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The pool of battleground states in this poll includes more that Trump carried in 2016 (10) than were won by Hillary Clinton (5), reflecting the reality that the President’s campaign is more on defense than offense across the states. Taken together, though, they represent a more Republican-leaning playing field than the nation as a whole.

The movement in the poll among voters nationwide since June is concentrated among men (they split about evenly in June, but now 56% back Trump, 40% Biden), those between the ages of 35 and 64 (they tilt toward Trump now, but were Biden-leaning in June) and independents (in June, Biden held a 52% to 41% lead, but now it’s a near even 46% Biden to 45% Trump divide).

Trump has also solidified his partisans since June. While 8% of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents in June said they would back Biden, that figure now stands at just 4%. And the President has boosted his backing among conservatives from 76% to 85%.

But the survey suggests that Trump’s voters are a bit more likely to say that they could change their minds by November (12% say so) than are Biden’s backers (7%).

More voters say their choice of candidate is about Trump than say it is about Biden. Nearly 6 in 10 say they support the candidate they do because of their view of Trump (29% say their Biden vote is more to oppose Trump, 30% say they are casting a Trump vote in support of him), while only 32% say Biden is the deciding factor (19% are voting in favor of Biden, 13% casting a ballot to oppose him).

Overall, 54% disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job as president and 42% approve. That’s an uptick since June, and about on par with Trump’s ratings from earlier this year. It still lands the President near the bottom of a list of historical approval ratings for presidents seeking reelection just ahead of their nominating conventions. Trump lands ahead of Jimmy Carter (33% approval) and George H.W. Bush (35%), but below Barack Obama (48%), George W. Bush (49%), Bill Clinton (53%) and Ronald Reagan (54%).

Trump’s favorability rating remains underwater nationally (43% see him favorably, 55% unfavorably), a bit worse than Biden’s 46% favorable to 47% unfavorable even split. In the battleground states, though, voters’ views on the two candidates are almost even: 52% have an unfavorable opinion of Biden, 54% of Trump. Both candidates are viewed favorably by 45% in those states.

Kamala Harris seen as a good pick

Harris joins the ticket with a narrowly positive favorability rating (41% have a favorable view, 38% unfavorable), which is an improvement since May when 32% of Americans said they had a positive view of her and 33% a negative one.

Biden’s selection of Harris is rated as excellent or pretty good by most (52%), and 57% say it reflects favorably on Biden’s ability to make important presidential decisions. Most say she is qualified to be president should that be necessary (57%). And a majority, 62%, say her selection does not have much effect on their vote. People of color, though, are more likely than White people to say her selection makes them more likely to back Biden (28% among people of color, 18% among whites).

Compared with other recent Democratic running mates, Harris fares well. The 30% who call her selection excellent outpaces the share who said so in CNN polling on John Edwards in 2004, Biden in 2008, Joe Lieberman in 2000 or Tim Kaine in 2016. And the 57% who say she is qualified to serve as president if that becomes necessary is only topped by Biden (63%) and Al Gore in 1992 (64%).

On the issues

The poll suggests that supporters of the two candidates are living in alternate universes when it comes to the issues that matter to their vote. Overall, the economy, coronavirus, health care, gun policy and race relations are rated as extremely important by at least 40% of voters. But there are large gaps between Biden and Trump voters on the importance of these issues. Seventy percent of Biden voters say the coronavirus is critically important vs. 24% of Trump voters. Among Trump backers, 57% rate the economy as extremely important, while 37% of Biden voters agree. Majorities of Biden supporters (57% in each case) call health care and race relations extremely important, while only about 1 in 5 Trump backers agree (20% on health care, 22% on race relations).

Biden tops Trump as better able to handle most of the issues tested in the poll: Racial inequality in the US, the coronavirus outbreak, health care and foreign policy. Trump wins out on handling the economy. Voters are closely divided over which candidate would keep Americans safe from harm (50% say Biden would, 47% Trump). And more generally, Biden is more often seen as having “a clear plan for solving the country’s problems” (49% choose Biden to 43% Trump) and as better able to “manage the government effectively” (52% Biden to 44% Trump).

And when it comes to these top issues, nearly all Trump and Biden supporters think their man is the right one for the job. Just 1% of Biden backers say they would trust Trump over Biden to handle racial inequality in the US, and only 2% would trust Trump to handle the coronavirus outbreak. On the flip side, 2% of Trump voters say they would prefer Biden on the economy, and only 4% choose him on the coronavirus outbreak.

Overall, Biden holds the edge on a range of positive traits often seen as valuable in a run for the White House. Most say he cares about people like them (53% Biden, 42% Trump), shares their values (52% Biden to 43% Trump), and is honest and trustworthy (51% Biden to 40% Trump). More also say Biden will unite the country and not divide it (55% Biden to 35% Trump). But in this matchup between two septuagenarians, voters are split over which one has the stamina and sharpness to be president (48% say Trump, 46% Biden).

