US President Donald Trump on Wednesday fired his campaign manager, just four months ahead of the US presidential election, in a bid to transform a campaign that has seen his popularity sinking over his management of a surging COVID-19 pandemic.
With two more polls on Wednesday adding to several that have shown Trump’s support tanking, he took to Twitter to announce that Brad Parscale would be replaced by Bill Stepien, his former deputy campaign manager.
Praising both for their efforts, Trump struck a hopeful note as he looked ahead to November, saying the election “should be a lot easier” than 2016 “as our poll numbers are rising fast, the economy is getting better, vaccines and therapeutics will soon ... be on the way, and Americans want safe streets and communities!”
Photo: EPA-EFE
However, the reality is stubborn and sobering: More than 137,000 Americans have been killed by COVID-19; confirmed new cases are on the rise in 40 out of 50 states; California announced it was locking down parts of its massive economy for a second time; and Trump is clashing with health experts tasked with fighting the pandemic.
With infection rates that have taken radically different trajectories than those in Europe, the US is in bad shape — and the president appears to be dodging the subject.
Trump on Wednesday traveled to Atlanta, Georgia — not to visit the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for an update on the pandemic response as cases spike in the south and west, but to deliver a speech on modernizing the nation’s infrastructure.
One day earlier, he held a news conference at the White House in which he touched on multiple subjects and vilified his presumptive Democratic rival for the White House, former US vice president Joe Biden, but barely mentioned the pandemic.
His attempt to discredit respected infectious disease specialist Anthony Fauci, who has bluntly warned that the US strategy against the coronavirus is faltering, has flopped.
Even some voices within his own camp are urging Trump to tackle the problem more seriously, rather than blame scapegoats.
“We don’t have a Dr Fauci problem,” said US Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican. “I think any effort to undermine him is not going to be productive.”
The White House has sought to calm the waters, with Trump castigating US Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Director Peter Navarro for an opinion piece in USA Today attacking Fauci, but Trump and the White House have also repeatedly criticized Fauci.
Fauci on Wednesday described those efforts as “bizarre,” telling The Atlantic magazine that “ultimately, it hurts the president to do that.”
Amid the hubbub, former US president Barack Obama weighed in with an appeal for apolitical action.
“The latest data offers a tragic reminder that the virus doesn’t care about spin or ideology,” Obama wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, without naming the president, but clearly referring to Trump.
“The best thing we can do for our economy is to deal with our public health crisis,” Obama added.
Biden appears content to run a minimal campaign with few public appearances, but he nevertheless has sought to seize the momentum from a flailing Trump.
Enjoying favorable polling, including in some traditionally Republican states, Biden denounced Trump for his “complete and utter failure” to combat COVID-19, as he shifts his own electoral strategy.
Biden on Tuesday aired his first campaign ad in Texas, a state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1976, but where polls now put him in a dead heat with Trump.
“If you’re sick, if you’re struggling ... I will not abandon you,” Biden says over images of masked emergency responders, and loved ones communicating via Webcast or through glass.
There is palpable concern in the Republican camp.
Biden leads Trump by 9 percentage points in national polling, according to an aggregate compiled by RealClearPolitics.
A Quinnipiac University poll on Wednesday put him a commanding 15 points ahead, with Trump’s approval rating eroded to 36 percent.
Biden, 77, is also ahead in at least five of the major swing states that could decide the presidential election: Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
A Monmouth University poll on Wednesday reaffirmed Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania — but warned that “voters are evenly divided on who they think will win the Keystone State’s electoral votes this year as a majority believe that their communities hold a number of ‘secret Trump voters.’”
Trump, who has also repeatedly spoken of a “silent majority” of supporters across the nation, is for his part sticking to a limited line of attack — portraying his opponent as a listless old man easily manipulated by the “radical left.”
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