Many Republicans have pinned their political futures to Trump, while Democrats are running as bulwarks against him.

The battle for control of Congress is solidifying into a race about President Donald Trump, as Republicans hitch their fortunes to their party’s leader and Democrats position themselves as a bulwark against him – and as partners in a potential Joe Biden White House.

So far, voters are signalling they want to finish the job they started in 2018 by installing Democrats for House majority control. Now, they are on track to potentially do the same in the Senate.

“The president continues to overshadow and impact the races for the Senate and the House,” said Nathan Gonzales, the editor of Inside Elections, which tracks the campaigns.

Usually, a president at the top of the ticket boosts his party’s chances, but Trump’s slump is shifting the congressional map, strategists said. House Democrats are expected to easily retain the majority, without too many losses. The Senate, now in Republican hands, could almost as easily flip to Democrats.

Together, the congressional races provide a snapshot of an American electorate ahead of a voting season unlike any other.

The coronavirus crisis, a shattered economy and a new civil rights era are forcing a reassessment of the way the federal government approaches long-standing problems. In a volatile political climate, healthcare, jobs and even what the parties are calling the soul of the nation are all on the ballot.

As Democrats gain momentum, Republicans are digging in, echoing Trump’s harsh criticism of the nationwide protests over police violence, particularly against Black people. He sounds dire warnings about the demonstrations happening in some cities. It is an opening for the GOP, an attempt to win back wary suburban voters, particularly white women, who voted for Trump in 2016 but have since drifted away.

“It’s a winning message,” said Bob Salera, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP’s campaign arm.

The NRCC used Trump’s visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin, to unleash a flurry of attacks against vulnerable Democrats, primarily those freshmen who built the House majority in 2018 from districts the president won in

‘Win back the Senate’
The Democratic campaigns are taking the opposite approach. As their calling card to voters, they are offering healthcare policy – preserving and expanding the coverage under the Affordable Care Act and strategies to end the COVID-19 crisis.

Ten advertisements released by House Democrats last week targeted Republicans who voted to repeal and replace “Obamacare” or pushed a quick economic reopening despite COVID-19 risks. Democratic Senate candidates are taking similar cues as they appeal to voters concerned about healthcare access or costs.

“We’re gonna win back the Senate,” Biden told donors last week on a fundraising call.

The former vice president is eyeing a handful of Senate seats he believes Democrats could wrest from Republicans, with plans to campaign in North Carolina, Georgia, Texas and other states where Republican senators are vulnerable.

Two months before the election, the races are still in flux. Any boost in Trump’s standing could bolster Republican chances, analysts said. Any missteps by Biden could hurt Democrats.

On top of that is the uncertainty of the COVID-19 crisis, which upended campaigning. While many Republicans are following Trump’s lead, holding events and meeting voters in person, Democrats are largely matching Biden’s approach of avoiding health risks by holding campaign events online.

A memo from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee obtained by The Associated Press news agency said candidates should remind voters “through your actions” that they take the COVID-19 threat seriously. Republicans mock Democrats’ virtual campaigning as hiding from voters.

Republicans hold a slim 53-47 majority in the Senate. That means they could afford to lose two or three seats, while Democrats would need to pick up three or four for a working majority. If either party has 50 seats, the vice president becomes a tiebreaker.

While election season began with the parties on defence, protecting their incumbent senators, it has shifted to a decidedly lopsided Senate map.

Only one Democrat, Senator Doug Jones in Alabama, appears seriously at risk of defeat, running in a Deep South state where Trump is more popular than almost anywhere else.

The list of potentially endangered Republican senators has only grown. Senator Cory Gardner is running against popular former Governor John Hickenlooper in Colorado, a state that has become more Democratic blue than toss-up purple.

In battleground Arizona, Republican Senator Martha McSally is trailing Democrat Mark Kelly, a former astronaut. GOP Senator Susan Collins is relying on her independent brand to try to fend off challenger Sara Gideon in Maine.

Some incumbent Republican senators walk a fine line on support for Trump. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina distances himself from Trump on some issues, but pulls close on others, and he joined the president for his speech accepting the GOP nomination on the White House lawn.