The CNN Poll was conducted by SSRS August 12 through 15 among a random national sample of 1,108 adults reached on landlines or cellphones by a live interviewer, including 987 registered voters. The survey also includes an oversample of residents of 15 battleground states for a total subsample of 636 adults and 569 registered voters from those states. That subset was weighted to its proper share of the overall adult population of the United States. Results for the full sample have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points. It is 4.0 points among registered voters and 5.4 points for results for registered voters in the battleground states.

With the pick, Biden acknowledged the disappointment that some Democratic women still feel nearly four years after Hillary Clinton lost her bid to be the first female president. That sting had persisted in a historic year when a record number of women ran for president as major contenders yet did not advance into the final round, despite all the energy of the women’s marches and the resurgence of feminism in reaction to Trump.

Now Democratic women and women of color, who are the driving force of the party, will see themselves represented on the national stage.

Though vice presidential picks historically have not made a major impact on the outcome of presidential elections, the Biden campaign hopes that Harris will help shore up his support among suburban women who were drawn to her White House bid, older African American women who are the core of the Democratic Party, as well as younger Black voters, many of whom did not show up at the polls in 2016 for Clinton.

More than 20 years Biden’s junior, Harris is also a vibrant and energetic pick who may help Biden address the concern among some voters about his age. By picking a former rival — who punched him hard as she tried to carve her own path to the White House — Biden drew a direct contrast with Trump, who has shown little capacity for forgiveness and has sought to punish anyone he believes has crossed him.

Biden and Harris will appear together as running mates for the first time on Wednesday in Wilmington, Delaware, to deliver remarks on their vision for restoring “the soul of the nation” and helping working families. They plan to hold a virtual grassroots fundraiser Wednesday evening.

A VP pick who defies easy definition

The varied attacks unleashed on Harris from Trump and his allies Tuesday showed the difficulty of defining the former prosecutor, who was raised in Oakland and Berkeley, California, and went on to serve as district attorney of San Francisco and attorney general of California.

Trump rolled out a scattered, kitchen-sink-style list of criticisms of the senator from California during his news conference, attempting to brand Harris as a “big tax raiser,” a “slasher of funds to the military,” an advocate for “socialized medicine” and one of “the most liberal” members of the US Senate.

But the President seemed most fixated on drawing attention to Harris’ past attacks on both Biden and then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The President repeatedly called her “nasty” in the sexist parlance that he so often uses to describe women he views as his opponents.

Playing into the hands of Biden’s advisers — who want to draw attention to the fact that Biden chose Harris despite her sharp critique, during a June 2019 debate in Miami, of his opposition to busing and his work with segregationist senators — Trump said he was surprised that Biden had chosen someone who had been “very, very, nasty” to the former vice president.

“One of the reasons that it surprised me is — she was probably nastier than even Pocahontas to Joe Biden,” Trump said at the White House on Tuesday, employing the racially offensive name that he uses to describe Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, another former Biden rival.

“She said things during the debates, during the Democratic primary debates, that were horrible about sleepy Joe, and I wouldn’t think that he would have picked her.”

Trump also said he wouldn’t forget Harris’ interrogation of Kavanaugh, who was accused of sexual assault decades ago during the vetting process for his nomination (accusations Kavanaugh denied). From her perch on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Harris was one of his toughest interrogators, in video clips that went viral just like so many other sessions where she questioned Trump nominees in her courtroom style.

“That was a horrible event,” Trump said Tuesday of Harris’ intense questioning of Kavanaugh. “I thought it was terrible for her; I thought it was terrible for a nation. I thought she was the meanest, the most horrible, most disrespectful of anybody at the US Senate.”

Though Trump initially said in 2019 that Harris looked like one of the strongest Democratic contenders when she announced her presidential run, he claimed Tuesday evening that she had been his “number one draft pick” during the veepstakes. He mocked her for doing “very poorly in the primaries,” adding — “and that’s like a poll.”

But the Trump campaign’s challenge in categorizing Harris, given her varied biography and career, was evident in the first statement released about the pick from Trump’s adviser Katrina Pierson.

In the contradictory statement, Pierson said Harris would try to “bury her record as a prosecutor, in order to appease the anti-police extremists controlling the Democrat Party,” but also said Harris had “embraced the left’s radical manifesto” and “is proof that Joe Biden is an empty shell being filled with the extreme agenda of the radicals on the left.”

For Biden, a choice with a personal tie to his son

Biden had seriously vetted nearly a dozen contenders — all women — before making his selection, which unfolded with the utmost secrecy after a week in which he had spoken with the contenders either in person or in face-to-face meetings. A Biden official said the former vice president had called Harris 90 minutes before the announcement to offer her the job, according to CNN’s Jeff Zeleny.

Given the nation’s focus on race relations and the criminal justice issues that Harris has made the focus of her life’s work — from both inside and outside the system as prosecutor and lawmaker — she was a natural fit for this moment in the view of many Democrats.

She was one of the leading sponsors in the US Senate of the recent legislation to curb police misconduct, and an outspoken advocate for revisions that would provide greater accountability for police. In his tweet announcing his choice Tuesday afternoon, Biden argued that Harris has long been a “fearless fighter for the little guy.”

