Presidential elections are often won and lost on the economy, so both candidates seized on new Labor Department data released Friday that showed employers were continuing to bring back furloughed workers, but at a slower pace than in the spring, and that the unemployment rate had fallen.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. delivered a speech in Delaware in which he faulted President Trump for failing to control the coronavirus outbreak, which continues to ravage the economy, leaving millions of Americans still out of work.
“Donald Trump may be the only president in modern history to leave office with fewer jobs than when he took office,” Mr. Biden said, noting that it appeared that many temporary layoffs were becoming permanent and the nation has yet to recover 11.5 million jobs, more than half of the jobs it lost.
While some had initially hoped that this would prove to be a V-shaped recession — a sharp downturn, followed by a fast rebound — Mr. Biden said that “economists are starting to call this recession a K-shaped recession, which is a fancy phrase for what’s wrong with everything about Trump’s presidency.”
“The K means those at the top see things go up,” Mr. Biden said, “and those in the middle and below are seeing things go down, and get worse.”
President Trump, for his part, touted the unemployment rate, which fell to 8.4 percent in August, down significantly from a high of 14.7 percent in April, the worst since the Great Depression, and 10.2 percent in July.
“That is many, many months ahead of schedule,” Mr. Trump said. “They said you won’t break 10 percent until at least next year some time. And we just hit 8.4 percent, and we’re going down rapidly.”
That drop brings the rate below the peak of the last recession a decade ago, when unemployment briefly hit 10 percent. But joblessness remains higher than the peak of many past recessions.
When a reporter asked Mr. Trump if the jobs figures were good enough, given that at this rate it would take a year to recover all the jobs that have been lost since the pandemic struck, Mr. Trump responded, “I think what’s happening is you’re going to see tremendous growth in the very near future,” and continued to hold out hope that a vaccine would be rolled out soon.
WILMINGTON, Del. — A visibly angry Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Friday lashed President Trump over reporting that Mr. Trump had made extraordinarily disrespectful remarks about fallen soldiers, saying that such words would confirm that the Republican is unfit to serve as commander-in-chief.
The comments came a day after a report by The Atlantic that Mr. Trump had referred to American soldiers killed in combat during World War I as “losers” and “suckers” and had repeatedly shown disdain for military service at other points in his presidency. Mr. Trump has denied the reporting.
“If what is written in The Atlantic is true, it’s disgusting,” Mr. Biden said in remarks he delivered in a gymnasium a short drive from his home. “It affirms what most of us believe to be true: that Donald Trump is not fit to be commander in chief.”
Ticking through a list of other well-documented instances in which Mr. Trump has dismissed the sacrifices of military veterans, including those of the late Senator John McCain, Mr. Biden continued, “President Trump has demonstrated he has no sense of service, no loyalty to any cause other than himself.”
Mr. Biden’s late son, Beau Biden, served in the Iraq war, and Mr. Biden, who is keenly attuned to the death toll of American troops, often concludes his remarks with the phrase, “May God protect our troops.”
A palpably outraged Mr. Biden, who noted at times he was trying to keep his language in check in an effort to strike a presidential tone, spoke in strikingly personal terms on Friday about his son’s service. With barely concealed fury, he said that Beau Biden “wasn’t a ‘sucker.’ The servicemen and women he served with, particularly those who did not come home, were not ‘losers.’”
He called the reporting “damning” and said that it appeared to be true, adding, “I’ve just never been as disappointed in my whole career with a leader.”
“It is sick,” he said at another point. “It is deplorable. It is so un-American. It is so unpatriotic.”
Mr. Trump has denied the reporting, which cited several sources but did not name them.
Military veterans often lean Republican, but in 2018 a number of the most prominent Democratic House candidates were veterans, and Mr. Biden, who has been endorsed by a long list of Republican national security experts, hopes to appeal to more voters with ties to the military.
Mr. Biden’s criticism of Mr. Trump came in a speech that was otherwise focused on the economy, an area that has been a source of political strength for the president, though the ravages of the pandemic have threatened his standing on the issue. In a national Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday, likely voters were evenly split on whether Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden would do a better job handling the economy.
