Trump news – live: Fauci issues stern warning to president's campaign on Covid as Amy Coney Barret grilled on guns, abortion

Hello and welcome to The Independent’s rolling coverage of the Donald Trump administration. 

Trump returns to campaign trail in Florida and insists he feels ‘powerful’

Donald Trump, who was discharged from hospital just a week ago following his coronavirus diagnosis, returned to the campaign trail in Sanford, Florida, on Monday night and insisted he felt “powerful”.

"I'll walk into that audience. I'll walk in there, I'll kiss everyone in that audience. I'll kiss the guys and the beautiful women... everybody. I'll just give you a big fat kiss," the president said to cheers from his supporters, most of whom were not wearing masks or social distancing.

Tossing MAGA hats into the crowd, the president touted his administration's “success” in fighting a virus that has killed more than 210,000 Americans - the highest death toll anywhere in the world.

"Nobody acted fast like I did,” he said. “The bottom line is we saved millions of lives. When this first came out if we didn't do a good job they predicted 2.2m people would die. We're at 210,000."

He also danced, rather stiffly, to the Village People.

With the president trailing Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, by around 10 percentage points in current polls, Mr Trump is due to take part in a second rally in as many days this evening when he addresses an audience in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

Here’s John T Bennett’s report.

'Coronavirus? It was just a big old scare'

Before last night’s rally in Sanford, Richard Hall took the temperature of the MAGA crowd and found some pretty alarming sentiments expressed.

"I do believe the coronavirus is over exaggerated. I've had many friends who have tested positive for it, they didn't show any symptoms, they were never really sick," said Brittany Howard, 22.

"It seems like it was just a big old scare. I don't know if the numbers are real or not. I've heard a lot about hospitals skewing paperwork, they get paid, get government funding if they put that it was coronavirus based."

Incredible, given the year we’ve had.

Here’s his report.

First US case of Covid-19 reinfection recorded

While Trump might continue to insist that he is now "immune" to coronavirus - and fancy himself as Superman  - it is becoming increasingly clear that catching the disease once is no guarantee that you can’t get it again.

Just yesteday, in fact, US scientists reported the country’s first case of reinfection.

A study published by The Lancet showed that a 25-year-old man from Nevada was infected with two distinct variants of Sars-CoV-2 within a 48-day span.

The patient’s second infection was more severe, the researchers at the University of Nevada said, resulting in hospitalisation with oxygen support.

At least four other reinfection cases have been confirmed globally – in Belgium, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Ecuador – though scientists have suggested the true figure is likely to be much higher.

Samuel Lovett has more on this.

Democrats attack GOP as Amy Coney Barrett hearings open

The Senate Judiciary Committee convened yesterday to consider Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court as Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s successor, a session that saw Republican and Democratic senators argue back and forth in their opening statements for and against proceeding with the week-long hearings.

Republicans took umbrage at what they said were unfair attacks against the deeply conservative Judge Barrett over her devout Christian faith while Democrats said the nomination should not be happening before the 3 November election and that their opponents were attempting to rush it though in the interests of having the court dismantle the Affordable Care Act before potentially losing the White House and their Senate majority.

The panel’s chairman, the embattled Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, insisted it was all above board.

“Bottom line here is that the Senate is doing its duty constitutionally,” he said.

“There have been 19 vacancies filled in election years. Seventeen of the 19 were confirmed to the court when the party of the president and the Senate were the same.”

Monday’s session began with controversy as Utah GOP senator Mike Lee arrived to participate in person despite testing positive for the coronavirus a little over a week ago (his colleague and fellow sufferer, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, took part via Zoom).

The atmosphere didn’t improve.

Democrats like Pat Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, Dick Durbin, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker all made impassioned pleas against any assault on healthcare on behalf of their constituents as the likes of Ted Cruz, Mike Crapo and Josh Hawley rolled their eyes and accused their rivals of playing politics, while the judge herself remained inscrutable behind a black face mask.

Griffin Connolly has this report.

Kamala Harris accuses GOP of 'bypassing the will of voters’ to get Obamacare scrapped

Also taking part remotely was Joe Biden’s running mate, the senator for California, who characterised Coney Barrett as “a Supreme Court nominee who will take healthcare away from millions of people during a deadly pandemic that has already killed more than 214,000 Americans” - referring to the alleged Republican plot to repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act, AKA Obamacare.

“Republicans finally realised that the Affordable Care Act is too popular to repeal in Congress. So now they are planning to bypass the will of the voters and have the Supreme Court do their dirty work,” she said.

Here’s Griffin Connolly again.

Five takeaways from Day One of the Amy Coney Barrett hearings

There was plenty to wade through yesterday and more coming later so here’s a crib sheet for the latecomers.

President ‘almost as unpopular as Hillary Clinton in 2016’

Back to Trump, who followed last night’s Florida rally by claiming on Twitter that the World Health Organsation now agrees with his opposition to national lockdowns (it absolutely doesn’t), deridin’ Biden, berating Fox and insisting his re-election war chest is not empty.

Here’s some more reporting he won’t like - the polls are indicate he is almost as widely disliked as his nemesis was in 2016.

‘The data speaks for itself’: Fauci raises alarms about Trump’s planned blitz of campaign rallies

Poor old Dr Anthony Fauci, having yesterday had to distance himself from Team Trump’s dishonest use of an old interview quote in a campaign video, is now having to sound the alarm over the president’s ill-advised superspreader rallies.

"When you look at what’s going on in the United States, it’s really very troublesome,” the doc told Jake Tapper on CNN on Monday. “It’s going in the wrong direction right now. If there’s anything we should be doing, it’s doubling down on the public health measures that we’ve been talking about for so long.”

With the White House Coronavirus Task Fask now well and truly sidelined by this administration, despite the US coronavirus crisis only getting worse, the low morale of Fauci was there for all to see.

Meanwhile, the Joe Biden campaign has drawn attention to his disavowal of Trump’s latest ad with a clip of their own:

Here’s John T Bennett on the disillusioned director of the National Institute for Infectious Diseases who finds himself a reluctant political pawn in the final weeks of this election cycle.

Sleepless Trump tweeting at 6am

Having seemingly posted his last tweet (denying his campaign had run out of cash) at around 1am, the president is awake and posting grievances and empty Biden smears before the sun has even risen.

Is he definitely well? Taking his meds? Those retweets look nasty from where I’m standing.

Swine flu deaths? You don’t want to go there Donald…

According to the CDC, 12,469 Americans died of H1N1 under the Obama administration. 

You’re now on, oh let’s see, 215,000 and counting for coronavirus.