GOP senators in Iowa, Montana and Georgia are now facing races suddenly in play. Even in Texas, South Carolina and Kentucky, where big-name GOP senators are up for re-election – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Bluegrass State, Lindsey Graham in the Palmetto State – races are becoming costly, even if the seats are not seriously in jeopardy.

‘Trump continues to drive Democratic energy’
In the House, Republicans face an even tougher haul.

They would need to net some 19 seats to wrest control from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, a tall order in any election but especially now in the hard-fought suburban districts with Trump wobbly at the top of the ticket.

Some of the Democrats elected in 2018 in places Trump won in 2016 were surprise winners, like Representative Kendra Horn in Oklahoma City, and they are among the most vulnerable.

Representative Ben McAdams in Utah faces a challenge from Burgess Owens, a former NFL player and Black conservative who delivered a standout speech at the GOP convention.

Some freshman Democrats, though, have tried to carve out brands to steel themselves against challenges in districts where Republicans typically would win.

Many of the issues once thought to define the candidates – including the Trump impeachment votes – have dimmed against the COVID-19 crisis.

At the same time, Trump’s willingness to push the norms of executive power suddenly makes Congress matter not just as a legislative branch of government, but one conducting oversight.

Gonzales said after GOP losses in 2018, there was an expectation that Trump atop the ticket would bring back Republican voters in 2020.

“But President Trump continues to drive Democratic energy and turnout,” he said.

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The US president came under fire after The Atlantic reported he called marines killed in action ‘losers’ and ‘suckers’.

The US President Donald Trump has demanded the Fox News network fire its national security correspondent after she confirmed claims he had disparaged the military – a bombshell that has dogged him for two days.

Trump came under fire after The Atlantic magazine reported he had called marines killed in action in the World War I “losers” and “suckers” in connection with a November 2018 visit to France in which he skipped a visit to a United States’s military cemetery.

Fox News correspondent Jennifer Griffin on Saturday said two former administration officials had confirmed to her the president “did not want to drive to honour American war dead” at the Aisne-Marne cemetery outside Paris, implying weather was not a factor.

One official also told her Trump had used the word “suckers” to denigrate the military, but in a different context related to the Vietnam War.

“When the president spoke about the Vietnam War, he said, ‘It was a stupid war. Anyone who went was a sucker’,” she quoted the unnamed official as saying.

“It was a character flaw of the president. He could not understand why someone would die for their country, not worth it,” the source said.

‘Slimeball reporter’
Trump has furiously defended himself in the wake of the story in The Atlantic, tweeting and retweeting stories condemning it as “fake news”.

“You work so hard for the military, from completely rebuilding a depleted mess that was left by OBiden, to fixing a broken V.A. and fighting for large scale military pay raises, and then a slimeball reporter, maybe working with disgruntled people, makes up such a horrible charge,” a furious Trump tweeted on Saturday.

A day earlier, the US president had tweeted: “Jennifer Griffin should be fired for this kind of reporting. Never even called us for comment. @FoxNews is gone!”

According to The Atlantic, in a conversation with senior staff members, on the morning of the visit, Trump said: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”

The official explanation for that missed visit was bad weather.

The habitually Trump-friendly Fox News has been criticised for seemingly sidelining Griffin’s reporting in its coverage of the story.

A story on its website on Saturday was headlined: “Sources dispute claim Trump nixed visit to military cemetery over disdain for slain veterans.”

Several of Griffin’s colleagues at Fox have publicly defended her on Twitter, along with Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, who called her “fair and unafraid”.

“I can tell you that my sources are unimpeachable,” Griffin said on-air on her network on Saturday. “My sources are not anonymous to me and I doubt they are anonymous to the president.”

Just before The Atlantic published its story, a poll by the Military Times and the Syracuse University Institute for Veterans and Military Families found that just 37.4 percent of active-duty personnel support Trump’s re-election bid, while 43.1 percent back Joe Biden

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The White House is targeting training on critical race theory and white privilege, calling them ‘anti-American’.

The US President Donald Trump has directed the executive branch’s budget office to crack down on federal agency training programmes that are meant to support diversity and combat racism, calling them “divisive, anti-American propaganda”.

