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“The legal process was exhausted, and the results were decisively confirmed. The Department of Justice, too, found no basis for overturning the result. If states wish to reform their processes for future elections, that is their prerogative. But Joe Biden’s victory is entirely legitimate.”

At this point, further attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election are contrary to the clearly expressed will of the American people and only serve to undermine Americans’ confidence in the already determined election results.”

Organizers were preparing for an expected crowd of 5,000 on Tuesday and more than 30,000 throughout the week, according to permits issued by the National Park Service.

Some of the speakers during the rally at the Freedom Plaza delivered aggressive speeches claiming the groups were “at war,” targeting Republicans in Congress who have refused to protest the results of the election.

“I hope the Democrats, and even more importantly, the weak and ineffective RINO section of the Republican Party, are looking at the thousands of people pouring into D.C. They won’t stand for a landslide election victory to be stolen,” Mr. Trump said, using the acronym for “Republican in Name Only.”

Yet despite Mr. Biden’s clear win, many of Mr. Trump’s allies were slated to speak at the protests this week and continue to promote the president’s false claims, including Roger J. Stone Jr. and George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign advisers who recently received pardons.

In December, violent clashes in Washington between supporters of Mr. Trump and counterprotesters left four people with stab wounds. Preparing for similar brawls, the National Guard said on Monday it would dispatch about 340 troops to the rallies, responding to Ms. Bowser’s request for additional security.

Protesters have trickled to the Capitol since Monday, many without masks and crowded close together as they carried Trump flags and “Stop the Steal” banners.

the continued determination of the president's most die-hard supporters to fight what they incorrectly perceive as an unfair election has some members of Congress wondering: Will the insurrection continue? And how can they stop it?

Krishnamoorthi says he didn't anticipate how large the crowd outside the Capitol would become or that "the president would incite this mob to march on the Capitol to 'go wild' and instigate the insurrection."

The Washington Post reports that FBI agents are investigating whether some of the Capitol rioters intended not just to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College votes, but also to capture or kill lawmakers.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, warned Saturday that he was notified of a "disturbing report of a death threat" received Friday by the Iowa Democratic Party.

The likelihood of more violence is one of the reasons Twitter permanently suspended President Trump's account

Twitter was particularly concerned by a Trump tweet indicating he wouldn't attend the inauguration. That message "may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a 'safe' target."

Otis, a former CIA analyst, says that extremist groups were likely encouraged by seeing how relatively easy it seemed to be to overtake the Capitol building — and how close participants were able to get to political officials whom they see as enemies.

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, told CNN that the group was seeing online "chatter" from white supremacists online who feel "emboldened" by the current moment.

In the wake of the Capitol insurrection, Florida lawmakers have proposed a measure that would increase penalties for people arrested during a violent protest.

"We are confident in our security partners who have spent months planning and preparing for the inauguration, and we are continuing to work with them to ensure the utmost safety and security of the president-elect,"

"I and our organization, marchers, demonstrators and potential voters left here sunken, sad, traumatized, obstructed and distracted from our intention to lead people all the way to the polls," said the march organizer,

"Let me tell you something: We were beaten, but we will not be broken," he added.

Video published by the Raleigh News & Observer appears to show demonstrators and law enforcement scuffling over sound equipment outside the Alamance County Courthouse. Alamance County sheriff's deputies wearing gray uniforms soon deploy pepper spray, and at least one deputy is seen spraying a man in the face. Others spray toward demonstrators' feet.

Lt. Sisk said Sunday officers allowed the march to pause for about 8 minutes and 40 seconds, but after 9 minutes marchers were told to clear the road.

"They started arresting people before our rally began,"

The Alamance County Sheriff's Office said it made arrests at the demonstration, citing "violations of the permit" Drumwright obtained to hold the rally.

"As a result, after violations of the permit, along with disorderly conduct by participants leading to arrests, the protest was deemed an unlawful assembly and participants were asked to leave."

