Trump refuses to commit to accepting election
result as Biden enjoys poll lead
President refuses to say whether he will accept
election result
Repeats claim that virus is ‘going to disappear, and
I’ll be right’
Martin
Pengelly in New York
@MartinPengelly
Published
onSun 19 Jul 2020 18.28 BST
Joe Biden
leads Donald Trump by 15% among registered voters nationally and holds a
20-point lead when it comes to who Americans trust to handle the coronavirus
pandemic, according to a major poll out on Sunday.
In the same
ABC News/Washington Post poll, Biden led by two points in March and 10 points in
May. Now, among respondents who said they will certainly vote in November,
Biden leads by 11%.
Fox News
also released a poll on Sunday. It put Biden ahead on coronavirus, race
relations and the economy and eight points up nationally.
In an
interview with Fox News Sunday recorded at the White House on Friday, Trump
said “I’m not losing, because those are fake polls” and refused to say if he
would accept the result if Biden won in November.
“I have to
see,” Trump said. “I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not
going to say no, and I didn’t last time either.”
On
Saturday, the New York Times and Washington Post reported that the White House
is seeking to block funding for coronavirus testing and tracing, the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and
state and Pentagon efforts to tackle Covid-19 abroad.
Biden
director of rapid response Andrew Bates said: “Trump is turning his back on his
most important responsibility to the American people because in the words of
his own advisers, he ‘doesn’t want to be distracted by’ the worst public health
crisis in 100 years. This is absolutely unconscionable.”
Trump told
Fox News Sunday he took “responsibility always for everything” regarding the pandemic.
But he also
said he might veto the next stimulus package designed to help unemployed
Americans and small business if it did not include a payroll tax cut. As that
would dramatically affect social security and other vital programmes, it is
seen by most in Congress as a political non-starter.
More than
3.7m cases of Covid-19 have been recorded in the US, now at a rate of about
70,000 a day, and more than 140,000 have died.
According
to the ABC/Post poll, Biden has also caught up to Trump on trust to run the
economy and leads by nine points on trust to handle crime and safety. That will
be a worrying number for Trump as he seeks to make law and order a central
plank of his campaign, portraying Biden as a puppet of protesters demanding
radical policing reform.
On Fox News
Sunday, Trump claimed Biden supported calls to defund police. Host Chris
Wallace pointed out that was not true, leading to an angry exchange.
Wallace
also asked why the US did not have “a national plan” for tackling the pandemic
and if Trump took responsibility for that.
“Look,” the
president said, “I take responsibility always for everything because it’s
ultimately my job, too. I have to get everybody in line.”
I take
responsibility always for everything because it’s ultimately my job, too. I
have to get everybody in line
Donald
Trump
That
contrasted with an infamous remark made at a press conference in March, when
Trump said “I don’t take responsibility at all” for problems with federal
testing.
Trump also
repeated a familiar claim, saying the amount of testing the US was doing “skews
the numbers”, and was challenged about his remark earlier this month that the
coronavirus would “at some point … sort of just disappear”.
“I’ll be
right eventually,” he said. “I will be right eventually. You know, I said:
‘It’s going to disappear.’ I’ll say it again … It’s going to disappear and I’ll
be right.”
The
president said he had a good relationship with Dr Anthony Fauci, the White
House coronavirus taskforce member who has reportedly been blocked from
television and who has said he has not briefed the president in months.
“I spoke to
him yesterday at length,” Trump said, “I have a very good relationship with Dr
Fauci.”
He also
said Fauci, who has served six presidents since 1984 and has emerged as a
trusted and frank public voice, was “a little bit of an alarmist”.
Biden was
due to run coronavirus-themed ads during the interview in six battleground
states, in which polling averages put him in the lead. In the ABC/Post poll,
Trump’s overall job approval was down nine points to 39%.
Trump, 74,
declined a chance to say his 77-year-old challenger was “senile” but said: “I’d
say he’s not competent to be president.” The Fox News poll found that more
people think Biden is mentally sound compared to Trump.
The
president also blasted his niece, Mary Trump, whose tell-all book sold nearly
1m copies on publication day. The clinical psychologist has been highly
critical of her uncle in interviews, having defeated an attempt to silence her
through the courts.
Trump
repeatedly complained that his niece depicts his father, Fred Trump, as a
“psychopath”. In fact she says the property developer, who died in 1999, was a
“high-functioning sociopath” who shaped his son’s personality.
“Donald’s
pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable,” Mary Trump
writes in Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most
Dangerous Man, “that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis
would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that
he’ll never sit for.”
On Sunday,
as the media frantically parsed Trump’s latest battery of misleading or
inflammatory claims, it seemed the decision to sit for an interview with
Wallace may not have been a wise one.
Trump
played golf in Virginia, but found time to tweet about his decision to send
federal agents to Portland, Oregon, the site of extensive protests over racism
and police brutality.
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