. “And 30% plus of the people in suburbia are minorities. African American, Asian American, Hispanic American – they’re minorities – 30%. The number is even higher, they say 35% but I like to cut it a little bit lower.”
“You want something where people can aspire to be there, not something where it gets hurt badly” with low-income housing, the president said.
Trump has been playing up racist fears that more people of color in the suburbs will lead to increases in crime and lower housing values that gave rise to the redlining that persists today.
Last month, he tweeted that as a result of his administration’s decision to roll back an Obama-era program to address racial segregation in suburban housing, “people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream” would “no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low-income housing built in your neighborhood”.
Criticizing Democratic governors for maintaining pandemic restrictions, Trump said they are forcing Americans to stay in their homes, which he described as “prisons.”
“In their prisons! They call ‘em prisons,” Trump said.
Inside actual prisons, coronavirus outbreaks have killed thousands, as my colleague Sam Levin reports:
At this news conference, Trump introduced Dr Scott Atlas, and invited him to speak.
Atlas, a healthcare policy expert at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University has promoted unscientific views about coronavirus. My colleague Oliver Milman reported earlier:
Atlas appears to be more in tune with Trump’s thinking on the virus after the president publicly criticized both of his top pandemic officials, Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, over concerns they raised about the disastrous spread of Covid-19 in the US and the danger of allowing students to return to school.
In June, Atlas said the idea that schools could not reopen after the summer break was “hysteria” and “ludicrous”. The new White House adviser has also called for college football to resume – a favored move by conservatives – despite a surge in virus cases in many states.
“The environment of college sports is very sophisticated, it is controlled, there is accountability. The athletes couldn’t get a better and safer environment,” Atlas told Fox News earlier this week.
“Young people that age, without a co-morbidity, have virtually a zero risk from this. The risk is less than seasonal influenza. There is such fear in the community, and unfortunately it’s been propagated by people doing sloppy thinking and sensationalistic media reporting.”
Atlas, who has an MD degree from the University of Chicago School of Medicine, has previously provided healthcare policy advice to various businesses and presidential candidates, including Trump ally Rudy Giuliani. He has taken his services abroad, too, advising the World Bank and academics in China.
Dr Deborah Birx and Dr Anthony Fauci — nominally the public health experts in charge of the country’s coronavirus response — have been absent from the president’s briefings.
The supporters who came to catch a glimpse of Biden and Harris today
Lauren Gambino
Despite a thunderstorm, dozens of supporters arrived at the high school hoping to glimpse the new presidential ticket. Most lived in Delaware and were longtime supporters of the Bidens. Two women sat in lawn chairs holding a sign that said “Delaware loves Biden-Harris”. Some wore Black Lives Matter T-shirts while others wore the signature green and pink of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, which Harris joined as a college student at Howard University in Washington DC.
Dina Griffin, who wore a pink dress with a matching blazer and a pin that said “VOTE”, said she had hoped Biden would choose Harris but seeing an image of them together for the first time after the announcement brought “tears of joy”.
“A lot of people have lost hope and are feeling upset and depressed about the way this country has gone in the last few years,” said Griffin. “So this moment is just a renewed spark and hope that we can come together to heal our divisions.”
Like Clark Benjamin, a retired educator and Delaware resident, most who turned out on Wednesday had already voted for Biden many times over as senator and then as the vice-president – and planned to do so again in 2020. Though Biden already had her vote, Benjamin said choosing Harris added energy and dynamism to the Democratic ticket.
“It’s historic,” she said, explaining why she chose to spend her afternoon outside in the summer humidity. “That’s why I had to be here.”
But the choice, some said, also revealed something new about the candidate.
“It showed that he was listening to the people who are speaking up around the world and asking for equity, justice and fairness,” said Debbie Harrington, another member of the AKA sorority, referring to the nationwide anti-racism protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May.
“His pick said: I hear you. And not only did I hear you, I understand you and I’m going to do something about it.”
In response to the wave of protests this spring against racism and police brutality, Harris emerged as a prominent voice on issues of racial justice. Her advocacy in favor of criminal justice legislation has eased some concerns among progressives over her record.
They delivered the speech on the third anniversary of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, an event that Biden said was, for him, a “call to action”.
“On the assumption I win, we’re going to be terminating the payroll tax,” Trump said.
Both Democrats and Republicans have opposed cuts to payroll tax – which finances social security. His executive order proposing a payroll tax suspension delays the collection of tax, but only Congress can eliminate taxes altogether.