The rally was scheduled from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET starting from Wayman's Chapel AME church, with an expected stop at the Confederate Monument at Court Square, before ending at a polling place on Elm Street, according to the flyer for the event.

At least eight people were arrested during the rally on various charges,

After five minutes, several people remained and officers again pepper sprayed the ground, authorities said.

Later, a Graham officer was assaulted, Sisk said, and the rally was deemed unsafe and unlawful and law enforcement officers dispersed the crowd.

"At no time during this event did any member of the Graham Police Department directly spray any participant in the march with chemical irritants,"

Sisk called the irritant a "pepper fogger" similar to OC spray, commonly referred to as pepper spray

"they suffered the same effects" of the pepper spray.

Sisk disputed that the march was "scheduled to go to the polls," saying the event was meant to stop at the courthouse where a rally would be held.

"We need the public to understand that we made every effort to coordinate with the planner of this event to ensure that it was successful," Sisk said, alleging it was organizers' intent to block the road, but authorities aimed to ensure safety of both demonstrators and others in downtown Graham.

the "peaceful protests" became violent "because law enforcement tried to take the sound equipment," he tweeted.

Rain Bennett, another attendee, told CNN that demonstrators stopped at Court Square for an eight-minute moment of silence for George Floyd following the march, and that "police presence was there and they had no problem with that."

"Everybody is coughing and kind of running away," he said, adding that it was "really confusing because it'd been fine."

The incident was criticized by a number of officials and civil rights groups, including the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights, the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina, whose executive director likened it to "voter intimidation."

North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper shared the Raleigh News & Observer's article about the march on Twitter and called the incident "unacceptable."

"This is extremely concerning, and we need to get to the bottom of it," he said.

North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Wayne Goodwin issued a statement condemning the actions of law enforcement, calling them "completely unwarranted police hostility and voter suppression."

"We thought there would be tons of people coming in after this event," Peppler told CNN. "We had extra people come on hand because the idea of this was that this gathering would end at the polls, but they broke it up over there at the courthouse before they ever got here."

Almost two-thirds—64%—say they disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of the crisis, while 28% approve. By a 12-point margin, Latino voters said coronavirus was more important than the economy in determining their vote

Latino voters in Florida and Arizona had Mr. Biden leading Mr. Trump among the group 55% to 33% and 66% to 26%, respectively.

Just 63% of Latino voters ranked their interest in the race at the very top of a scale from one to 10, compared with 82% of non-Latino white voters and 74% of Black voters. The 63% for Latinos is higher than the 58% recorded in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted shortly before the 2016 election.

For the final week of the campaign, Mr. Biden had almost three times as much money booked as Mr. Trump for Spanish-language broadcast television ads, $2.4 million to $829,000, data from ad-tracking firm Kantar/CMAG showed.

The oversample of Latino voters was conducted in conjunction with The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll conducted Oct. 29-31. The survey, which included 410 registered Latino voters, has a margin of error of plus or minus 4.8 percentage points

Trump demands continuous updates on the state of the race.

"It's really a contest to see whether or not we can all stand it, right?" Trump said at his frostbit event in Michigan

Increasingly, Trump's efforts on the trail amount to willing into existence the reality he'd rather be facing than the one he actually is. For him, coronavirus is a media exaggeration designed to prevent his campaign from hosting massive crowds. He insists the numbers for his rallies are bigger than ever, despite the pandemic.

Trump has not divulged to many what he might do should he lose. The delicate matter is not discussed widely among his team and has not been raised often with the President, who believes adamantly he will win.

Not one for introspection, but deeply prone to insecurity about potential failure, Trump has offered only fleeting glimpses of turmoil about potentially falling short.

