First Thing: US Covid deaths just passed 200,000 – and winter is coming

Trump says it’s ‘a shame’ the US death toll has doubled in just four months. Plus, the people losing loved ones to QAnon conspiracy theories

Good morning,

Four months after the US coronavirus death toll topped 100,000, it has doubled to 200,000. With winter on the way, and new cases still at about 35,000 per day, there is so far no sign that the virus’s spread can be slowed. Scientists have urged Americans to get the flu vaccine, to prevent the nation’s stretched healthcare services being overwhelmed by the double threat of Covid-19 and flu.

Asked by reporters to comment on the US loss of life, which is equivalent to a 9/11 every few days, Donald Trump on Tuesday described it as “a shame”, but claimed that “if we didn’t do it properly and do it right, you’d have 2.5m deaths.”

Essential workers are burned out by the pandemic, according to national polls, which found them suffering from fatigue, stress and anxiety caused by increased workloads, understaffing and their personal fears over Covid-19.

Trump blamed China for the Covid ‘plague’ in UN speech

Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, offered starkly different responses to the pandemic in their pre-recorded speeches to the United Nations general assembly on Tuesday, with the US president accusing China of having “unleashed this plague onto the world”, while Xi said the battle against the virus was an opportunity for international cooperation.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, described today as the international community’s “1945 moment” – an opportunity to rebuild after a global catastrophe, but amid the risk of a new cold war, this time between the US and China.

China will be carbon neutral by 2060, Xi pledged, marking a potentially major turning point in the UN’s efforts to force governments to act on the climate crisis. China is currently the world’s biggest carbon emitter.

Trump’s ban on the popular Chinese app WeChat will seriously disrupt the daily communications of Chinese Americans, drawing them into the trade war between the two countries.

Romney dashed Democrat hopes of blocking RBG’s replacement

Mitt Romney has dramatically boosted Trump’s chances of replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the US supreme court, after the Utah senator said he would support a vote on confirming the president’s nominee. Some Democrats had hoped Romney – who earlier this year voted to impeach Trump – would oppose such a vote before the election. But with his support, Mitch McConnell now almost certainly has sufficient votes to ram through a confirmation.

Replacing RBG with a conservative judge will change the courts political balance, rock the election and potentially affect US society for decades to come, as Moira Donegan explains in the latest Today in Focus podcast.

Democrats still hold the trump cards, argues David Litt, who says progressives must simply start mimicking McConnell’s “constitutional hardball”:

If Trump and McConnell rush through the confirmation of an extremist, partisan judge, cementing a 6-3 majority, the calculation for Democrats will change completely. Even moderate members of the party are likely to conclude that they simply don’t have much to lose by acting more aggressively.

Cindy McCain publicly endorsed Joe Biden

The widow of one-time GOP presidential nominee John McCain has publicly endorsed this year’s Democratic hopeful, Joe Biden. Cindy McCain tweeted that there was “only one candidate in this race who stands up for our values as a nation” – and that was Biden.

Speaking to donors on Tuesday, Biden said McCain’s endorsement had been spurred by disparaging comments the president reportedly made about the military and US war dead, “about how my son and John and others who are heroes, who served their country. You know, he said they’re ‘losers, suckers’.”

Beto O’Rourke is becoming Biden’s greatest ally in the Democrat’s bid to swing Texas in November, reports Ed Pilkington. Trump is just one point ahead in the state, which has been red since 1980.

Biden’s big transition team is gearing up to face an array of unprecedented challenges from day one, reports Daniel Strauss – including the possibility that the election outcome itself could take weeks to resolve.

In other news…

About 380 whales have died on the coast of Tasmania in one of the world’s worst recorded mass stranding events, with more than 450 long-finned pilot whales caught on sandbanks and beaches – only about 50 of them have been rescued.

A new generation of cheaper, more powerful batteries for electric vehicles is still three years away, the chief executive of Tesla, Elon Musk, told shareholders on Tuesday.

The original draft of Trump’s memo firing James Comey was “excruciatingly juvenile, disorganized and brimming with spite, incoherent and narcissistic”, according to a new book by a top prosecutor who worked on the Mueller investigation.

Mexico’s drug war has left nearly 39,000 unidentified bodies in the country’s morgues, according to an investigation which found that the facilities are often unable to handle the volume of corpses brought in for autopsies.

Great reads

The queer rodeo stars bucking tradition

Photographer Luke Gilford was born in Colorado, the son of a rodeo champion, and never felt at home in a world he saw as “very homophobic and conservative”. Until, that is, he discovered gay rodeos – which are now the subject of his first monograph, as he tells Dale Berning Sawa.

Losing loved ones to the QAnon conspiracy theory

QAnon has proved useful to some Republicans, who are willing to harness the baseless conspiracy theory to garner fresh support. But for those with loved ones convinced by its nonsense claims about a secret cabal of powerful pedophiles, reports Cecilia Saixue Watt, it is destroying lives and relationships.

Opinion: RBG died trying to solve sexism in America

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an icon for American feminists, and a role model for those who are more bookworm than rabble-rouser, says Jill Filipovic.

For today’s young women, who were raised in an era where being a ‘good girl’ meant being a smart girl, Ginsburg’s success represented the pinnacle of what we were promised: that hard work pays off; that if you’re meticulous enough in all you do, you don’t need to be the loudest or the most intimidating or even the most charismatic to make change happen.

Last Thing: The Comey Rule is a devastating portrayal of Trump

Showtime’s new drama The Comey Rule is “a horror film”, wrote one reviewer, “and the monster is Donald Trump”. The miniseries will probably anger Republicans with its damning portrayal of the president, writes David Smith – while Democrats may dismiss its broadly sympathetic depiction of James Comey.

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