But in Harris, Biden also saw a kindred spirit of his son Beau, the former attorney general of Delaware who died in 2015 at the age of 46 after a battle with brain cancer. Beau Biden became friends with Harris when they were serving as attorneys general at the same time.

“Back when Kamala was Attorney General, she worked closely with Beau,” Biden wrote in one of two tweets announcing the pick. “I watched as they took on the big banks, lifted up working people, and protected women and kids from abuse. I was proud then, and I’m proud now to have her as my partner in this campaign.”

That personal connection clearly helped Biden work through any lingering hard feelings about Harris’ attempts to derail his candidacy during the 2019 Miami debate. On Tuesday, Harris once again vowed to be a loyal partner to Biden as the presidential race rolls into the crucial final months.

“@JoeBiden can unify the American people because he’s spent his life fighting for us. And as president, he’ll build an America that lives up to our ideals,” Harris tweeted. “I’m honored to join him as our party’s nominee for Vice President, and do what it takes to make him our Commander-in-Chief.”

Indeed, asked on Thursday whether a vaccine — 29 prototypes of which are currently being developed and trialed by multiple countries including the United States — would arrive in time for Election Day on November 3, Trump bumped up his personal timetable, characteristically telling anyone listening exactly what they want to hear.

“I’m optimistic that it’ll be probably around that date. I believe we’ll have the vaccine before the end of the year certainly, but around that date, yes. I think so,” the President said, agreeing that an announcement could boost his reelection bid.

“It wouldn’t hurt. It wouldn’t hurt. But … I’m doing it, not for the election. I want it fast because I want to save a lot of lives.”

His rhetoric about vaccines may also be counterproductive to the ultimate goal of ending the crisis. The President’s comments on Thursday drew a rebuke from former Surgeon Gen. Dr. Vivek Murthy, who said it was “very dangerous” to set artificial timelines and cautioned against a perception that the process was being rushed.

“We can’t sacrifice our standards because if we do, it not only hurts people, but it’s going to damage people’s faith in vaccine efforts,” Murthy told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on “The Situation Room” Thursday, at a time when polls show nearly half of Americans wouldn’t take the vaccine even if it was available.

Suspicions of political interference

Everyone would love to share Trump’s optimism. The prospect of many more months of stunted life, huge unemployment caused by the pandemic and another winter likely to bring more sickness and death is dismal.

But it’s hard to take Trump’s assessments seriously. Throughout America’s fight against the novel coronavirus, it has sometimes been difficult to tell whether the President is being deliberately deceptive or does not fully appreciate the details and the scale of the challenge ahead.

It’s the same with a vaccine. While many medical experts believe that a vaccine could be available by early next year for high-risk patients — it could be the middle of next year for it to become widely available. That might mean it could be fall 2021 before normal life really begins to return, long after Trump’s presidential destiny will be decided one way or the other.

Still, as a political device, talking about a Covid-19 vaccine may seem alluring for a President who has seen nearly 160,000 Americans die on his watch in a public health crisis he has denied, neglected and downplayed.

It allows him to play on offense, too. Any Democrat who points out the many complications of vaccine development and who doubts Trump’s optimism can quickly be accused of rooting against the very development that might end the crisis for political reasons.

And there is, it appears, a good story to tell.

By most accounts, Operation Warp Speed, the $10 billion government-funded race for a vaccine, is going well and could produce an effective, safe vaccine that could be mass produced at record speed. If that is the case, Trump will deserve his share of the credit for a multi-agency effort in partnership with the private sector. His cheerleading for a vaccine has contrasted with his suspicion of coronavirus testing — which is now going down in 29 states, even though experts say it needs to be expanded by many multiples to effectively fight the virus. In Washington, presidential enthusiasm and attention is vital to getting action, and the relative pace of sluggish testing and tracing efforts compared to the pace of vaccine development will reflect that.

Ethical questions

The Trump’s administration’s record of bending rules for political gain and cutting legal corners and the way it cavalierly treated human life in the pandemic — demanding swift economic openings, for example — raise a flurry of ethical questions about its trustworthiness in handling the first successful vaccines.

The White House has consistently marginalized scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, who has tried to present a truthful narrative about the dire state of the pandemic that contradicts the consistently rosy and misleading spin preferred by the President and his aides.

On issues like Trump’s demand for all schools to open in the coming weeks, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has come under fierce pressure from the West Wing. With an election looming, regulatory agencies like the Food And Drug Administration could face similar pressure to bend to the President’s will.

Trump, meanwhile, has all but prescribed hydroxcholoroquine from his White House podium, trashing peer-reviewed studies that say it doesn’t work in favor of a disputed analysis and anecdotal soundbites on conservative media.

And given that the administration has politicized almost every aspect of the fight against the virus and has unloaded a daily torrent of lies and misinformation, it will get precious little benefit of the doubt on its handling of the vaccine.

There will also be highly sensitive and potentially life and death decisions subject to medical ethics and scientific fact that will sway which vulnerable populations and even ethnic groups receive the vaccine first.