"How the hell can we be tied?" Trump has asked about states where he and Biden are running neck-to-neck

He has joked he might drive an 18-wheeler into the distance, escaping the political life he chose for himself five years ago.

he has mused about fleeing overseas to escape humiliation

"I shouldn't even be here. They said I have Georgia made," Trump said later Sunday, standing beneath two fluttering American flags in a state that's voted Republican in the last six presidential elections. "But I said, I promised -- we have to be here. They said, 'Sir, you don't have to come to Georgia. It's won.' "

Trump will almost certainly continue tweeting.

If Trump does fail to win a second term -- the first president to do so in almost 30 years -- few believe he would fade into the background like his predecessors, who mostly stepped away from public life.

While he has suggested mass firings in his Cabinet should he win, he has not made his intentions explicitly known -- though by his final, muggy rally on a Miami area tarmac on Sunday night, he seemed ready to offer a hint.

After all, it is the rally where Trump has seemed most himself, even after four years of being president and ample time to adjust to a more presidential way of behaving

Ten hours and three rallies later, Trump boasted he could draw bigger crowds than his rivals, who have enlisted musical acts in the final stretch

He sounded dour and spoke for only about 20 minutes on Friday in Minnesota when rally was limited by the state's coronavirus restrictions.

Because of the pandemic, they are smaller now than they were in 2016, a fact Trump has refused to admit even as it remains patently obvious to any casual observer. Often, aides throw out numbers with little rooting in reality.

Sometimes he adds a new insult of his rivals; this weekend's addition was claiming his Democratic rival Joe Biden's signature aviator sunglasses were too small for his face and that his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, has been mispronouncing her own name.

He has not gone in for retail politics, partly because any unscheduled appearance at a restaurant or takeaway would place him squarely in the optics of coronavirus. When he stopped for pizzas in Pennsylvania in August, he seemed somewhat taken aback by the plexiglass barriers between himself and the cashier. Trump rarely, if ever, encounters voters who do not support him.

A lover of routine, Trump has spent only a handful of nights away from the White House, preferring to fly back even from late-night rallies.

On Thursday, after returning to the White House in the dark after a two-day Western swing, Trump was tweeting at 3 a.m. about the prospect of an election decided by the Supreme Court.

It isn't clear how much of his wife or teenage son he has seen lately; first lady Melania Trump has recently embarked for the first time on the campaign trail herself. All three had coronavirus last month; Trump has taken to touting his 14-year-old son Barron's infection as evidence of the mild effect on young people, suggesting he had it for either two minutes, 14 minutes or 15 minutes.

Along the way he has found some new interlocutors, including the rapper Lil Wayne, who had been in touch with the White House about Trump's plan for bolstering Black communities and was invited to meet the President at his Doral golf club

While not particularly wistful, Trump does sometimes wax nostalgic about his only previous campaign. He has assembled many of the same aides, most decades his junior, to accompany him as he attempts to repeat his victory this year. He will hold his final campaign rally on Monday evening in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the same place he held his final event in 2016.

"As soon as that election's over, we're going in with our lawyers," Trump said in North Carolina on Sunday, stopping between his second and third rallies of the day to speak with reporters as the sun set behind him.

After inviting supporters to enter a chance to win tickets to an election night party at his hotel in downtown Washington, Trump scrapped a planned appearance there. He was put off, he said, by Mayor Murial Bowser's restrictions on large gatherings.

How Trump reacts to the information coming to him about percentages of early votes and turnout numbers is anyone's guess. But no officials have ruled out Trump declaring himself the winner even in the absence of formal vote counts or media projections.

These are public Trump fans who, in private, acknowledge that his tweets are humiliating, his crowing about his victories is tasteless, his policy flip-flops are dispiriting and some of his statements are hurtful and damaging. They won’t say they’re tired of him to a pollster. It can be as embarrassing to admit you liked Mr. Trump and now fear him as it was to admit you were attracted to him in the first place. Mr. Trump’s critics portray his supporters as fools, and to say you only now realized he has problems seems to concede the point.

