First thing election special: Trump makes a stand in the battlegrounds

Good morning.

With just over two weeks to election day, Donald Trump still trails his Democratic rival by double digits in national polls. Just like in 2016, his campaign is sinking all its efforts into the few battleground states that offer the president a narrow path to an electoral college victory. On Sunday, Trump was in Nevada, while on Monday he heads to Arizona, followed by Pennsylvania and North Carolina on Tuesday and Wednesday.

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Trump: If I lose, it will be to the worst candidate in history – video

Four years ago, it was Wisconsin’s shock swing to Trump that in effect dashed Hillary Clinton’s hopes on election night. Now, the economic impact of the coronavirus crisis may lead the state – where infections are rising – to swing back into the Democratic column, as Dominic Rushe reports.

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Trump ‘inciting domestic terrorism’ with ‘lock her up!’ rally chant says Michigan governor – video

• Gretchen Whitmer has accused Trump of “inspiring and incentivising domestic terrorism” after he attacked the Michigan governor during a recent rally in her state, responding positively to the crowd’s chants of “Lock her up!”

The US is ‘rounding the turn’ on Covid – but not in a good way

At his rally in Nevada, Trump insisted again that the US was “rounding the turn” in its fight against the coronavirus. In fact, weekly case averages are rising in 48 out of 50 states, while Friday had the highest 24-hour infection total in the US since July, with 68,000 new cases. Meanwhile, China has become the first major economy to recover from the crisis. Campaigning in North Carolina, Biden responded to Trump’s claim: “This guy’s gone around the bend if he thinks we’ve turned the corner.”

The world’s rightwing populists are rooting for Trump

Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Around the globe, rightwing populists – or, as Biden described them last week, “all the thugs in the world” – have expressed support for Trump ahead of the presidential election. A Trump victory would bring such figures a psychological boost more important than any specific policy benefits, write Shaun Walker and Tom Phillips.

If Biden wins, by contrast, it could be a signal that the world’s populist moment is over, says Erin Kristin Jenne, a professor of international relations at Central European University:

It would be seen as a major failure of populist nationalism as a governing ideology, particularly at a time when societies are looking for competent leaders who can steer their countries through the Covid crisis.

• Ireland is backing Biden. The Democrat is vocal about the value he places on his Irish roots, and the Irish believe it could influence his foreign policy in their favour, as Rory Carroll reports.

Racist terror groups are more active than ever in the US

Just days before the FBI arrested six men for plotting to kidnap Whitmer earlier this month, Trump’s acting secretary of homeland security had expressed concerns about “white supremacist violent extremists”. In his department’s annual assessment of threats to the nation, Chad Wolf said such extremists “seek to force ideological change in the United States through violence, death, and destruction”.

Last year was the deadliest on record for domestic extremist violence since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, with white supremacists responsible for most of the bloodshed. And what makes the threat level so uniquely dangerous, writes Ed Pilkington, is Trump himself.

• Violent insurrection is at the heart of US gun culture, says the gun control activist Josh Horwitz, who tells Lois Beckett he fears guns will be used to intimidate voters on election day:

White men, especially, are feeling that the political reins of power are pulling away from them, and their grip on power is falling away. Guns are a way to exercise power.

In other election news …

• Pete Buttigieg believes Amy Coney Barrett’s elevation to the supreme court could put his marriage under threat, he told Fox News, by increasing the prospect that the court’s 2015 Obergefell v Hodges decision – which enshrined the right to same-sex marriage – will be overturned.

• The activist and philosopher Cornel West does not endorse Joe Biden, he told Hugh Muir in a wide-ranging interview: “But I believe we gotta vote for him … When there is a cold-hearted, mean-spirited neo-fascist like Trump, I have got to try and push Biden over the line.”

Stat of the day

Public health officials in Minnesota have traced 23 cases of Covid-19 to a pair of Trump rallies held by the president in the state in September – suggesting the impact of such events on infections may be smaller than feared. One coronavirus case was also tied to a Biden campaign event in Duluth in the same month.

View from the right

Liberals fear a slide into autocracy should Trump win a second term. But conservatives believe the left has totalitarian tendencies, too, as Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times.

Just as liberals see political authoritarianism in a Republican party clinging to power via the Senate’s rural bias, conservatives increasingly see that same GOP as the only bulwark against the cultural authoritarianism inherent in tech and media consolidation.

Don’t miss this

According to an analysis by ProPublica, taxpayers in Mississippi’s Humphreys County are audited at a rate higher than anywhere else in the US, despite an unemployment rate double the national level. News that Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017 came as little surprise to a community that’s “kind of adjusted to the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”, as Sara Sneath reports from Belzoni.

Last Thing: a New Zealand journalist’s TV takedown wins her fans abroad

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‘I don’t want to hear any of that rubbish’: Tova O’Brien’s interview with Jami-Lee Ross – video

New Zealand’s government has been praised around the world for its effective response to the coronavirus pandemic. Now one of its political journalists is earning fans for her brutal interview with a politician who helped to spread Covid-19 conspiracy theories during the country’s recent election. Savannah Guthrie, eat your heart out.

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