Biden vows mask order; Trump targets ‘blue wall’
WILIMINGTON, Del. — If Joe Biden wins next week’s election, he said he’ll immediately call Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, and work with governors and local officials to institute a nationwide mask-wearing mandate.
He said he would instruct Congress to pass a sweeping spending bill by the end of January to address the coronavirus and its fallout.
But Biden likely will face significant political challenges in combating the worst public health crisis in a century. He also likely will encounter the limits of federal powers when it comes to mask requirements and is sure to face resistance from Republicans who have said they will buck additional spending.
“There are no magic wands,” said Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, vice dean for public health practice at Johns Hopkins University and former Maryland state health department chief who recently briefed Biden on reopening schools during the pandemic. “It’s not like there’s an election, and then the virus beats a hasty retreat.”
Biden traveled Tuesday to Warm Springs, Ga., the hot springs town where Franklin Delano Roosevelt coped with polio to declare the U.S. is not too politically diseased to overcome its health and economic crises, pledging to be the unifying force who can “restore our soul and save this country.”
“I’m here to tell you we can and will get control of this virus,” Biden said. “As president, I will never wave the white flag of surrender.”
The Democratic presidential nominee offered his closing argument with Election Day just one week away while attempting to go on the political offensive in Georgia, which hasn’t backed a Democrat for the White House since 1992. He promised to be a president for all Americans regardless of party, even as he said that “anger and suspicion is growing and our wounds are getting deeper.”
“Has the heart of this nation turned to stone? I don’t think so,” Biden said. “I refuse to believe it.”
A WALL TO SCALE
While Biden worked to expand the electoral map in the South, President Donald Trump focused on the Democrats’ “blue wall” states that he flipped in 2016 — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — and maintained a far busier travel schedule taking him to much more of the country.
At a cold, rain-soaked rally in Lansing, the Michigan capital, Trump said that Biden supported the North American Free Trade Agreement and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, both of which he said hurt the auto industry and other manufacturing in the state.
“This election is a matter of economic survival for Michigan,” the president said, arguing that the state’s economy was strong before the coronavirus pandemic hit. “Look what I’ve done.”
Trump also cheered Senate candidate John James while criticizing Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer for moving aggressively to shut down much of the state’s economy to slow the virus’s spread.
“All the fake news media wants to talk about is covid, covid, covid,” Trump said Tuesday in an all-caps tweet. “On November 4th, you won’t be hearing so much about it anymore. We are rounding the turn!!!”
Biden, even as he predicted the country could rise above politics, went after his election rival, accusing Trump anew of bungling the federal response to the pandemic and failing to manage the economic fallout or combat what he believes is institutional racism and police brutality.
“The tragic truth of our time is that covid has left a deep and lasting wound in this country,” Biden said, scoffing at Trump’s pronouncements that the nation is turning a corner on the virus. He claimed that the president has “shrugged. He’s swaggered. And he’s surrendered.”
The former vice president plans to travel to Iowa, which Trump took by 10 points in 2016, later in the week. And his running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, is hitting Arizona and deep red Texas.
Besides Lansing, Trump traveled to Wisconsin, where mail-in ballots were the subjet of a Supreme Court ruling Monday.
The court sided with Republicans to prevent Wisconsin from counting mailed ballots that are received after Election Day.
In a 5-3 order, the justices on Monday refused to reinstate a lower court order that called for mailed ballots to be counted if they are received up to six days after election. A federal appeals court had already put that order on hold.
FIRST LADY OUT, ABOUT
First lady Melania Trump was on the road, too, making her first solo campaign trip of the year in Pennsylvania. And Vice President Mike Pence was in South Carolina.
Biden will visit in coming days Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida, where former President Barack Obama gave a speech in Orlando on Tuesday, accusing Trump as only worrying about the virus because it was dominating news coverage.
Trump expressed his displeasure that Fox News carried his Democratic predecessor’s speech live, complaining to reporters about it and tweeting the network was “playing Obama’s no crowd, fake speech for Biden.”
In Atglen, Pa., Melania Trump said she was feeling “so much better now,” just weeks after being diagnosed with the virus. She slammed Biden’s “socialist agenda,” praised her husband as “a fighter,” and also commented on the president’s use of social media.
“I don’t always agree the way he says things,” she said, drawing laughter from the crowd, “but it is important to him that he speaks directly to the people he serves.”
The Trumps left for their campaign trips at the same time, and the president gave the first lady a quick peck on the cheek before they boarded separate planes.
The president will visit Omaha, Neb., after a Sunday stop in Maine.
While Biden rarely travels to more than one state per day, the Republican president has maintained a whirlwind schedule, focusing on his argument that he built a booming economy before the coronavirus pandemic upended it. Trump is planning 11 rallies in the final 48 hours before polls close.
Biden, meanwhile, is hoping to lift Democrats in Georgia and Iowa running for the U.S. Senate. He was visiting Atlanta after his address in Warm Springs.
GOOGLE’S AD BAN
Separately, Google said Tuesday that it will ban all ads related to the election after polls close Election Day, adding it expects the ban to last at least a week.
The company cited its “sensitive events” policy, which seeks to stop brands from profiting off fast-moving, critical events. Election results will probably take longer to confirm this year as more people vote by mail, and Google said in a blog post Tuesday that the ban is necessary “to limit the potential for ads to increase confusion post-election.”
The ban will cover any ad that mentions a candidate, a political party, or an election, among other election-related content.
Google, which owns YouTube, is one of several social media companies outlining plans to try to slow the spread of misinformation on their sites in the lead-up to the election.
The move follows similar ones by other tech giants. Facebook also will ban political ads after polls close, as well as disallowing new ads the week before the election. Twitter announced a broad ban of political ads about candidates last year.
Meanwhile, more than 1,000 clergy members, religious scholars and other faithbased advocates have signed on to a unique statement that supports a comprehensive path to “a free and fair election” and urges leaders to heed the verdict of “legitimate election results” regardless of who wins in November.
Signatories of the statement, provided in advance to The Associated Press, include senior officials at the Nation
al Association of Evangelicals and prominent progressive pastor the Rev. William Barber, as well as two past faith advisers to former President George W. Bush.
GOP EX-PROSECUTORS WEIGH IN
Also on Tuesday, 20 former U.S. attorneys — all of them Republicans — publicly called Trump “a threat to the rule of law in our country,” and urged that he be replaced with Biden.
“The President has clearly conveyed that he expects his Justice Department appointees and prosecutors to serve his personal and political interests,” said the former prosecutors in an open letter. They accused Trump of taking “action against those who have stood up for the interests of justice.”
The effort was organized initially by Ken Wainstein, a former U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who later served during George W. Bush’s administration as assistant attorney general for national security.
A spokesman for the Trump campaign dismissed the letter from the former prosecutors as arrogant and offensive, noting that it is Trump who has the support of police officers and their unions.
“No one should be surprised establishment elitists are supporting Joe Biden,” Hogan Gidley said. In an emailed statement, he noted that the signers did not speak out “when Joe Biden promised to redirect funds away from police. I noticed their worry for politics wasn’t voiced when Joe Biden’s DOJ claimed to be a ‘wingman’ for the Administration, and I must have missed their unease for disunity when Biden refused to condemn his supporters for burning down churches, destroying businesses, and physically assaulting innocent Americans in the streets.” Information for this article was contributed by Will Weissert, Alexandra Jaffe, Aamer Madhani, Thomas Beaumont, Mark Sherman, Elana Schor, Michael Rubinkam, Bill Barrow and Kevin Freking of The Associated Press; and by Rachel Lerman,Tom Hamburger and Devlin Barrett of The Washington Post.