Other Trump-supporting friends used this phrasing, too, and I began to wonder if it was a sublimated yearning. It would accomplish two things: first, make Mr. Trump a martyr to leftist intolerance, and second, get him out of office.

They expressed strangely little anxiety that Mr. Trump would get very sick or die. Compassion for his suffering, yes. Anger at Democrats’ schadenfreude, yes. But no fear he would be swept off the political stage.

President Bill Clinton was a prime example of this double standard; he represented a party that insisted it — and only it — supported women’s empowerment while he preyed on a female intern.

My relative was more upset. She called me near tears. “What’s going to happen to your health care?” she asked. (I rely on the Affordable Care Act.) She never thought Mr. Trump would occupy the White House. Her vote was a form of trolling.

Mr. Trump’s shtick became less satisfying when he was president. My relative found his demonizing of Baltimore appalling and confessed she’d had to stop looking at his tweets. “Reagan was very genteel,” another pro-Trump friend complained to me — very much unlike Mr. Trump.

“How could so many of my countrymen love this man so much?” The answer may be simpler than we expect: a lot of them don’t.

Perhaps it is actually disturbing to consider that Trump fans’ intense public enthusiasm may be a front, because that would mean a proportion of them had a wish to throw the country into chaos. They don’t think America looks good right now, either. They think it looks bad, and they possessed — and probably still possess — such anger and cynicism about American politics that they risked a conflagration.

If Trump should lose the popular tally but again overcome that to reach a majority in the Electoral College, he'd set several other records worthy of note. He would be the first president reelected after being impeached.

He would be the oldest president to win reelection (seven months older than Ronald Reagan) and the first president to have two terms without winning the popular vote either time.

His reelection would also mark the first time in U.S. history that voters reelected four presidents in a row.

What does it mean that presidents are again being reelected so regularly? It surely does not reflect a general satisfaction with Washington or with politics as usual. But it may mean that the advantages of incumbency are at least as difficult to overcome as ever. Put another way, the national parties have struggled to nominate sufficiently compelling alternatives.

One distinction Trump does not want is to be the first president ever defeated by a former vice president. Nor does he wish to join the small and unhappy club of presidents who were turned out of office by the voters.

Biden stands to set several records of his own if he manages to reach a majority in the Electoral College. He would beat Trump's record as the oldest president ever to take the oath of office — and beat it by eight years. He would be the first president from Delaware and the first to have had so long a career in the Senate (1973 to 2009).

He would be the first former vice president to defeat an incumbent president and the first Democratic vice president to come back and win the Oval Office without succeeding the president he had served.

Not since the beginning of time has anyone ever made greater use of superlatives than Donald Trump. He has constantly been "the most" this, "the least"

"It's been the most unconventional and contentious election season of our lifetime."

And Obama, weakened by deep midterm losses of his own in 2010, was still struggling to sell the Affordable Care Act when he faced voters again in 2012.

“The peaceful transfer of power is enshrined in our Constitution and fundamental to the survival of our Republic. America’s leaders swear an oath to the Constitution. We will uphold that oath.”

President Trump’s refusal on Wednesday to commit to a peaceful transfer of power enraged Democrats and again put Republicans in a difficult position as their party leader continued to make remarks aimed at delegitimizing the election.

Earlier Wednesday, he flatly predicted that the presidential election would end up in the Supreme Court and said that was why he wanted a full slate of justices, barely concealing his hope for a friendly majority on the court.

Researchers found that of the 800 people surveyed, about 18 percent said politics had caused them to lose sleep and more than 29 percent said they had lost their temper because of politics. More than 11 percent said politics had adversely affected their physical health and more than 26 percent said they had become depressed when a preferred candidate lost.

But the last polls in the United States don’t close until 1 a.m. Eastern, and even then there are multiple scenarios under which we may not know the results for quite some time after. So here are some tips on how to survive the many long hours between now and then, no matter which candidate you’re pulling for.