“You can’t have an economic comeback when almost 1,000 Americans die each day from Covid,” Mr. Biden said, faulting the president over his handling of the virus.
The Biden campaign and leading Democrats quickly seized on a report in The Atlantic that President Trump had privately referred to American soldiers who died in combat as “losers” and “suckers,” saying it revealed Mr. Trump to be a “coward” motivated by self-interest rather than self-sacrifice.
“If, what is written in The Atlantic is true, it’s disgusting,” Joseph R. Biden Jr. said. “It affirms what most of us believe to be true, that Donald Trump is not fit to be commander in chief.”
Mr. Trump continued to deny the report. “It was a totally fake story. And that was confirmed by many people who were actually there,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Friday. “I’ve done more for the military than almost anybody else.”
Earlier Friday morning, on a call with reporters set up by the Biden campaign, Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat who was severely wounded while serving as a helicopter pilot in Iraq, singled out a section of the story in which Mr. Trump reportedly shunned the presence of wounded veterans at public events.
“I’ll take my wheelchair and my titanium legs over his bone spurs any day,” she said, referring to the minor ailment Mr. Trump cited to obtain a medical deferment to avoid service in the Vietnam War.
“I am not shocked to hear more instances of Donald Trump belittling those who have shown more bravery than he is capable of,” said Ms. Duckworth, who was among the contenders to become Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s running mate.
Aides to Mr. Biden plan to make Mr. Trump’s history of disparaging service members a staple of their attacks down the homestretch, three senior Biden campaign officials said on Friday.
“According to Trump, the winners in life are those who put themselves before all and the losers are those who don’t,” Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father who represented Virginia at the Democratic National Convention last month, said on the call.
“His soul is that of a coward,” added Mr. Khan, who delivered a blistering rebuke of Mr. Trump at the 2016 Democratic convention, citing the legacy of sacrifice left by his son Humayun, an Army officer killed by a suicide attack in Iraq in 2004.
Mr. Trump responded to that speech by saying he too had “made a lot of sacrifices,” and went on to cite his career as a developer who had built “great structures.”
Late Thursday, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic magazine, reported that Mr. Trump had canceled a scheduled 2018 appearance at a World War I cemetery in France because he was afraid the rainy weather would muss up his hair — and because he believed those who died in combat had made the foolish decision to throw away their lives.
Mr. Trump said: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers,” according to Mr. Goldberg, a longtime foreign and military affairs reporter, citing four unnamed people with “firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day.”
On the same trip, the article said, he referred to American Marines slain in combat at Belleau Wood — one of the most important American engagements of the war — as “suckers” for getting killed.
At a press briefing on Friday, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, dismissed the report. “I don’t believe a word of what was in The Atlantic article,” he said, adding that in his two and a half years “working side-by-side with the president, I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Long before The Atlantic published an article on Thursday night depicting President Trump disparaging America’s war dead, liberal veterans groups had been feverishly working in battleground states to appeal to veterans and military family members, a cornerstone of President Trump’s base.
That effort got a significant jolt in both interest and money, and the attention of Joseph R. Biden Jr., in the hours after the article appeared.
By Friday morning, Democrats, especially those with a military background, were reacting with both outrage and a sense of opportunity, denouncing Mr. Trump in news conferences and news releases and assuring veterans and military families that they had their backs.
The largest liberal veteran organization, Vote Vets, released an online ad featuring the parents of troops slain in Iraq and Afghanistan, one speaking in Spanish. In the first five hours after it went up, the group said it raised $100,000 from 2,500 donors.
Mr. Biden issued a statement early Friday afternoon deeply critical of the remarks attributed to Mr. Trump, noting that it was part of a long pattern of Mr. Trump dismissing veterans and their concerns.
The idea behind the appeal to veterans is not to win a majority of their vote, which most Democrats consider nearly impossible, but to peel away a small percentage of persuadable veterans and military family members. While Mr. Trump’s popularity has fallen steadily among troops over the past four years, according to polls, it remains high compared with other subsets of voters.
