Joe Biden by Beatrice Gormley (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📕

At a news conference on September 23, President Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power after the November election. He repeated the false claim that mail-in ballots were open to fraud. Meanwhile, the polls continued to show that nationally, Joe Biden was keeping a steady lead over Donald Trump. In several of the battleground states—Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—Biden seemed likely to win. In Florida and Arizona, he was even with Trump.

By the end of September, 90 percent of likely voters had already made up their minds, and some of them had already voted. Although Election Day was officially November 3, it had evolved into “Election Season.” Early voting started on September 18 in Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wyoming, and only fifteen of the fifty states had no early voting.

Besides campaigning for reelection, Republicans were striving to achieve one particular goal before the end of President Trump’s term. They hoped to place another conservative justice on the Supreme Court, giving the conservatives a firm 6–3 majority. Then they might finally be able to overturn Roe v. Wade and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). Also, if the presidential election results were extremely close, as they had been in 2000, the Supreme Court might make the final decision about whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump had won.

On September 18, Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died at the age of eighty-seven, so now a seat on the court was vacant. The next day, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the Senate would vote on Trump’s nominee for the court before the election. The following week President Trump named his choice, appellate judge Amy Coney Barrett.

Democrats were outraged. McConnell and the Republican senators had claimed it was wrong for President Obama to nominate a Supreme Court justice during 2016, his last year in office. Now these same senators insisted that it was the president’s duty to fill a vacancy on the court. But no matter how much the Democrats protested, Trump and the Senate did have the legal right to nominate and confirm a new Supreme Court justice. On October 26, Judge Barrett was confirmed by the Republican majority in the Senate.

The first presidential debate took place on September 29 at Case Reserve Western University in Cleveland, Ohio, moderated by Chris Wallace of Fox News. Many observers judged it the worst presidential debate ever. For over an hour and a half, Trump interrupted and talked loudly over Biden, in spite of the moderator’s reminders that both sides had agreed not to interrupt. A few times Biden lost his temper, exclaiming, “Will you shut up, man?” and calling President Trump a “clown.”

However, Joe Biden did manage to make a few points between Trump’s interruptions. When Trump tried to throw him off-balance by slandering Hunter, Biden turned and spoke directly into the cameras. “This is not about my family or his family,” he told the audience watching at home. “It’s about your family, the American people. He doesn’t want to talk about what you need.”

In spite of the disorderly debate, two meaningful facts came out: Trump still refused to agree that he would accept the results of the election, and he repeated false claims that mail-in ballots were often fraudulent. He also refused to condemn violence committed by white supremacist groups, and even seemed to encourage them.

And only a week after the debate, the FBI had shocking news for the country. They had arrested thirteen members of an armed militia group that had been plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. The domestic terrorists’ goal had been to take over the state government and launch a civil war before the election.

In the debate, President Trump had mocked Biden for wearing a mask to protect against COVID-19. Two days later he assured the guests at a charity dinner that “the end of the pandemic is in sight.” The next morning, October 2, Trump announced that he and the First Lady had tested positive for the COVID-19 virus. That evening he was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

President Trump was given oxygen at least once and was treated with a combination of medications usually reserved for seriously ill patients. However, he insisted in tweets and on video that he was recovering quickly. In fact, he left the hospital only three days later, posed on the White House balcony removing his mask, and urged the nation not to be afraid of the coronavirus.

People diagnosed with COVID-19 are advised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to isolate themselves for at least ten days after the first symptoms. However, on October 10, President Trump declared at a rally at the White House that he was “immune” and not infectious. On October 12 he launched a strenuous week of back-to-back, in-person rallies in Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, for starters. He intended to hold two or three such events every day until November 3.

In contrast, Joe Biden continued to campaign steadily but safely. In Toledo, Ohio, on October 12, he spoke outside, in a United Auto Workers union hall parking lot, to an audience in American-made cars. Biden reminded them how in 2009, during the Great Recession, he and President Obama had rescued the US auto industry. At the applause lines, the listeners honked their approval.

In spite of Trump’s efforts to de-emphasize the COVID-19 pandemic, it was topmost on the minds of most Americans. And most Americans blamed President Trump for mishandling the US response to the disease. It had been revealed recently that Trump had known since January how deadly the coronavirus was, but had deliberately downplayed the danger.

Since March, the lethal virus had disrupted Americans’ lives, and it continued to do so. The school year had begun, but a large proportion of schools still could not hold in-person classes, or offered them only half the time, in a “hybrid” schedule.