Nothing about the President’s handling of the worst public health crisis in 100 years suggests he has so far considered those questions — or will want to be guided by moral considerations when it comes to a vaccine.

Fauci’s caution

Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease specialist, shares Trump’s optimism about the possibility of a vaccine — but has also been tempered in his assessments about its immediate impacts.

“When the vaccine becomes available after a 30,000-person-or-more placebo-controlled randomized trial, and it’s shown to be safe and effective, I would get it any time within the timeframe of the people who prioritize it according to ethical principles,” Fauci said on a Politico Pulse Check podcast Thursday.

In an interview with Reuters Wednesday posted on YouTube, the Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree, who is often rebuked by Trump, said that data not politics would dictate when a vaccine became available.

“I’m certain of what the White House would like to see, but I haven’t seen any indication of pressure at this point,” Fauci said.

“As you get into the fall, there — there’s going to be data accumulating, and people are going to be looking at the data … if the data is so bad that you should stop the trial, they say stop. If the data is … even dangerous, they say stop. If the data still needs to be accumulated, they’ll say keep the trial going. If the data looks so good, they may say timeout, approve it because it’s so good.”

FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn has also said that no amount of political pressure will cause his agency to cut corners.

“I have repeatedly said that all FDA decisions have been, and will continue to be, based solely on good science and data. The public can count on that commitment,” Hahn wrote in a Washington Post op-ed.

In an administration in which science has constantly been trumped by politics, those undertakings will be carefully watched in the weeks to come.

The case remains pending in Polk County court. CNN has reached out to the public defender representing Poole Franklin but has not heard back.

Since the incident, Natalia and her family said they have constantly battled with anger, fear, and the teen’s mental and physical recovery.

Natalia has dreamed more than once that the same SUV returns and “runs over in her upper part of her body like it’s going to finish her up,” said Dalila Alonso Miranda, the teen’s mother.

While the state case remains pending, Natalia’s family is calling for federal hate crimes charges to be brought against Poole Franklin.

“If you don’t charge someone with a hate crime when they tell you that that’s why they did it, then when will you?” Alonso Miranda said.

More hate crimes reported, less federal prosecutions

Bias against Black or African American people overwhelmingly comprises the largest category of reported hate crime offenses pertaining to race, according to the FBI data.

In the past few months, more incidents involving Asians and Black people were reported than in the previous two years, Levin says, but it doesn’t mean the anti-Latino sentiment is gone.

“We have ticking time bombs across the country and we don’t know who they’re going to hit exactly but we know who they hate,” Levin said.

Gerstenfeld, whose primary field of study is hate crimes, said there could be more incidents that remain unknown to authorities because victims don’t feel comfortable reporting them.

“Hate crimes in general don’t get reported to the police very often, but particularly with some communities of victims. Latinos, especially if they’re undocumented or they have poor relationships with police, are not going to report them,” Gerstenfeld told CNN.

‘We are in America, we don’t speak Spanish here’

The mother, Vasquez, said that when one of the women approached her, she asked her daughter to translate and the woman began yelling at them and assaulted them. CNN is identifying the mother by her last name for privacy and security concerns.

“She yelled, ‘We are in America, we don’t speak Spanish here, speak English!,'” Vasquez, 46, told CNN. The mother did not identify which one of the two women yelled at her.

During the altercation, Vasquez said she was bitten on her right thumb and hit multiple times while her daughter was punched in the face multiple times and pulled by the hair.

Two women — Jenny Leigh Ennamorati, 25, and Stephanie Armstrong, 25 — were each charged with two counts of violating constitutional rights with bodily injury and two counts of assault and battery charges, the district attorney said. Both cases have probable cause hearings scheduled for September.

They told police they heard the Vasquezes laughing and speaking Spanish and believed they were making fun of them, according to a police report, which redacted the women’s names but they were later released by prosecutors.

CNN has reached out to an attorney representing Ennamorati but has not heard back. William J. Barabino, an attorney representing Armstrong, said video recorded by a bystander and the “accuser statement” shows that his client “never laid a hand on anyone.”

“Eventually, she went over to the physical dispute and can be seen extending both arms in an effort for all to calm down. That isn’t a crime and we expect that a judge or a jury will eventually reach that same conclusion,” Barabino said in a statement emailed to CNN.

The incident has haunted Vasquez since then. For weeks, she says her daughter would wake up scared and crying at night and constantly asked why anyone would treat them like that. They have been mostly at home since the incident because of the pandemic and her daughter has been talking with a counselor but Vasquez is concerned about how she would interacts with more people when classes resume.

Fear may have kept many other victims silent, Vasquez says, but she can’t let hatred and bigotry go unpunished. Even after the Vietnamese restaurant where she worked closed due to the pandemic and she struggled to find another job for nearly four months, she hasn’t stop talking with others about the incident and working with her attorneys.

“There’s Asians, Latinos, everything in this country and still others haven’t understood that we deserve the same respect than people who were born in America,” Vasquez said.