But in an election that will be won on the margins in key battleground states, Democrats are hoping small movements will help, especially in states like North Carolina, Florida and Arizona, where in 2016 Mr. Trump won twice as many voters with a military background than Hillary Clinton did. In such states, a small number of veteran and military votes, supplementing a base of Black and Hispanic voters, could be enough for Democrats to win.
“In a close race, everything and everyone matters,” said Nathan Gonzales, the editor of Inside Elections, a nonpartisan analysis organization.
President Trump wasn’t simply furious that the flags on federal buildings had been lowered to half-staff to honor the late Senator John McCain in August 2018: He actually tried to have them raised, again, on all buildings across the country, according to a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security.
In an interview on Friday, the ex-official, Miles Taylor, said he was in Australia on a counterterrorism trip when he and others on the trip learned of Mr. McCain’s death. Soon, said Mr. Taylor, he started getting phone calls from Washington.
“I get someone from the White House, a senior person there, who calls and says, ‘What is going on with the flags. The president is upset, this has gone out too soon and he doesn’t want it to happen.’”
Mr. Taylor, a Trump appointee who served in the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019 and was eventually chief of staff to Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, said he was uncertain of the procedure for lowering flags to half-staff, and spotty Wi-Fi on the trip across the globe had left him somewhat out of the loop on how the president was reacting to Mr. McCain’s death (the White House had lowered its own flag on the presidential complex, only to raise it again, in what was seen at the time as a perplexing break from protocol).
After some frantic middle-of-the-night research, he said, he learned that after the White House lowered its flag, D.H.S. had sent orders for all federal buildings to follow suit.
“I was then asked, ‘Would you guys be able to rescind the directive?’” Mr. Taylor said. He said he told the White House official that “we would need a compelling reason for the White House to order us to do that.”
“They never ended up giving us that order, but the intimation I got was, ‘This shouldn’t have happened,’” Mr. Taylor said. It was that the president “won’t want them down, and he’s angry, and look into what you would be able to do with it.”
Mr. Taylor, who recently endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr. in a video testimonial released by the group “Republican Voters Against Trump,” said that he found the episode “pretty astounding and disgusting.”
Mr. Trump has angrily denied a new report in The Atlantic that said that he was furious when he saw the flags lowered to half-staff. Speaking with reporters on Thursday night, Mr. Trump insisted that he respected Mr. McCain even though they disagreed.
“I was never a fan. I will admit that openly,” Mr. Trump said. But “we lowered the flags. I had to approve that, nobody else, I had to approve it.”
Responding to reporting from The Atlantic that he had made disparaging remarks about veterans, President Trump made a series of inaccurate claims on Twitter on Thursday night about Senator John McCain, who died in 2018.
What Trump said:
“I never called…..John a loser and swear on whatever, or whoever, I was asked to swear on, that I never called our great fallen soldiers anything other than HEROES.”
This is false.
In a 2015 conversation with the Republican pollster Frank Luntz about Mr. McCain’s 2008 presidential bid, Mr. Trump called Mr. McCain a “loser,” and later tweeted a news article reporting that he had done so.
“I supported him for president. I raised $1 million for him. That’s a lot of money. I supported him, he lost, he let us down. But he lost and I never liked him much after that ‘cause I don’t like losers,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Luntz, adding that Mr. McCain was “not a war hero.”
Mr. Trump then highlighted his comments on Twitter.
What Trump said:
“I was never a big fan of John McCain, disagreed with him on many things including ridiculous endless wars and the lack of success he had in dealing with the VA and our great Vets.”
This is misleading.
Mr. Trump has long criticized Mr. McCain’s record on veterans’ issues, saying in 2015 that he had “done nothing to help the vets” and in 2019 comparing their records.
In singling out the Department of Veterans Affairs, though, Mr. Trump ignores the Veterans Choice Act, which created the Veterans Choice health care program and allowed the V.A. to penalize or remove problematic workers. It was first signed into law in 2014, and Mr. McCain co-sponsored the Senate version of the bill. Other legislation Mr. McCain helped enact includes the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act to increase access to mental health support for veterans.
Veterans and veterans’ groups have certainly criticized Mr. McCain over specific issues during his long career, but many took Mr. McCain’s side when Mr. Trump attacked him during the 2016 election.