The US Chamber of Commerce, which has usually backed White House efforts to cut federal regulations and taxes in favor of businesses, said in a letter to the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, that the payroll tax suspension is “surrounded by uncertainty as to its application and implementation” and “ exacerbates the challenges” for companies.
“I want to make it unmistakably clear that I am protecting people from evictions,” Trump said. He is not.
Fact check: Trump’s executive order does not reinstate eviction moratoriums, or provide financial aid to Americans struggling to make rent amid the economic crisis.
“They should do that race over,” Trump said of the election that delivered Democratic representative Carolyn Maloney victory in New York, baselessly alleging “ballot frauds”.
The president’s misinformation about mail-in voting and his questioning of election results that favor Democrats could be a preview of what’s to come in November. “It will be the greatest rigged election in history,” Trump said. “This will be one of the greatest frauds in history.”
Trump is saying that Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are “holding the American people hostage” over “their radical leftwing agenda”.
In fact, Pelosi and Schumer compromised in their ask for a coronavirus relief package, but the Trump administration abandoned negotiations and instead sought to legislate through executive orders.
Taking issue with Democrats’ ask for more funding to bolster voting systems ahead of the elections, the president also launched into his usual lies about mail-in voting, falsely claiming that the system is marred by “fraud and corruption”.
Yesterday, I wrote a bit more about Harris’ friendship Beau Biden, which both Harris and Joe Biden discussed moments ago.
In her memoir, Harris called Beau an “incredible friend and colleague” who became a close collaborator. “There were periods, when I was taking heat, that Beau and I talked every day, sometimes multiple times a day,” she wrote. “We had each other’s backs.”
After Beau’s death, Harris said at the 2016 California Democratic convention that the Biden family “truly represents our nation’s highest ideals, a powerful belief in the nobility of public service”. Joe Biden, she said, “has given so much to our country and on top of everything he has accomplished, he gave to us my dear friend Beau.”
The elder Biden endorsed Harris’s Senate campaign that year, and she endorsed him for president this year after dropping out of the race. In both cases, they mentioned Beau Biden as a reason they trusted and respected each other.
On public health, Harris drew a distinction between the Obama/Biden administration’s response to Ebola and the Trump administration’s response to coronavirus.
“Remember Ebola? Barack Obama and Joe Biden did their job. Only two people in the US died – two,” Harris said. That may not be an entirely fair comparison – Ebola nowhere near as easily transmittable as coronavirus – but it is true that Trump gutted pandemic-preparedness systems that Obama built up in response to Ebola.
Biden, as I noted earlier, highlighted the significance of Harris’ nomination as vice-president. “This morning, all across the nation, little girls woke up, especially little Black and brown girls, who so often feel overlooked and undervalued,” he said. “Today, just maybe, they’re seeing themselves for the first time in a new way.”
Later, Harris said she also respects Biden as the only man to have served under a black president and the only man to choose a black VP running mate.
Notably missing at this historic campaign event: applause.
Both Biden and Harris were tasked with delivering rousing speeches without any cheers of agreement from a live audience after they delivered their biggest lines and rallying cries.
The event ends with a socially distanced photo-op with Harris and her husband Doug, and Joe and Jill Biden, standing a distance apart. pic.twitter.com/XgKQV7J06r
Pointing to the health and economic crisis that has gripped the country, Harris said: “This is what happens when we elect a guy who just isn’t up for the job. Our country ends in tatters and so does our reputation around the world.”
Both Harris and Biden have attacked Trump on his administration’s response to the pandemic.
“This virus has impacted every country. But there’s a reason it has hit America worse than any other advanced nation,” she said. “It’s because of Trump’s failure to take it seriously from the start.”
Earlier, Joe Biden, who introduced Harris, praised her “seriousness of purpose and of mind”.
November will be “a life-changing election for this nation”, Biden said. “The choice we make this November is going to determine the future of America for a very, very long time.”
Harris, the daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica is not only a historic choice, “she’s ready to do this job on day one”, Biden said.
Kamala Harris addresses the nation as Biden's vice-presidential pick
Harris has begun by discussing her friendship with Beau Biden, Joe Biden’s late son, who served as attorney general of Delaware while Harris was the attorney general of California.
Both Harris and Joe Biden have talked today about how they got to know each other through Beau. Harris told Biden she is “so grateful to become a part of your extended family”.
“In the midst of the Great Recession, Beau and I spoke on the phone practically every day,” she said. “I learned quickly that Beau was the kind of guy that inspired people to be a better version of themselves. He really was the best of us.”