In a letter on Friday, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, told all executive branch agencies to identify any spending related to training on “critical race theory”, “white privilege”, or any theory that posits that the US, as well as any race or ethnicity, “is inherently racist or evil”.

“The divisive, false, and demeaning propaganda of the critical race theory movement is contrary to all we stand for as Americans and should have no place in the federal government,” the letter reads.

“Critical race theory” refers broadly to a school of thought that argues that systemic racism exists in US law and institutions and that race is a social construct created for the benefit of white citizens.

“White privilege” is the concept that white citizens inherently benefit from the systemic racism in US society.

The US president’s advisory comes amid months of racial justice demonstrations following the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, in May in Minnesota.

Trump has rejected the idea that there is systemic racism in the US, particularly in law enforcement.

He argued during a trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday that high-profile incidents of police killing Black people are the result of “bad apples” in the police force or good cops who “choke”.

The US president spent Saturday morning retweeting conservative supporters of his decision to end the training, which he called “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue”.

“Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!” Trump tweeted.

‘Press reports’
Friday’s memo said Trump’s decision came following “press reports” that described training programmes in which employees across the Executive Branch are told that “virtually all white people contribute to racism” or where employees were required to say they “benefit from racism”.

The memo did not specify which reports it was citing, although Fox News has recently run critical segments on the training, according to The Associated Press news agency.

Vought’s memo added that additional federal guidance on training sessions would be forthcoming.

But it maintained that “the president, and his administration, are fully committed to the fair and equal treatment of all individuals in the United States”.

“The president has a proven track record of standing for those whose voice has long been ignored and who have failed to benefit from all our country has to offer, and he intends to continue to support all Americans, regardless of race, religion, or creed,” Vought added.

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Joe Biden declares Donald Trump ‘unfit’ for presidency as anger grows over media reports he disparaged fallen soldiers.

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has come under fire over reports that he mocked the country’s war dead as “suckers” and “losers”, with Joe Biden, his main opponent in the upcoming presidential election, declaring him “unfit” for the commander-in-chief role.

Biden’s comments on Friday came as Trump again sought to dismiss as “false” the alleged comments, first reported on by The Atlantic magazine and then by The Associated Press news agency.

Voice cracking, Biden told reporters in Delaware that “you know in your gut” Trump’s comments, if true, are “deplorable”.

“I’ve just never been as disappointed, in my whole career, with a leader that I’ve worked with, president or otherwise,” Biden added. “If the article is true – and it appears to be, based on other things he’s said – it is absolutely damning. It is a disgrace.”

Trump, in the Oval Office, said no apology was necessary, because it was a “fake story”.

The allegations, sourced anonymously, describe multiple offensive comments by the president towards killed and captured US service members during a trip to France in November 2018.

In the morning of a scheduled visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, Trump reportedly told senior staff, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” The White House later said the visit was cancelled because foggy weather made the helicopter trip from Paris too risky and a 90-minute drive was deemed infeasible.

The Atlantic also said Trump, in a separate conversation on the same trip, referred to more than 1,800 US soldiers who died during the consequential 1918 battle at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Speaking in the Oval Office on Friday, Trump denied ever uttering such comments: “It was a terrible thing that somebody could say the kind of things – and especially to me, ’cause I’ve done more for the military than almost anyone anybody else.”

Later, in a news briefing, Trump suggested the source of the story was his former chief of staff, retired Marine General John Kelly. “It could have been a guy like John Kelly,” Trump told reporters, saying his former top aide “was unable to handle the pressure of this job”.

‘You’re no patriot’
But that denial was met with scepticism, with critics seizing on the media reports to shine a fresh light on Trump’s previous public disparagement of US troops and military families.

That includes his criticism of the late Arizona Senator John McCain, a decorated Navy officer who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said of McCain in 2015. He had also said at the time: “I like people who weren’t captured.”

On a call with reporters hosted by the Biden campaign on Friday, Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth lambasted Trump for “belittling the sacrifices of those who have shown more bravery than he’s capable of”.