A report that President Trump chose not to visit a cemetery in France to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the battle of Belleau Wood and honor the Marines killed during it because he believed they were “losers” struck a raw nerve with veterans of the corps and military families.
The response, initially, came mostly from veterans and their family members on social media who were not likely to support Mr. Trump anyway. But discussion of his comments, reported by the Atlantic late Thursday — and what they revealed about the president if proven to be true — spanned the political spectrum.
Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts and a Bronze Star recipient who served four combat tours in Iraq, said the insults, which Mr. Trump has vehemently denied, were rooted in the president’s feeling of inadequacy when confronted with people willing to risk their lives for their country.
“The most selfless thing you can do is put your life on the line. That is a concept so foreign to this president, he not only doesn’t get it, but actually hates it,” Mr. Moulton said in an interview. “Every time he sees a veteran, it reminds him that he is a coward. It reminds him that he lied about his feet so he wouldn’t have to go.”
M.J. Hegar, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas and a Purple Heart recipient, called the president’s reported comments “disgraceful.” She said she was “having a very physical and visceral response to the reporting” in an interview with Rachel Maddow on MSNBC Thursday night.
“As a Medevac pilot, I Medevacked so many wounded and dying, and dead patriots who have served this country,” said Ms. Hegar, an Air Force helicopter pilot who suffered shrapnel wounds evacuating soldiers under fire from the Taliban in 2009.
Some of Mr. Trump’s defenders questioned the Atlantic report — parts of which have been confirmed by other news outlets. They point out that John Bolton, the former national security adviser who has been sharply critical of Mr. Trumpt since leaving his administration, backed up the president’s claim the trip was scrapped because of inclement weather, rather antipathy toward the troops.
But Mr. Trump’s critics were not buying it. VoteVets, a veterans organization that has long been critical of Mr. Trump, quickly released an online ad featuring the parents of troops slain in Iraq and Afghanistan, each one declaring that their son or stepson was not a “loser” or “sucker.”
Representative Conor Lamb, Democrat of Pennsylvania and a veteran of the Marines, said Belleau Wood was not just any battle, but a defining moment in the history of the corps.
“Every Marine learns in their first weeks, probably their first days, about the importance of Belleau Wood,” he said Friday during a conference call set up by the Biden campaign.
More than 1,800 Marines would die during a succession of clashes with German attackers in early June 1918.
Mr. Lamb, a lawyer who served as a military prosecutor for much of his active-duty service, hedged a bit in his remarks, telling reporters that even if all the details of the Atlantic story are never fully verified by on-the-record accounts, “they are consistent with what we have heard the president say publicly multiple times.”
Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that has informed and spoken for American troops since the Civil War, will cease print and online publication by the end of September, expanding the Trump administration’s war on news media to include those paid by the government to cover the military.
Founded in 1861, “Stripes” has more recently frustrated presidents and defense secretaries during the “Forever Wars” that began in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by elevating the voices of those in uniform who contradicted commanders and political leaders.
But while the newspaper found enough backers in Congress and among retired military officers to keep it alive during previous administrations, that support has been unable to reverse Defense Department plans to zero out the Stars and Stripes budget.
On Wednesday, eleven Democratic and four Republican senators called on the Defense Department to maintain funding for the publication, which has around 1.3 million readers online and in print. The senators wrote to Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, that the Pentagon could surely find the $15.5 million in federal funding needed to keep Stars and Stripes going somewhere in its $700 billion budget.
“We urge you to take steps to preserve the funding prerogatives of Congress before allowing any such disruption to take place,” said the letter. “Stars and Stripes is an essential part of our nation’s freedom of the press that serves the very population charged with defending that freedom.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a retired Air Force Reserve colonel, sent a separate letter to Mr. Esper last month on behalf of the publication, and cited “strong support” for Stars and Stripes in Congress.
The challenge facing Stars and Stripes — maintaining editorial independence while depending on government funding — is playing out in other parts of the Trump administration.
Similar efforts to weaken federally funded news outlets are underway at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees international broadcast outlets like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcast Networks.