While there’s still no guarantee the vaccines being developed will prove effective, at least one vaccine trial in the US has entered its third phase. In the meantime, health officials are urging states to implement stricter measures after weeks of surges in new cases following reopenings that mostly began in May. Nationwide, there have been more than 1,000 deaths five times in the past week. And in hospitals throughout several states, doctors report more incoming patients and maxed out ICUs.

While President Donald Trump said Monday some governors should be quicker about reopening states, White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said over the weekend there are states showing a concerning increase in positivity rates and new cases. Those states include Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. Health experts, she said, recommending “100% of people” wear masks in all indoor public places and that social and indoor gatherings are limited to less than 10 people.

States crack down on social gatherings

Birx said that among the states officials are tracking, there seems to be a “household” pattern of infections that starts with young people, usually less than 30 years old. Those residents, who are usually asymptomatic, then transmit the virus to their parents who then transmit it to other, older residents, she said.

In Mississippi, about 80% of surveyed coronavirus patients said they had attended a social gathering, including funerals and birthday parties, where people weren’t adhering to social distancing. And in New Jersey, health officials said they have seen multiple outbreaks arising from gatherings of young people.

To stop those infections, states have cracked down on congregate settings — like bars — and pleaded with younger groups to heed guidelines including wearing masks and social distancing.

“Our city like many others across the country are seeing an increase in COVID-19 cases, and there is clear evidence of community spread — especially indoors in places where groups are gathering,” Mayor Andrew Ginther said in a statement. “We’re also seeing a clear increase among younger people, and we know that bars and nightclubs have been the source of outbreaks locally.”

In Kentucky, the governor also imposed new restrictions on restaurants, shut bars down for the next two weeks and recommended schools postpone in-person instruction until late August.

“It’s time to do the things that we got to do, given the stage that we’re in, to control this virus,” the governor said. “And I know there ended up being questions out there about ‘why didn’t you take this step four weeks ago, or six weeks ago?’ Listen, this virus doesn’t care about our schedules.”

New York and Miami issuing hundreds of coronavirus-related citations

But in Miami and New York, officials have doubled down on enforcement.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Monday the state had issued at least 132 violations over the weekend to bars and restaurants for not following coronavirus-related regulations. Most of them were in New York City, Cuomo said.

Since the state began reopening, at least 40 establishments have had their liquor licenses suspended as a result of violations and 10 of those suspensions occurred since Friday, the governor said. The lack of compliance with social distancing policies in bars and restaurants among young people is a concern for his administration, Cuomo said.

Meanwhile, in Miami-Dade County — which has reported more cases than all but 12 states — police issued more than 300 citations in 10 days to individuals and businesses who weren’t abiding by the local mask order.

“The growth rate (of cases) has shown flattening since we implemented the masks in public rule and we’re following the advice of our health care professionals and our hospital administrators who are telling us that what we have to do now is focus on enforcement,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez told CNN Sunday. “We created a special task force just for that and we’ve been issuing hundreds of tickets over the course of the week.”

Phase 3 of vaccine trial in US underway

Officials are now using precautions like face masks and social distancing to curb the spread of the virus, but soon the country may have even more help.

Vaccine maker Moderna started its final trial of a coronavirus vaccine in the US Monday, and volunteers from dozens of sites across the country will participate in the study, Fauci said Monday.

“There are 89 sites distributed throughout the country,” Fauci said. “They are widely distributed as a matter of fact in areas where there is clearly as of right now active infection going on.”

There are expected to be 30,000 adult volunteers in the Phase 3 trial. The first patient was dosed at a site in Savannah, Georgia, on Monday.

“I think we are going to get a good sampling of the activity of virus transmission that’s currently going on in the country.”

Fauci said that a vaccine likely won’t be widely available to people in the US until “several months” into 2021.

And this part of the US trial can’t be sped up, a vaccine expert told CNN Monday.

“Typically vaccine development programs take 15 years on average. This vaccine development program is probably going to take a year and a half,” said Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and professor of pediatrics at the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“The one thing you can’t truncate or coalesce or overlap is the Phase 3 trial,” Offit said. “The proof is in the pudding. The Phase 3 trial’s the pudding and now you’re going to test hopefully 10, 15, 20,000 people that will get this vaccine, 15,000 people that will get placebo and you’ll see to what extent this is really safe and you’ll see to what extent it’s effective.”

The anchor of Trump’s new, punchier briefings is a scripted opening in which he cherry picks the most hopeful aspects of a pandemic that has destroyed the rhythm of American daily life and turned the economy upside down.

But in his two briefings so far, his rejigged approach seems more like a cosmetic political exercise than an attempt to provide the country with meaningful public health advice as the pandemic gets worse.

One problem is that he will not appear alongside public health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx.

“They’re briefing me, I’m meeting them. I just spoke to Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx is right outside and they’re giving me all of everything they know as of this point in time and I’m giving the information to you,” Trump said Wednesday.

“I think it’s probably a very concise way of doing it. It seems to be working out very well.”