Duckworth, a retired Army National Guard lieutenant colonel who lost both of her legs in the Iraq War, has been a prominent critic of Trump’s handling of military issues. Knocking Trump for allegedly inventing an injury to avoid serving in the Vietnam War, Duckworth said she would “take my wheelchair and my titanium legs over Donald Trump’s supposed bone spurs any day”.

Khizr Khan, whose son, Humayun, was killed in action in Iraq in 2004, joined Duckworth on the call and said Trump’s “life is a testament to selfishness”.

Khan, who drew national attention after criticising Trump during the 2016 Democratic National Convention, added: “Words we say are windows into our souls. So, when Donald Trump calls anyone who places their lives in service of others a loser, we understand Trump’s soul.”

Veterans also condemned the president’s alleged remarks.

Paul Eaton, a retired major general, in a Twitter video said Trump had shown “disrespect to the military in countless occasions”, adding: “You’re no patriot.”

VoteVets posted online a video, in which six families of US soldiers who died while on duty criticised Trump, each one declaring their children were not losers or suckers. “You don’t know what it is to sacrifice,” one father said.

Reporting from Alexandria in the US state of Virginia, Noble Reporters Media said Trump’s alleged comments had been confirmed by multiple news outlets.

“This story isn’t going away, because now, a number of news outlets here in Washington have confirmed the same scope and the same quotes that were in that story. That includes Fox News, which has been the president’s go-to television news network.”

Jordan was referring to reporting by Jennifer Griffin, Fox News’s national security correspondent, who said two former Trump administration officials had confirmed The Atlantic’s reporting.

‘This never happened’
Trump’s supporters, meanwhile, took to television networks and social media to defend the president, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo telling the programme, Fox and Friends, on Friday that he was with the president for a good part of the trip to France.

“I never heard him use the words that are described in that article,” Pompeo said.

US Defense Secretary Mark Esper issued a statement saying “Trump has the highest respect and admiration for our nation’s military members, veterans and families” and “has fought for greater pay and more funding” for the armed forces.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was the White House press secretary at the time of Trump’s visit, said of The Atlantic report: “I was actually there and one of the people part of the discussion – this never happened.”

First Lady Melania Trump also defended her husband, issuing a rare public statement, calling Trump’s alleged mockery of US war dead “not true” and blasting The Atlantic’s reliance on anonymous sources.

Mike Pence, the vice president, said he was not in Paris but “it never happened”.

He told CNBC: “American people just roll their eyes at these late-hit, anonymous-source media coming from The Atlantic or anywhere else. It’s just politics as usual.”

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The Atlantic reported US president had referred to marines buried in a cemetery near Paris as ‘losers’.

United States President Donald Trump has denied a report saying he made disparaging remarks about fallen United States military personnel buried in France and declined to visit a cemetery during a trip there in 2018.

The Atlantic, citing anonymous sources with direct knowledge of the event, reported on Thursday that Trump had referred to marines buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris as “losers” and declined to visit because of concern that the rain that day would mess up his hair.

Speaking to reporters later on Thursday, Trump, who is seeking re-election in November and has touted his record helping US veterans, said the story was false.

“To think that I would make statements negative to our military and fallen heroes when nobody has done what I’ve done,” for the US armed forces, the Republican president said. “It’s a total lie … It’s a disgrace.”

The president said he did not go to the cemetery because weather prevented a helicopter flight. The alternative, a long drive, would have meant going through very busy areas of Paris and the Secret Service objected, he said.

“The Secret Service told me, ‘You can’t do it.’ I said, ‘I have to do it. I want to be there.’ They said, ‘You can’t do it’,” Trump said.

According to The Atlantic, in another conversation on the trip, Trump referred to the 1,800 marines who died in the World War I battle of Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

The publication said Trump also referred to former President George H W Bush as a “loser” because he was shot down by the Japanese as a Navy pilot in World War II.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who is leading Trump in national polls before the November 3 election, emphasised his own commitment to helping members of the military in a response to the report.

“If the revelations in today’s Atlantic article are true, then they are yet another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the President of the United States,” Biden said in a statement released by his campaign.

“And if I have the honour of serving as the next commander in chief, I will ensure that our American heroes know that I will have their back and honour their sacrifice – always.”

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