Your phone won’t help.

Find other things to do.

When to tune in for news.

What if your preferred candidate doesn’t win?

Support for Colombia has never depended on whether a Democrat or Republican was in the White House -- nor, for that matter, on the party affiliation of Colombia's presidents. It should stay that way.

At the end of the day, though, this isn't about individual politicians. It's about a partnership built between our two countries over decades -- a partnership that we both need now more than ever.

None of us wants to see our partnership suffer. That's because we know how much our countries can achieve when we work side by side. Today, Colombia is far safer and more prosperous than it was twenty years ago -- an accomplishment built on the backs of our brave Colombian partners and facilitated by across-the-aisle support here in the US. Colombia is once again facing a series of unprecedented challenges, including the Covid-19 pandemic, an economic downturn, a spike in insecurity and the Venezuelan refugee and migrant crisis. Regardless of whether Biden wins the White House come November, we want nothing more than to sustain -- in fact, to increase -- our cooperation with Colombia to tackle these challenges together.

There are currently four openly transgender U.S. state legislators

“Speaking for buncombe” meant that a congressman was holding forth in a way designed not to appeal to the other members of the chamber, but to convince his constituents that he was working for their needs and beliefs.

To enliven their speeches, southern members often insulted and threatened Republican members of Congress. Fellow congressmen understood the game; after a particularly fiery speech, a member might walk over to his colleague’s desk and apologize for his choice of words, clearing the air. And, in spite of these harangues, congressional relationships remained mostly friendly

that was not what their constituents saw. Southerners back home rarely knew of these congressional friendships (sometimes because members purposely kept them secret); they could read only the desperate speeches accusing Republicans of undermining the system of slavery and preaching that the South was fundamentally oppressed by the nonslaveholding states.

Cynical public speech aimed at winning political power had consequences in 1860, and it surely will have consequences now. In 1861, those consequences included a four-year Civil War that claimed the lives of 750,000 people and nearly destroyed the American democratic experiment.

While some of these federal politicians had long been in favor of southern separation, a majority were surprised by the mass anger that took hold in the South after Lincoln’s election. In the weeks that followed, such prominent federal politicians as Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens dismissed or opposed talk of secession. Stephens, who knew Lincoln from when the two served in the House of Representatives together in the late 1840s, told Georgia residents, “In my judgment, the election of no man, constitutionally chosen to that high office, is sufficient cause to justify any State to separate from the Union.”

Ordinary white southerners were furious—and trained their ire on their own representatives. They repeatedly blamed Washington politicians for failing to protect them.

Southern senators and representatives soon adopted the fury of the men and women they represented. They withdrew from their positions in Congress and joined their colleagues in supporting secession. By the end of March 1861, Davis and Stephens had become the president and the vice president of the new Confederate government, and many of their colleagues in Congress accepted other key posts.

by spreading misinformation about the electoral process, promoting conspiracy theories, and tacitly endorsing threats against members of the other party, the GOP has created a base that cannot bring itself to believe that Joe Biden won.

The consequences of congressional Republicans’ 21st-century buncombe speeches have yet to be fully felt. What comes next may depend on Republicans’ willingness to do what too many members of Congress were unwilling to do in 1860—tell their constituents the truth, even at the risk of their own electoral defeat.

We don't see how the parties can reach a stimulus deal in this environment," Jaret Seiberg, policy analyst at the Cowen Washington Research Group, wrote in a note to clients Monday. "Failure to enact the Phase 4 stimulus will damage the recovery."

The unexpected death of Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg adds another element of risk to the timing of the [stimulus talks] outcome, and could weigh on the market overall in the near term,"

he Dow was down 3%, or around 800 points, during afternoon trading.

If -- and this is a big if -- President Donald Trump successfully replaces Ginsburg, it would result in a 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court.

