Election 2020 live updates: Democrats gear up for their convention; Trump defends postmaster general

The White House is open to Congress passing a stand-alone measure to ensure the U.S. Postal Service is adequately funded to manage a surge in mail voting in November, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“The president of the United States is not going to interfere with anybody casting their votes in a legitimate way whether it’s the Post Office or anything else,” he said.

Meadows also pledged the Postal Service will not take offline before November any sorting machines that aid mail voting. He also insisted the earlier removal of sorters was part of a plan that predated the Trump administration.

Both statements would appear to step back from the president’s comments Thursday when he said he opposed Postal Service funding because he wanted to restrict expanding voting by mail.

Democrats have continued to express alarm over Trump’s comments. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Sunday the president “is doing everything he can to suppress the vote.”

“And it is an outrage, Chuck, because this campaign is more than health care, it’s more than education, it’s more than the Postal Service,” Sanders told host Chuck Todd on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.” “It is democracy, and he is sabotaging our democracy.”

Meadows, meanwhile, insisted the president is only opposed to states sending ballots directly to all registered voters — not to a more common practice in which states send mail ballots only to registered voters who request them. Trump, however, attacked all forms of mail voting for months before recently dialing back his criticism in particular states, including Florida, where he voted by mail himself this year.

“The president doesn’t have a problem with anybody voting by mail if you would look at it in terms of a no-excuse absentee ballot,” Meadows said. “What he opposes is universal mail-in ballots.”

There are five states that voted nearly entirely by mail before the pandemic and four more that have announced plans to do so since the pandemic hit. Meadows suggested more states will attempt to shift to sending ballots directly to all registered voters between now and the election.

“This is more about states trying to re-create how they get their ballots and they’re trying to do it on a compressed timeline that won’t work,” he said.

It was one of the biggest moments of President Barack Obama’s tenure, the signing of his landmark health-care law. Every word was planned. Message discipline was critical, particularly for the administration’s least scripted member: Joe Biden.

The vice president’s staff had worked on the remarks late into the night. There was the quote from Virgil. The nod to history. The praise of the president. But in the end, all anyone remembered was a single off-color, off-the-cuff phrase, one Biden intended to whisper to Obama but was caught on mic: “This is a big [expletive] deal.”

For those who have tried to write speeches for Biden, it was a signature moment. He likes his language simple and direct. He wants to communicate things in their essence. And he rarely follows the script.

Biden now faces the most consequential speech of his political career — Thursday’s address claiming the Democratic nomination he has sought for much of his life — and it will unfold under extraordinary circumstances, with strict social distancing and no cheering crowd in the room. It comes days after a similarly constrained speech, Biden’s introduction of Harris as his running mate.

A speaker who thrives on speaking extemporaneously, often feeding off his audience and just as often frustrating his staff, is preparing for something he’s never faced. His speechwriters are attempting to craft something entirely new — a convention speech without built-in applause lines, lacking the crowd’s appreciative laughter or adoring cheers, where any pause could look awkward or worse.

Biden on Sunday extended his condolences to Trump on the death of the president’s younger brother Robert Trump.

“Mr. President, Jill and I are sad to learn of your younger brother Robert’s passing,” Biden tweeted Sunday morning. “I know the tremendous pain of losing a loved one — and I know how important family is in moments like these. I hope you know that our prayers are with you all.”

Robert Trump died Saturday in New York City at age 71. The death was announced by the White House. He had been hospitalized for several days after becoming seriously ill. No cause of death was immediately given.

Robert Trump was the quiet one in comparison with his boisterous brother. He often did what his famous sibling asked him to do, absorbing the criticism that his brother reportedly lobbed at him and remaining loyal until the end of his life.

“It is with heavy heart I share that my wonderful brother, Robert, peacefully passed away tonight,” the president said in a statement Saturday. “He was not just my brother, he was my best friend. He will be greatly missed, but we will meet again. His memory will live on in my heart forever. Robert, I love you. Rest in peace.”

The Democratic National Convention will open Monday in a spirit of unity and shared purpose, with the party’s often-warring moderate establishment and galvanized liberal wings agreeing for now to set aside their differences to defeat Trump in November and deliver the White House to Joe Biden.

That’s not to say divisions and disagreements don’t exist. They do and probably will be back if Biden wins, potentially complicating his efforts to govern. Still, the overall mood on the eve of this year’s convention contrasts with that of four years ago, when Hillary Clinton arrived in Philadelphia still dealing with the grievances of a long and rugged nominating contest against Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

That Democrats today appear far more unified is testament in part to the work of Biden, Sanders and their teams over the past several months to avoid a repeat of the 2016 experience. But the unity owes much more to the occupant of the White House, who many Democrats fear could inflict lasting damage to the country and its democratic institutions if he gains a second term.

“Four years ago, you could point to Donald Trump as the wolf at the gate, but it was still theoretical,” said Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor who ran unsuccessfully against Biden in the primaries. “Now the wolf is through the gate, eating the chickens.”

Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller on Sunday dismissed questions about the eligibility of Harris to run for vice president, pushing back against a false racist conspiracy theory promoted by another Trump campaign adviser and echoed by the president himself.

“In our opinion, it’s case closed,” Miller said in an interview on ABC News’s “This Week.”

When asked about statements last week by Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, promoting the conspiracy theory, Miller replied, “She wasn’t speaking for the campaign. I am.”

Harris was born in Oakland, Calif., and is, by the laws of the Constitution, a U.S. citizen. But some birther conspiracy theorists say, wrongly, that her parents’ immigration status at the time of her birth makes her ineligible, and Biden’s campaign has denounced such claims as “abhorrent.”

Trump — who previously promoted the past false allegation that Barack Obama was born in Kenya rather than in Hawaii and thus ineligible to serve as president — said last week that questions raised about Harris’s eligibility to run for vice president were “very serious.”

“So I just heard that, I heard it today, that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Trump said Friday. “I have no idea if that’s right. I would have assumed the Democrats would have checked it before she gets chosen to run for vice president. But that’s a very serious … You’re saying that they’re saying that she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country?”

Trump’s campaign began promoting the conspiracy theory last week when Ellis retweeted a Newsweek op-ed written by John C. Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University in California and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank.

In his piece, Eastman questioned whether Harris’s parents were U.S. citizens at the time of her birth or “merely temporary visitors,” adding that it was possible that Harris “was not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers.”

Eastman in 2010 ran unsuccessfully for the GOP nomination for California attorney general; Harris defeated the eventual GOP nominee in the general election.

The op-ed prompted a swift online backlash, and Newsweek responded by posting an editor’s note arguing that the essay “has no connection whatsoever to so-called ‘birther-ism.’ “

Asked last week about her decision to retweet the piece, Ellis defended Eastman’s views.

“It’s an open question, and one I think Harris should answer so the American people know for sure she is eligible,” Ellis said in an email.

With the balloon drop scrapped and the cheering crowds banished, Democratic convention planners faced the grim prospect this summer of throwing Biden a party in a pandemic without any apparent celebration.

“At a regular convention, audience reaction is a huge part of the speeches,” Andrew Binns, the event’s chief operating officer, explained. “We needed a way to do that technologically and virtually.”

Faced with a complex problem, Democrats decided to go big, aiming for a solution that has more in common with Netflix, Facebook Live and the cheering fan screens courtside in Orlando’s NBA bubble than the C-SPAN-style cattle call typical of past national party gatherings.

Over four nights starting Monday, a behind-the-scenes crew of about 400 with operation centers in New York, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and Wilmington, Del., plans to broadcast to the nation hundreds of live video feeds from living rooms, national monuments and stages around the country, according to interviews with three people involved in planning the event.

Soon after taking office in 2017, Trump seized on the U.S. Postal Service as an emblem of the bloated bureaucracy. “A loser,” he repeatedly labeled one of America’s most beloved public institutions, according to aides who discussed the matter with him.

Allies coddled Trump by telling him the reason he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 was widespread mail-in balloting fraud — a conspiracy theory for which there is no evidence — and the president’s postal outrage coarsened further.

Then Trump complained to senior White House advisers that Jeff Bezos — a presidential foe in part because he owns The Washington Post, whose news coverage the president thought was unfair and too tough on him — was “getting rich” because Amazon had been “ripping off” the Postal Service with a “sweetheart deal” to ship millions of its packages, one of them recalled.

They explained that this was not true and that the Postal Service actually benefited from Amazon’s business, the adviser added, but the president railed for months about what he described as a “scam.”

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Sunday finds most Americans approve of Harris’s selection as a vice presidential running mate by presumptive Democratic nominee Biden.

The Post-ABC poll finds 54 percent of Americans approve of Biden’s choice of Harris while 29 percent disapprove and 17 percent have no opinion. Initial reactions to Harris’s selection are similar to those of other recent vice-presidential selections, including for Republican tickets: 51 percent approved of Mitt Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan to the Republican ticket in 2012 and 60 percent approved of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running mate in 2008.

An 86 percent majority of Democrats approve of Biden’s choice of Harris, including 64 percent who strongly approve. But Harris also draws mostly positive reactions among political independents, with 52 percent approving and 29 percent disapproving. Approval drops to 25 percent among Republicans.

Harris will be the first Black and Asian American woman to be nominated as vice president for a major- political party. Among Black Americans, 78 percent approve of her selection, including 50 percent who approve “strongly.” That compares to 65 percent approval overall among Hispanic adults and 46 percent among Whites. The poll finds little gender split in reactions to Harris’s selection, with 56 percent of women approving compared to 52 percent of men.

The Post-ABC poll was conducted Aug. 12-15 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults, with 75 percent reached on cell phones and 25 percent on landlines. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.