Trump, however, went on to make misleading statements that would never have been uttered by a public health expert but that he seems to think are politically helpful. He blamed migrants from Mexico crossing the closed border for causing a spike in cases, along with young people attending anti-racism protests.

The President also claimed that kids with strong immune systems don’t bring the coronavirus home and that all schools can open in the fall. He did not provide any scientific evidence for the assertion or explain, for instance, why children who often pick up the flu and colds in class would not be at similar risk for transmitting the coronavirus.

And yet again, Trump claimed falsely that the United States is doing “amazing things” in comparison to other countries as it fights the virus. In fact, the US lags fellow highly industrialized nations in suppressing infection curves and leads the world in infections and deaths.

“The President doesn’t want doctors Fauci or Birx there because they are real time fact checkers,” Dr. Jonathan Reiner, professor of medicine at George Washington University, told CNN’s Kate Bolduan.

“Without them he can say things which are either misleading or out and out false,” Reiner said, using as an example the President’s misleading interpretation of statistics on a positive rate in testing.

“The truth is the truth and the more the public understands, the better the public will adhere to, you know, prudent policy,” he said.

Trump twists science on school openings

Trump’s approach to managing the virus — that tends to put his own political interests ahead of science-based reasoning — extends to reopening schools, which he wants to do so that the country will look like it’s back to some semblance of normality ahead of the fall election.

But experts disagree with his calls.

“He wants to open the schools, regardless of what the science says. And the science is pretty clear. If you open schools in areas or school districts where there’s a high level of virus transmissions, say if you were going to do this in Houston today or San Antonio or Phoenix, it will fail,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University.

“It will fail because not only are the kids transmitting the virus but adults, vendors are going in and out of the schools,” Hotez said on CNN’s “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.”

“What will happen within two weeks, teachers will start going into the hospitals, going into ICUs. It’ll be bus drivers, cafeteria workers and parents will start getting sick. It’s untenable. It’s not sustainable.”

The President also dwells on the few positive developments amid a grim time as the country battles a virus that has already killed more than 140,000 Americans.

On Wednesday, he touted a new deal with Pfizer to produce and deliver 100 million doses of a vaccine when it becomes available. With an eye on older voters who have cooled on him, according to latest polls, he announced new measures to help nursing homes and long-term care facilities.

Still, for once, and despite much of his presentation being highly misleading, the President did not destroy his own strategy with ill discipline.

He largely avoided getting sucked into ill-tempered clashes with reporters and got out of the encounter after only a few questions. So if his return to the podium is a political tactic rather than a genuine effort to change his approach on a virus he has minimized and mismanaged, he may have at least done himself a modicum of good in the eyes of his campaign team.

Trump’s law-and-order pitch to the suburbs

Another prong of the President’s refashioned electoral strategy was on display earlier Wednesday when he announced he would “surge” federal law enforcement agents to Chicago and other cities, despite the opposition of local and state officials.

The plan, another way in which Trump has used his executive power to fulfill personal political goals, solidifies his effort to portray Democrats as weak on crime and to create a picture of a nation under siege from radical, anarchistic elements and staggering under what he says are liberal efforts to destroy policing. The move follows the dispatch of federal officials to Portland, Oregon, who have been seen arresting protesters while wearing camouflage uniforms and without identifying their name and rank. Critics have warned that the President is indulging authoritarian tendencies and hyping a law-and-order crisis to discredit Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

“We’ll work every single day to restore public safety, protect our nation’s children and bring violent perpetrators to justice,” Trump said. “We’ve been doing it and you’ve been seeing what’s happening all around the country.”

“We’ve just started this process and frankly we have no choice but to get involved,” the President said, announcing deployments for the FBI, US Marshals Service, the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

From Trump’s point of view, the effort makes political sense. As Democratic mayors and governors balk at his pressure and say they will not accept Trump’s “troops” and “secret police” on their streets, he can accuse them of not taking the safety of Americans seriously. It’s a pitch aimed directly at suburban voters who have peeled away from Republicans since the 2016 election. Trump has repeatedly hit on law-and-order themes, apparently designed to play on fears of White voters, who Trump thinks see others as an enemy that threatens their vision of traditional American culture.

As a Trump campaign press release put it in an email on Wednesday: “Your family won’t be safe in Biden’s America.”

“The way he deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” Biden said at a virtual town hall hosted by the Service Employees International Union.

“No sitting president has ever done this,” he said. “Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed, that tried to get elected president; he’s the first one that has.”

Trump escalates showdown with China

In another example of the way Trump is using presidential power to bolster a campaign theme, the administration on Wednesday announced the shock closure of China’s consulate in Houston, Texas.

The State Department accused Beijing of engaging in massive illegal spying and influence operations for years, but did not say whether there was an individual incident that triggered the move.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been touring Europe seeking to get the support of US allies in a broad front against Beijing.

There is credible evidence to suggest that China has been stealing US intellectual property and has used its espionage services to try to infiltrate US government, military, science and intelligence establishments.

But the new crackdown, which is accelerating a serious deterioration in ties between the established superpower and the rising power, comes as the White House seeks to scapegoat China — the origin of the novel coronavirus — to cover up Trump’s earlier denials that the pandemic would threaten the US.