KENOSHA, Wis. — The usual campaign-friendly stops were spurned. There was no grilled bratwurst or Wisconsin frozen custard to eat for the cameras. The candidates’ motorcades did not pull over at Tenuta’s Deli, a 70-year-old local institution whose walls are lined with the obligatory framed photographs of visiting politicians.
The campaign trail returned in a scaled-back form to Kenosha this week, as President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. arrived in town for back-to-back events, each striking a sharply different tone in a city struggling with civil unrest and the coronavirus pandemic. Here are three takeaways from a week focused on Wisconsin:
Mr. Trump played to his base.
The president arrived on Tuesday, crunching through the rubble of burned buildings in Kenosha’s Uptown district and meeting with a group of local officials at a high school, including the county sheriff and the city’s police chief. He did not meet with the family of Jacob Blake, who was shot by a police officer on Aug. 23 and remains in a hospital.
Mr. Trump struck a law-and-order note, condemning the destruction that has scarred Kenosha. “These are not acts of peaceful protest but, really, domestic terror,” he said.
Mr. Biden pressed his case that he can bridge the nation’s widening divides.
When the Democratic nominee arrived on Thursday, he first met with the Blake family, a conversation that a family representative described as engaging and prayerful. Then he headed to Grace Lutheran, a church that stands out in the community for its warmth, giving away meals and household supplies to Kenosha families.
In front of a carefully selected group of community leaders, Mr. Biden, too, condemned violence, but promised to focus on correcting racial disparities if elected. “I’m going to go down fighting for racial equality, equity across the board,” he said.
In Kenosha, few people showed up for either candidate.
This city of 100,000 people is still boarded up, frozen in place even though it has been a week since any violent unrest. Marches and protests have dwindled. And only a few relatively small, scattered groups seemed interested enough on either day to catch a glimpse of a sitting president or the former vice president.
To limit voter misinformation ahead of November’s election, Facebook said this week that it would block new political ads from appearing on its site in the week before Election Day.
It was a sweeping action by the social network, which is used by millions of voters. But just how effective could such a move be in minimizing confusion?
The answer: likely not very effective.
That’s because political ads on Facebook are just one piece of content on the social network; political misinformation also flourishes in messages that people post and in discussions in private Facebook Groups. Facebook is not tackling those areas.
Political ads have also been on the rise on Facebook already. Many of those ads will likely remain online before Election Day because the company is not removing existing promotions.
At the same time, some new political ads may slip onto the site because the social network has sometimes had difficulty identifying which ads should be categorized as political, researchers said.
“They can say they are being proactive, but at the end of the day, this is toothless,” Melissa Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches disinformation, said of Facebook’s pre-election ads stoppage.
Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesman, said that blocking new political ads was not “a silver bullet.” He said the move “enables campaigns to make their closing arguments and run aggressive get-out-the-vote efforts on Facebook without making it hard to contest new claims in the final days before the election.”
Eris Eady, a project organizer at the Alliance for Safety and Justice, began a Zoom call this week with a request to the hundreds of participants: Tell us why, or for whom, you are here.
The answers poured into the in-meeting chat. “For my son,” who was fatally shot. “For survivors of mental and emotional abuse.” “For myself.” “For all our Black men and boys.”
And then: “For those who don’t think that voting makes a difference.”
For all that narratives about crime shape American politics, crime survivors are rarely centered in the conversation, if they are heard at all. Many express a sense that their voices and their needs don’t matter at the polls, just as they didn’t matter to the person who shot, assaulted or otherwise harmed them.
Hence the Zoom call, which served as the introductory event for a new campaign called #HealTheVote that aims to turn out 100,000 crime survivors for the coming election.
The Alliance for Safety and Justice, an advocacy group that supports crime prevention and rehabilitation programs instead of mass incarceration, will announce the initiative on Friday.
Its premise is that crime survivors are, like women or working-class voters or people with disabilities, a constituency with distinct needs that elected officials should be pushed to address — and also that engaging in the political process can help survivors themselves.
The campaign is nonpartisan, and it includes both Democrats and Republicans promoting a shift away from the 1990s-era “tough on crime” approach that led to mass incarceration of people of color.
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