Election 2020 live updates: Trump visits Gulf Coast to survey hurricane damage; Biden addresses National Guard conference

Speaking to a virtual gathering of the National Guard Association of America on Saturday, Biden pushed back on Trump’s conception of “law and order.”

“I promise you as president I’ll never put you in the middle of politics or personal vendettas,” Biden told the members of the National Guard, speaking from a podium set up on the first floor of his Wilmington, Del., home. “I’ll never use the military as a prop or as a private militia to violate rights of fellow citizens. That’s not law and order. You don’t deserve that.”

Biden said relations between the military and civilian leadership are the “bedrock principle of our republic,” but it has been “tested lately.”

“We have historic challenges,” Biden said. “We have to do it together.”

Trump has been ramping up a “law and order” message, saying Biden and the Democratic Party are responsible for unruly demonstrations in some cities in a moment of racial reckoning. Democrats note that the increased tensions are coming on Trump’s watch and believe militarized responses to protests that have, at times, resulted in looting and riots aren’t helpful in defusing the situation.

The Democratic vice-presidential nominee has not hit the literal campaign trail much at all during her first few weeks since she was chosen by Biden, but Harris has already centered many of her virtual efforts on key battleground states.

After holding multiple remote events in Michigan this week, Harris held a virtual roundtable Saturday with Hispanic small business owners in the Miami area. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, held an event with members of Florida’s Jewish community on Friday.

Florida and its 29 electoral votes are crucial to Democrats’ hopes of retaking the White House in November: Obama won the state twice before it flipped to Trump by around 100,000 votes — or 1 percent of all votes cast there — in 2016.

Harris’s meeting with Latino small business owners is part of the Biden-Harris campaign’s organizing initiative in the Hispanic community, which makes up 26 percent of the state’s population. The Biden camp believes Latino businesses are well-positioned to help organize their communities to vote.

Many of Harris’s early events, like a roundtable she held with Black women in Michigan last week, have centered on mobilizing voters in key demographic groups and geographic areas.

Harris spent much of Saturday’s event listening to participants’ stories about the devastation the pandemic has wrought on their businesses. She told them a Biden-Harris administration will offer small businesses financial support to bring back workers even if they are not operating at full capacity, fund grants for businesses to cover the costs of reopening — including for personal protective equipment and plexiglass to reduce transmission — and expand access to business loans by funding nonprofit lending programs.

She also continued to attack the Trump administration’s response to the virus and said part of reinvigorating business in South Florida, where tourism is so crucial to the economy, is rebuilding trust in leadership and safety by implementing an effective plan to combat the coronavirus.

“We have to do that if we’re going to recapture everything that has been lost,” Harris said. “ … our plan is for supporting businesses and dealing with this public health crisis, and that is how we’re going to inspire confidence — to the point about tourism — for people to travel within the country, much less to come to our country.”

Trump pushed back on post-convention television ratings that showed more people watched the Democratic National Convention than the Republican event a week later and that Biden’s speech received more viewers than Trump’s.

“Wow! Despite the Democrats views across TV and online lie (Con!), we had 147.9 million, the Republican National Convention blew the Democrat National Convention AWAY. Not even close! Just like their lies on Russia, Football (PLAY!) and everything else! NOVEMBER 3rd,” Trump tweeted.

Fox News reported the 147.9 million figure for the Republicans, given to them by a Trump campaign official, and cited 122 million across television and online for the Democrats, but it is unclear how that data was calculated. Unlike the Nielsen television ratings, it is more challenging to capture online viewership across the many different streaming options.

The Democratic convention averaged more than 20 million total viewers per night in the 10 p.m. hour, compared with 17.4 million for the GOP convention among the six major broadcast and cable news networks, according to Nielsen data. Trump’s speech brought in 19.85 million total viewers, the ratings firm announced Friday, compared with 21.8 million for Biden, according to the early Nielsen report.

Television ratings are very important to the president, who often touts viewership of his former reality show, “The Apprentice,” and frequently comments on the audience size of various TV news shows.

The distinction made here by the Republicans is reminiscent of the lies about the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration. His then-press secretary Sean Spicer claimed it was the largest audience ever for a presidential swearing in. He then sought to clarify that his comment included online viewers, of which he claimed there were “tens of millions of people” watching, though he provided no evidence that was the case.

Jeremy Barr contributed to this post.

