President Trump Addresses Election Safety during Worst Disease in a Century at Press Briefing
July 31, 2020 (EIRNS)—President Donald Trump addressed the coronavirus pandemic in a July 30 press conference and elaborated on his comments on the question of delaying the election.
Trump spoke to the difficulty of addressing the worst disease in over one hundred years. Even in countries that had done a great job getting their numbers down, the virus has the ability to come roaring back if you let your guard down. Countries like Japan that had nearly eliminated the virus have seen their cases increase by an order of magnitude over the last month.
There is some good news—the number of new cases in the Sun Belt is declining. And new treatments are showing promise: dexamethasone, remdesivir, Regeneron’s antibody cocktail. Better treatment has dropped the infection fatality rate significantly.
To support the people of the United States, he called for an extension of expanded unemployment benefits, a temporary halt to evictions, and additional direct payments to individuals.
Trump urged the safe reopening of schools, calling for $105 billion in federal aid to help schools reopen safely. (For a full concept of what is required to achieve safe reopening, see “An Outline for Saving Our Students, Educators, and Their Families.”)
The first question to the President was about his tweet raising the question of delaying the election for safety and election integrity reasons. Trump explained the threat to fair elections that would arise from having hundreds of millions of unrequested mail-in ballots (as opposed to voter-requested absentee ballots) being distributed nationwide, and pointed to several experiments conducted recently involving the mailing of mock ballots, a number of which were not received even after a week or more. “I don’t want to see that take place in a week after November 3rd or a month or, frankly, with litigation and everything else that can happen, years. Years. Or you never even know who won the election.”
He pointed to the irony of pointing to Russian interference in the 2016 election while studiously maintaining that mail-in fraud poses no risk to the 2020 election: “You know, we talk about ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ for two and a half years, and then they found nothing, and there was nothing. But they talk ‘Russia, Russia, Russia.’ They talk China. They talk all of these countries. They say they get involved in our elections. This is easy. You can forge ballots.”
Questioned about the situation in Portland, Trump reported that the governor has committed to the Oregon State Police taking a more active role and that if the situation becomes more peaceful, the federal police agents will be removed. But if the situation continues to be out of control, the National Guard may be called in.
In response to the final question, Trump again spoke to the success in gearing up manufacturing and distribution of vaccines and treatments, through Operation Warp Speed.