But just as he cannot control what happens next with the virus, Trump is now vulnerable to however China might react to the closure of its Houston consulate. While bashing Beijing has long been a tactic in presidential campaigns, it’s not clear that all voters will welcome a new epochal clash with a powerful foreign rival — especially one exacerbated for personal political gain.

Merkley also tweeted one video of such an arrest showing two masked, camouflaged individuals with generic “police” patches, detain a person dressed in a black outfit and place them in an unmarked van before driving away.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) admitted to being one of the agencies involved in arresting protesters.

“Violent anarchists have organized events in Portland over the last several weeks with willful intent to damage and destroy federal property, as well as, injure federal officers and agents,” the agency said in a statement to CNN. “These criminal actions will not be tolerated.”

The statement said CBP agents suspected the individual seen in the video Merkley re-tweeted of “assaults against federal agents or destruction of federal property,” and that they moved the individual to a safer location for questioning after they saw “a large and violent mob move towards” them. CNN could not independently verify what happened before or after the video was recorded.

CBP Commissioner Mark Morgan tweeted the agency will continue to arrest “violent criminals that are destroying federal property.” He also said CBP personnel are clearly marked as federal officers and have unique identifiers.

“You will not see names on their uniforms b/c these same violent criminals use this information to target them & their families, putting both at risk. As Acting Commissioner, I will not let that happen!” Morgan tweeted.

Portland Mayor Tim Wheeler demanded Friday that President Donald Trump send the federal officers home.

“This is not the America we want. This is not the Portland we want,” Wheeler said at a news conference. “We’re demanding that the President remove these additional troops that he sent to our city. It is not helping to contain or de-escalate the situation it’s obviously having exactly the opposite impact.

Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf, who visited the city Thursday, defended the actions of his officers, saying in a tweet, “DHS officers were assaulted with lasers and frozen water bottles from violent criminals attempting to tear down federal property. 2 officers were injured.”

“Our men and women in uniform are patriots,” he said in another tweet that featured uniformed officers who looked to be similar to the ones shown in the video from earlier in the week.

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, described the arrests as “a blatant abuse of power by the federal government” in a tweet Thursday.

Brown tweeted she told Wolf “that the federal government should remove all federal officers from our streets.”

“His response showed me he is on a mission to provoke confrontation for political purposes,” she tweeted. “He is putting both Oregonians and local law enforcement officers in harm’s way.”

ACLU files lawsuit against DHS

Mark Pettibone, a 29-year-old Portland resident, told CNN he was taken by unknown federal agents Wednesday.

“I was kidnapped off the street in my own city for non-violently protesting and showing up in solidarity,” Pettibone said. “About four people just out of the van that pulled up in front of me, and my first reaction was I tried to get away.”

Pettibone said he was held for about two hours and plans to talk to the National Lawyers Guild, but will follow up with the ACLU.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon sued DHS Friday over the arrests.

The ACLU says DHS agents “have been deployed over the widespread objections of local leaders and community members, have been indiscriminately using tear gas, rubber bullets, and acoustic weapons against protesters, journalists, and legal observers.”

“This is a fight to save our democracy,” said Kelly Simon, interim legal director with the ACLU of Oregon.

“Usually when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street we call it kidnapping — what is happening now in Portland should concern everyone in the US,” the ACLU’s tweet read. “These actions are flat-out unconstitutional and will not go unanswered.”

“As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not,” Fauci said in one interview. In another, Fauci responded to the President’s claim that “99%” of coronavirus cases in the United States were “totally harmless,” saying he didn’t know where the President got the number, and suggesting Trump’s interpretation was “obviously not the case.”

Trump has taken to publicly criticizing Fauci on national television.

“Dr. Fauci is a nice man, but he’s made a lot of mistakes,” Trump said last week, undermining the public health expert whom Americans say in polls they trust more than the President.

In recent interviews, he openly questioned the advice he’d received from Fauci at the start of the outbreak.

“I think we are in a good place. I disagree with him,” Trump said in an interview Tuesday when questioned about Fauci’s assertion the US is still “knee-deep in the first wave” of the pandemic.

One senior administration official told CNN that some officials within the White House do not trust Fauci. According to the source, those officials think Fauci doesn’t have the best interest of the President, pointing to interviews where he openly disagrees with what Trump has said.

Other administration officials have told CNN that while they have disagreements with Fauci’s methods, they don’t doubt his motives, and that his only concern was public health.

“We need people more than ever to speak truth to power, to be able to level with the American people about what we’re facing with this pandemic, how to get it under control, how to protect ourselves and our families,” Schiff continued. “That’s what Dr. Fauci has been trying to do and by sidelining him the President is once again interfering with an effective response to this pandemic.”

Kathleen Sebelius, who served as secretary of Health and Human Services under former President Barack Obama, told CNN efforts to discredit Fauci and other scientists are “potentially very, very dangerous” as the US and other countries work toward a coronavirus vaccine.

