Biden to address nation as Covid deaths rise sharply before Thanksgiving – live updates

Biden will speak in Wilmington as US records highest daily Covid deaths since May and 172,935 new cases

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11.44am GMT

Leonard Pitts Jr writes for the Tampa Bay Times on something that feels like it could be a long-term consequence of the senior Republican decision to go along with Donald Trump’s legal charade disputing his election defeat. Pitts writes “I am not disappointed in Donald Trump”

For there to be disappointment at childish behavior presumes an expectation of adult behavior. No such expectation exists where Trump is concerned. So his weeks of sulking and floating bizarre conspiracy theories since he lost the election, while embarrassing in the extreme, doesn’t really let me down so much as confirm what I already knew. One might as well be disappointed in an infant for soiling his diaper as to be disappointed in Trump for soiling his office.

But I must admit that prior to this I did harbor some tiny, flickering expectation that, if pushed to the limit, the Republican Party, the party always lecturing the rest of us on patriotism, would stand up for the country. I did expect – or maybe it was just a vestigial hope – that when rubber met road, the GOP would finally put America … ahem, first.

11.32am GMT

Sen. Marco Rubio is on social media this morning complaining that media coverage of the coronavirus pandemic in the US has been negative to the Republican president and Republican-controlled Senate that have overseen the country face 12,597,506 cases and 259,976 deaths.

On Covid,media emphasized bad news even when we had positive developments & did more Trump/hydroxychloroquine stories than all vaccine stories combined

Part of a broader pattern of characterizing everything as bad news Republicans are to be blamed for https://t.co/Ki2AgoOJY1

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source: theguardian.com