Biden news: Campaign aide says Trump should have ‘gone to school’ on Covid ‘200,000 lives ago’

Hello and welcome to The Independent’s rolling coverage of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign. 

Biden aide criticises Trump for claim he’s ‘learned a lot about Covid’

An adviser to Joe Biden has hit out at Donald Trump over the president’s belated claim that he has “learned a lot about Covid” since his diagnosis and admission to hospital on Friday.

Antony Blinken, the Democratic presidential nominee’s adviser on foreign policy, said on Sunday that President Trump’s acknowledgement that he had "gone to school” on coronavirus by catching it, having spent months downplaying its seriousness, was not only ”devastating" but should have occurred “200k deaths ago, not when it affected you" - the figure an allusion to the number of US casualties so far.

Blinken was responding after Trump struck an optimistic tone in his latest address to his followers on social media last night.

“It’s been a very interesting journey. I learned a lot about Covid,” he said. "I learned it by really going to school. This is the real school. This isn't the 'let's read the books' school.

"And I get it, and I understand it, and it's a very interesting thing, and I’m going to be letting you know about it."

No one from Trump campaign reached out over Covid, says Biden adviser

Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union, senior adviser Symone Sanders was asked by Jake Tapper if anyone on the opposing side had “reached out to anyone on the Biden campaign about who may have been infected at the debate to ensure that everyone on your team takes the proper precautions”.

“No, we haven't heard, to my knowledge, from the Trump campaign or the White House,” she answered.

“But the reality is that Vice President Biden was not exposed. According to CDC guidance, you – less than six feet away is dangerous. Vice President Biden was always more than six feet away from President Trump.”

She also said that, as things stand, her candidate is still planning to take part in the second presidential debate on 15 October. 

Over to you Donald...

Andrew Naughtie has this report.

Candidate roars ahead in polls as election left in turmoil

In a new poll, conducted after the first presidential debate but before Trump’s Covid-19 announcement, the Democratic nominee extended his national lead by a two-to-one margin.

The candidate now leads the president by 14 points, 53 to 39 per cent, up from an eight-point pre-debate lead, according to a NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey of registered voters.

Here’s Justin Vallejo on what that all means for this most surprising of Octobers.

Biden in Miami on Monday ahead of NBC town hall

The Democratic nominee and his wife, Dr Jill Biden, again tested negative for coronavirus over the weekend are due to resume in-person campaigning in Florida today, where opinion polls show a tight race for the state's crucial 29 electoral college votes less than a month before the 3 November election.

Biden has repeatedly wished the president a speedy recovery. But the former vice president and his aides have used his Republican rival's positive test to underline a consistent campaign message: Biden would handle the pandemic better than Trump.

While Trump aides like Jason Miller continued to attack BIden over the weekend - calling his wearing of a mask “a prop” on ABC’s This Week - the challenger’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield told the same programme" that the Democratic nominee "has led by example," citing the campaign's use of masks, social distancing and limits on the number of people at campaign events.

In Florida on Monday, Biden will talk to Hispanic voters about his plan to rebuild the US economy after the coronavirus, his campaign said.

More than 3.3m ballots had already been cast nationwide by Sunday, according to the Elections Project at the University of Florida - as more Americans vote early or by mail to avoid being exposed to the virus at crowded polling places on Election Day.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken on Friday and Saturday after the president tested positive for the coronavirus, found Biden leading Trump by 10 percentage points nationally and that nearly two-thirds of Americans thought that Trump probably would not have been infected if he had taken the virus more seriously.

As Trump's doctors and aides gave sometimes unclear messages about the president's health situation over the weekend, Biden's campaign said it would publish the results of every Covid-19 test the candidate takes.

Biden would not need to do much to benefit from Trump's diagnosis, since many Americans already viewed Trump's approach to the virus as cavalier, said David Greenberg, a historian at Rutgers University.

"They're going to think that even more now, so I don't think Biden needs to hammer that home too hard," he said.

It remains uncertain when Trump will return to the campaign trail, if at all, and whether he will be able to participate in the second presidential debate on 15 October.

Trump's campaign said on Saturday that high-profile allies including Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s elder sons, Donald Jr and Eric, would take over in-person campaigning this week.

Pence, who tested negative on Friday, is scheduled to debate Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris on Wednesday.

Joe Biden unlikely to give Boris Johnson ‘warm, welcoming embrace’, says ex-ambassador

Sir Kim Darroch, the former British ambassador to the US, has said the UK prime minister would be unlikely to receive a “warm, welcoming embrace” from the White House if Joe Biden emerges victorious in the US election due to a lingering “resentment” over the PM’s previous remarks about Barack Obama.

Sir Kim, who left his post last year after an explosive leak of diplomatic cables criticising Trump, also insisted a Biden administration would be likely to prioritise negotiating a trade deal with the EU –or re-joining the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership – rather than an agreement with Britain. 

Asked during the Cheltenham Literature Festival who the prime minister would prefer to win the presidential election in 29 days’s time. “I think they are rather torn,” he replied. “I hesitate to say this, but there will be some Obama people in a Biden administration and they remember some of the things that the current prime minister said about Obama whether as a newspaper columnist or whether it was mayor of London."

Ashley Cowburn has more on this.

Jim Carrey debuts Biden impersonation SNL: 'We can all make America not actively on fire again'

The legendary comic actor, star of Dumb and Dumber, The Mask and Ace Ventura and now known for his vicious topical paintings of the Trump administration, starred opposite Alec Baldwin as Trump and Maya Rudolph as Kamala Harris in a recreation of Tuesday’s chaotic debate on the new Saturday Night Live.

Carrey’s Biden reveals a magic remote control that can pause Trump and tells America: “You can trust me because I believe in science and karma. Now just imagine if science and karma could somehow team up to send us all a message about how dangerous this virus can be. I’m not saying I want it to happen. Just imagine it did…"

Here’s Oliver O’Connell’s report.

Memorial held outside White House in honour of more than 200,000 Americans killed by Covid

The US has now suffered over 7.44m cases of coronavirus and almost 210,000 deaths, a fifth of the world’s total from four per cent of its population, a grim milestone observed in DC over the weekend.

Polarized: ‘I’m voting for Biden because Trump is an environmental racist’

In the latest in his series on individual voters, Chris Riotta talks to Rhode Island native Lauren Niedel, 58, who is planning to place an X next to Joe’s name because the president is, she says, “ disgusting… he’s arrogant, he’s a misogynist, he’s a habitual liar” and because he’s “destroying the environment and nobody seems to be able to focus on that at all”.

Trump’s 6am tweet spree ridiculed: ‘The greatest ad for Joe Biden that we could have’

The president was firing out all-caps tweets from his Walter Reed sick bed early this morning, imploring people to vote on a range of issues and leading commentators to suspect he was on the wrong dosage of at least one of the experimental medicines he is taking to combat Covid-19.

Walter Shaub, former director of the Office of Government Ethics, has even said it’s evidence enough to justify invoking the 25th Amendment.

But some are seeing an inadvertent appeal for a Biden administration in his delirious ramblings...

Here’s Matt Mathers on behaviour that would be considered deeply erratic and worrying coming from almost anyone else.