“I think people want to know from the scientists that the vaccine is safe, that it is effective, that it will not do more harm than good,” she told Blitzer on “The Situation Room.”

“And if the public scientists have been discredited, if the President says ‘don’t believe them, you can’t listen to them, they’re often wrong,’ we have then undermined a national vaccination campaign which is an essential step to bringing this horrible period to an end.”

In response to questions about the White House appearing to actively discredit Fauci, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at Health and Human Services, Michael Caputo, said there was no White House-versus-the scientists narrative, and provided a statement.

“We have great faith in the capacity of all of our scientists and doctors on the coronavirus taskforce to impart necessary public health information. People like Admiral (Brett) Giroir, Surgeon General (Jerome) Adams and others are carrying these messages very effectively,” Caputo said in the statement, although he did not directly answer questions about Fauci.

This story has been updated with comments from Rep. Adam Schiff and Kathleen Sebelius.

“We do know that the new virus is fitter. It doesn’t look at first glance as if it is worse,” Saphire said.

The mutation affects the spike protein — the structure the virus uses to get into the cells it infects. Now the researchers are checking to see whether this affects whether the virus can be controlled by a vaccine. Current vaccines being tested mostly target the spike protein, but they were made using older strains of the virus.

The study, published in the journal Cell, confirms earlier work suggesting the mutation had made the new variant of virus more common. The researchers call the new mutation G614, and they show that it has almost completely replaced the first version to spread in Europe and the US, one called D614.

No effect on patient survival

“Our global tracking data show that the G614 variant in Spike has spread faster than D614,” theoretical biologist Bette Korber of Los Alamos National Laboratory and colleagues wrote in their report. “We interpret this to mean that the virus is likely to be more infectious,” they added. “Interestingly, we did not find evidence of G614 impact on disease severity.”

This could be good news, said Lawrence Young, a professor of medical oncology at the UK’s University of Warwick, who was not involved in the study.

“The current work suggests that while the G614 variant may be more infectious, it is not more pathogenic. There is a hope that as SARS-CoV-2 infection spreads, the virus might become less pathogenic,” he said in a statement.

The team tested samples taken from patients across Europe and the US and sequenced the genomes. They compared these genome sequences to what’s been shared publicly. Comparing these sequences helped them draw a map of the spread of the two forms.

“Through March 1, 2020, the G614 variant was rare outside of Europe, but the end of March it had increased in frequency worldwide,” they wrote.

Even when the D614 form had caused widespread epidemics, in places such as Wales and Nottingham in England, as well as in Washington state, G614 took over once it appeared, they found.

“The increase in G614 frequency often continues well after stay-at-home orders are in place and past the subsequent two-week incubation period,” they added. There are a few exceptions, including the Santa Clara, California, area and Iceland, where the older, D614 form was never replaced by the newer, G variant.

Three to nine times more infectious

The new version seems to multiply faster in the upper respiratory tract — the nose, sinuses and throat — which would explain why it passes around more easily, the researchers said.

But tests on 1,000 hospitalized coronavirus patients in Britain showed those infected with the new version did not fare any worse than those who caught the original strain.

David Montefiore of Duke University and colleagues tested the virus in the lab. “We were able to test whether the G form of the virus was more infectious than the D form,” Montefiore, director of the Laboratory for AIDS Vaccine Research and Development, told CNN.

“All the results agreed that the G form was three to nine times more infectious than the D form,” he added. “We now had experimental evidence that supported, in part, what Bette was seeing in her analysis of the sequences across the globe — the G form had a fitness advantage in terms of infectivity.”

The lab tests of the virus in action confirmed what the genetic maps had shown.

“These findings suggest that the newer form of the virus may be even more readily transmitted than the original form. Whether or not that conclusion is ultimately confirmed, it highlights the value of what were already good ideas: to wear masks and to maintain social distancing,” Korber said in a statement.

Other mutations often go along with the G614 mutation, but it’s not clear what effect they have. “The earliest sequence we detected that carried all four mutations was sampled in Italy on Feb. 20,” they wrote. “Within days, this haplotype was sampled in many countries in Europe.”

The G614 mutation can be neutralized by convalescent serum — the blood product taken from people who have recovered from a coronavirus infection, Saphire said. Her team tested blood donated by six coronavirus survivors in San Diego.

“We looked to see whether the range of antibodies in the blood of the people was just as effective at neutralizing the new virus as the old virus and it was. It was, in fact, a little better,” she said.

“That was a relief.”

The researchers had worried that if the new mutation made the virus grow faster and to higher levels, it would take more immune system effort to neutralize it. “In these six San Diegans, that wasn’t the case,” Saphire said.

More work is needed, of course, to solidify the findings and to see what the changes mean for the epidemic and for patients, the researchers said.

“There are potential consequences for the vaccines. We are actively investigating those possible consequences,” Montefiore said.

And, of course, they’re keeping an eye out for other mutations. “We might have dodged a bullet with this particular mutation, Saphire said. “However, that is not to say that another mutation couldn’t come on top of this one,” she added.

“It would behoove us to remain vigilant.”