"All else equal, it may seem like having a large conservative majority on the court would be positive for business and therefore share prices, because it would reinforce the already antiregulatory and pro-capital tendencies of the Court for the foreseeable future,"

Some have argued that the Supreme Court vacancy is a big advantage to Trump because it will fire up his conservative base and, crucially, shift the conservation away from the pandemic.

The clearest conclusion we can draw from the Supreme Court vacancy is that it adds yet one more question mark to a year marked by deep uncertainty. And the year isn't over yet.

Mr. Schiff said his team had tried to produce an “HBO mini-series” featuring clips of witness testimony to bring to life the esoteric plot about Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine.

There are clips and tweets of Mr. Trump from last summer, warning he would only lose if the election was “rigged” against him; clips and tweets of him claiming victory after his loss; and clips and tweets of state officials coming to the White House as he sought to “stop the steal.”

The managers’ pretrial brief suggests they are planning to juxtapose footage of Mr. Trump urging his supporters to “fight like hell” and march to the Capitol and confront Congress with videos posted from members of the crowd who can be heard processing his words in real time.

To have any chance of making an effective case, the managers believe, they must make clear it is Mr. Trump who is on trial, not his party.

they were a bit less righteous, a bit more wobbly on topics such as white supremacy within police departments and the military

The scourge of systemic racism seems to especially elude the Republicans who, on Jan. 6, voted to annul the legally cast ballots of thousands of Black and Brown citizens. These senators said they were standing up for law and order. Disenfranchisement was punishment for a made-up crime. That was their version of justice.

he told in public, the story he’d told Booker in private about why he wanted to leave a lifetime appointment on the federal bench to do this job. It’s the most reasonable question, but one that so often is never asked: Why do you want to do this?

“I come from a family where my grandparents fled antisemitism and persecution,” Garland said. And then he stopped. He sat in silence for more than a few beats. And when he resumed, his voice cracked. “The country took us in and protected us. And I feel an obligation to the country, to pay back.”

“This is the highest, best use of my one set of skills,” Garland said. “And so I want very much to be the kind of attorney general you’re saying I could be.”

And that would be one focused on protecting the rights of the greatest and the least — and even the worst. Punishment is part of the job. But it’s not the definition of justice.

But most people in the COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy camp are more rational, more measured—informed enough not to believe the crazy talk, but worried enough not to want to be at the head of the line for a new vaccine.

Then too there is a question of effectiveness. Both of the vaccines that have been authorized for emergency use in the U.S., one from Pfizer-BioNTech and one from Moderna, have what Offit calls “ridiculously high efficacy rates—in the 95% range for all [COVID-19] disease and for Moderna’s product 100% for severe disease.”

Armed with numbers like that, however, humans are not always terribly good at calculating risk. On the one hand even an eight in 10,000 chance of contracting facial paralysis does sound scary; on the other hand, about one out every 1,000 American was killed by COVID-19 this past year. The mortal arithmetic here is easy to do—and argues strongly in favor of getting the shots.

The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines both use mRNA—or messenger RNA—to prompt the body to produce a coronavirus spike protein, which then triggers an immune response. That is a novel method for making a vaccine, but the basic research was by no means conducted within the last year. “The technology for the vaccine has actually been in development for more than a decade,”

The Gallup organization has been tracking vaccine attitudes by party since July and has found Democrats consistently more likely to get vaccinated than Independents or Republicans.

But nowhere is the difference starker than among racial and ethnic groups, with 83% of Asian-Americans surveyed expressing an intent to be vaccinated, compared to 63% in the Latinx community and 61% among Whites. In Black American respondents, the numbers fall off the table, with just 42% intending to be vaccinated.

“The main fear I hear [about vaccines] is that someone is injecting coronavirus into my body,” says Stanford. “And I answer in as detailed a way as I can about the mRNA and the protein and how it looks like coronavirus but it’s not.” That kind of clarity, she says, can help a lot.