Trump railed against authors of tell-all books about him, a new crop of which are being rolled out ahead of the November election from people who’ve been inside the Trump orbit.

Already on store shelves are cutting tales written by niece Mary L. Trump and former national security adviser John Bolton. Over the next week, books written by Melania Trump’s ex-best friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, and Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, will be released. Veteran Washington Post investigative journalist Bob Woodward’s newest tome about the Trump White House comes out on Sept. 15.

“About the only way a person is able to write a book on me is if they agree that it will contain as much bad ‘stuff’ as possible, much of which is lies. It’s like getting a job with CNN or MSDNC and saying that ‘President Trump is great.’ You have ZERO chance. FAKE NEWS!” Trump tweeted from Air Force One on his way to survey hurricane damage. (“MSDNC” is Trump’s reference to cable news network MSNBC, with an intentional conflation with the Democratic National Committee.)

“Even whether it’s dumb warmongers like John Bolton, social pretenders like Bob Woodward, who never has anything good to say, or an unstable niece, who was now rightfully shunned, scorned and mocked her entire life, and never even liked by her own very kind & caring grandfather!”

In her book, Mary Trump, daughter of Trump’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., who died of addiction, refers to her grandfather and uncle as “sociopaths.” She has long been estranged from the family after a dispute over her inheritance.

Since the release of her best-selling memoir, Mary Trump has made it a personal mission to ensure her uncle is not reelected. She recently gave The Washington Post secret tapes she’d made of conversations with the president’s sister, her aunt, saying Trump has “no principles” and shouldn’t be trusted.

Mary Trump was a guest on MSNBC during its prime-time coverage of the GOP convention’s final night on Thursday, offering intensely critical assessments of her uncle.

“He feels no shame. He has no humility. And that’s part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in,” she said on Thursday. “Donald has been rewarded for bad behavior his entire life, so I think, the motives are much more likely to be financial. There’s absolutely no way to shame him and that is another thing that makes the stuff we’ve heard about the love of his family so absurd over the past days.”

Biden and Harris posted tributes to the 43-year-old actor, Chadwick Boseman, who died Friday of colon cancer.

Boseman, most famous for his star turn in Marvel’s critically acclaimed “Black Panther,” also played Black icons Jackie Robinson, James Brown and Thurgood Marshall.

Boseman’s last tweet was on the day Biden announced Harris as his running mate. He posted a photo of him and Harris embracing and wrote: “YES Kamala Harris!”

After his death was made public, Harris posted a similar photo of her hugging the young actor, describing him as “brilliant, kind, learned and humble.”

In Biden’s tribute to Boseman, he wrote: “The true power of @ChadwickBoseman was bigger than anything we saw on screen. From the Black Panther to Jackie Robinson, he inspired generations and showed them they can be anything they want — even super heroes.”

Still undecided, Mike Baker of Bloomington, Ind., had watched parts of both political conventions over the past two weeks, supplementing his observations with newspaper articles and socially distanced conversations with friends.

He did not vote in the 2016 election in part because he found Trump too acerbic. That opinion hasn’t changed; he can’t see inviting Trump over to his Bloomington home. But he thinks the president has advanced a lot of the policy goals that Baker believes in.

His internal debate reflects the argument that the campaigns have made over the past two weeks to try to persuade still-undecided voters. At the Democratic convention, Biden and many others told viewers that the nation can’t endure another four years of Trump. Changing the occupant of the White House, they argued, would inject competence, compassion and sanity into the nation’s highest office.

But at the Republican convention, Trump trumpeted a litany of economic and policy achievements. He vowed to have a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year, even as he blasted Biden, Democrats and demonstrators protesting police brutality.

References to the judiciary, long a key motivator for conservative voters, were woven throughout the GOP convention this week and served as a reminder that even if Trump loses reelection in November, his stamp on the federal courts will last for decades to come.

But Democrats all but ignored the Supreme Court in their four-day convention earlier this month, even after the party spent Trump’s first term reckoning with the consequences of Republicans confirming two Supreme Court justices, including a reliably conservative justice who replaced the court’s swing vote.

The contrast worries liberal activists who see it as further evidence that the Democratic Party isn’t paying enough attention to an area where conservatives have made big inroads in recent years.

“The fact that Democrats spent so little to no time discussing the federal bench failed to take into account that their critically important goals for the future will be challenged in the courts,” said Nan Aron, the president of the liberal judicial advocacy group Alliance for Justice.