In all communities, it helps too if doctors and other authorities listen respectfully to public misgivings about vaccines, explaining and re-explaining the science as frequently and patiently as possible. But there is a burden on the vaccine doubters themselves to be open to the medical truth. “Questions are fine as long as you listen to the answers,” Pan says. “So talk to your doctor, go to sources like the CDC and our incredible mainstream medical organizations. Those are the ones you should be getting information from.”

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents the oil and gas industry, says Biden’s plan to boost renewable energy will hasten the decline of union jobs as their businesses reel from the coronavirus pandemic.

poll conducted last summer by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) found that a growing number of Americans describe climate change as a crisis, and two-thirds said Trump is doing too little to tackle the problem. The poll found that about 8 in 10 Americans say human activity is fueling climate change, and roughly half believe action is urgently needed to avert its worst effects.

n May, a KFF poll found ­that 33 percent of registered voters nationally said climate change is “very important” in their vote — down 10 percentage points from when the group asked the same question in February. Respondents said the economy, health care, the coronavirus pandemic, taxes and immigration were more important.

“The campaign is trying to reconcile a combination of demands that no political candidate for president to date has been able to successfully navigate,” said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center. “All [Biden] needs to do is blend the ambition of progressives and scientists with the pragmatism of organized labor, the energy industry and moderate Republicans. That’s no easy task.”

The new Biden plan includes a commitment to invest 40 percent of the clean energy money in historically disadvantaged communities — prompting Martinez to call it “the most innovative and bold plan in a presidential campaign that we’ve seen from an environmental justice standpoint.”

Biden “recognized this as a unique moment, when you could combine the economic benefit of clean energy with the environmental benefits,” Inslee said in an interview. “He had internalized that. It wasn’t just a talking point.”

The Sanders camp did secure one big win: A commitment to eliminate carbon emissions from power plants on an accelerated 15-year timeline.

“Everybody knows that Joe Biden can do a whole bunch of talking. But what he did do was that he also listened,” she said. “We needed that. We needed someone to listen.”

Blaming black Americans for dying from a novel virus because they had diabetes or high blood pressure was precisely what Azar was doing

the moment when the US response to coronavirus escalated into a full culture war is revealing. The big protests at state capitols, with crowds of white Americans demanding their governors reopen the economy, started about a week after national news outlets began reporting in early April that black Americans made up a disproportionate number of the dead.

Systemic racism created the health disparities that made black and brown Americans more vulnerable to dying from coronavirus, public health experts say; and now the same racism is also shaping, and undermining, the country’s political response to the pandemic.

It’s not a new idea that thousands of people must die to preserve America’s “business as usual”. It’s not a new assumption many of those people will be brown or black.

Americans don’t have much of a national vocabulary for talking about collective action and sacrifice

a gun rights activist from Austin, Texas, has strong opinions about tyranny and freedom. But he said he was frustrated that some of his usual allies did not seem to understand that dealing with a novel virus, in a country where no one has immunity, required a different kind of politics.

“Our rights are being violated. That is all actually real,” Stokes said. “But this is one of the few times when that’s OK. Pandemics – these call for a collectivist response. They don’t work without one.”

For some wealthy Americans eager to reopen the economy, the motivating fear may be the risk of social change, the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz said.

It’s not surprising that Americans, who are used to tackling every problem through the lens of “individual rights”, would struggle with how to respond to the collective demands of a pandemic. “It’s this mismatch in terms of a social problem, and the tools we have at our disposal to make sense of it,” the sociologist Jennifer Carlson said.

Early Puritan accounts of arriving in the New World and seeing indigenous people dying of illness are marked by a familiar self-righteousness. The Puritans look at an epidemic and “think it’s a divine dispensation”, Blanchfield said. “The very fact that people are dying is taken as both pragmatically offering market opportunities ... but also as a theological vindication of your own survivorship.”

European colonists established their settlements in the midst of the mass death of indigenous people and opened the American market for business “at gunpoint, in the wake of that epidemic”, said Patrick Blanchfield, the author of a forthcoming 500-year history of American gun violence. Enslaved black people died performing the essential labor that kept the economy running.

Today, “who is being asked to die for the market to be open?” Blanchfield said. “It’s black people. It’s Native American tribal communities.”

The coronavirus culture war is “kind of a petri dish of all the psychoses of US history”, as Dunbar-Ortiz, the author of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, put it.

That Puritan instinct to see infection as a sign of guilt, and health as a kind of vindication, is currently playing out across the political spectrum.

American liberals sometimes treat their belief in science as a kind of religion, Blanchfield argued, fetishizing technocrats and rejoicing when conservatives who do not “believe in science” are punished.

This impulse to blame other people for getting sick is rooted in fear

“Everyone wants some narrative, to explain the unimaginable level of illness and death and vulnerability that we’re all feeling,” he said. “Everyone wants there to be a logic to this.

The victim-blaming on the left, though, has come from individuals’ Twitter accounts, not Democratic party leadership. The victim-blaming of black Americans has come from the highest levels of government.

Just days after national news outlets first reported the emerging racial disparities in coronavirus deaths, Trump’s surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said at a White House briefing that communities of color needed to “step up” and advised them to “avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs”.

Lecturing individual black Americans about smoking, rather than talking about African Americans’ increased environmental exposure to air pollution, a demonstrated coronavirus risk, was classic “victim-blaming”

Poll results from mid-March had shown black respondents were actually more likely than white respondents to see coronavirus as a serious threat to their own health, he said.

“It’s hard, when you have so many white people who are protesting and not social distancing, to argue that they are taking it more seriously and that’s why they are less likely to die,” he said.

But the same argument that black Americans were to blame for dying simply evolved, Kendi said, to focus more on their “pre-existing conditions”.

In Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy, a white Republican and a medical doctor, had already cast doubt on whether inequities rooted in systemic racism were the reason so many black Louisiana citizens were dying of coronavirus. “That’s rhetoric,” he told NPR in early April. The real answer, the answer backed by science, was that “African Americans are 60% more likely to have diabetes” and that “we need to address the obesity epidemic”.

Blaming the victims of American racial disparities for what they suffer has a reliable outcome: nothing is done. The deaths mount.

Ronald Reagan attacked America’s post-war investment in social programs, Kotsko said, “by pointing out that the generosity is now extending to black people” and suggesting that “it’s better to tear down the system of solidarity than to allow the wrong people to get the benefits”.

Metzl argued in his book Dying of Whiteness that the way racism has shaped gun policy and healthcare choices in this country has led to outcomes that hurt black and brown Americans, but that also led to measurable increases in the deaths of white Americans. Today, he’s afraid that same dynamic is playing out again.

The Puritans had a form of torture called “pressing”, used during the Salem witch trials. They made the accused person lie on the ground, and then very slowly, over many days, placed one rock on their chest, and then another.

The exact origins of the group are unknown, but Antifa can be traced to Nazi Germany and Anti-Fascist Action, a militant group founded in the 1980s in the United Kingdom.

"What they're trying to do now is not only become prominent through violence at these high-profile rallies, but also to reach out through small meetings and through social networking to cultivate disenfranchised progressives who heretofore were peaceful," Levin said.

Earlier that year, Antifa protested the appearance of Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right provocateur, at the University of California, Berkeley. They also protested President Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017.

Crow, who was involved with Antifa for almost 30 years, said members use violence as a means of self-defense and they believe property destruction does not equate to violence.

Peter Cvjetanovic, a white nationalist who attended the Virginia protests, said he believes the far left, including Antifa, are "just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than the right wing could ever be."

But Crow said the philosophy of Antifa is based on the idea of direct action. "The idea in Antifa is that we go where they (right-wingers) go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that.