Amber Duke

White House coronavirus task force member Dr Scott Atlas said during a Tuesday interview with The Spectator there was 'no fair basis' for canceling this week's presidential debate between President Trump and Joe Biden following the President's coronavirus diagnosis. 'The debate absolutely should have been able to continue. Honestly, I think there is no fair basis for canceling that debate — none,' Atlas said. Trump and Biden were scheduled to meet for the second time on the debate stage on Thursday in a town-hall style event moderated by Steve Scully. The Commission on Presidential Debates announced last week, without agreement between the two campaigns, that the debate would be conducted virtually due to health concerns raised by the President contracting the virus.

Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris will square off in Wednesday night's vice presidential debate in Salt Lake City, Utah. Pence soundly won his 2016 vice presidential debate against Clinton running mate Tim Kaine, and based on his level of preparation, he will be equally formidable on tonight's stage. Chief of Staff to the Vice President Marc Short told reporters during a press call this afternoon that Pence has been prepping for the debate for six to eight weeks, partially with the help of former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who played the role of Kaine during practice rounds for the 2016 debate. Short indicated that several other individuals have also been stepping in to imitate Sen. Harris this time around.

'Please tell me you’re Republicans,' President Ronald Reagan joked with his doctors as he headed into surgery after an assassination attempt against him in 1981. The joke worked in part because it was obviously absurd to think any doctor would alter their standard of care based on the politics of their patient. In 2020, can anyone be so sure? In the age of COVID, medical opinion has often become indistinguishable from politics. Laypeople cherrypick statements and studies that seem to confirm their biases, and when all else fails, glob on to anecdotal evidence from a friend, family member, or celebrity who got the virus. Sadly, too many doctors are no better.

Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien sent an email to staff on Friday after President Trump’s positive COVID test, urging them to self-quarantine if they had been exposed to someone with the virus. The President and First Lady Melania Trump apparently became exposed to the virus through adviser Hope Hicks. It is believed Hicks tested positive on Wednesday night, after traveling with the President to Duluth, Minnesota for a rally. ‘In consultation with the White House Medical Unit and our own medical consultants, any campaign staff member who has had exposure to someone testing positive should immediately begin self-quarantine,’ Stepien wrote in the email, which was obtained by The Spectator.

The first presidential debate in Cleveland was a disaster, to put it bluntly. After 90 minutes of crosstalk, petty jabs, and 'c'mon man’s it's hard to believe many undecided voters will come out of the night with a clear candidate in mind. Most will be begging for presidential politics to stop rather than racing to the polls. In fact, judging from social media, many undecided voters are already saying this debate convinced them not to vote at all. President Trump's performance was perhaps his worst in a major debate so far because he squandered numerous opportunities to let Biden hang himself with his own words.

President Trump and Joe Biden will face off in the first of a series of presidential debates on Tuesday night. Team Trump says he has been preparing by watching videos of Biden and by regularly squaring off with unfriendly press, while Biden is reviewing Trump's tweets and engaging in practice sessions with a group of aides and strategists at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. The President's rather informal preparations have apparently worried the campaign, which is now trying to raise expectations for the candidate that they've repeatedly painted as cognitively impaired. 'We’re prepared to see the same Joe Biden who won his vice presidential debates in 2008 and 2012 on stage versus President Trump.

Joe Biden's presidential campaign called another early morning press lid at 9:20 a.m. on Thursday, leaving strategists and reporters wondering what the hell is going on. It was the ninth time this month that Biden had no public events on schedule and thus told the press before lunchtime that they would not be needed for the rest of the day. It's downright bizarre that a campaign would squander nine perfectly good days that could be spent on the trail just two months out from the election. What was Biden doing during this time instead? Sitting at home with his wife in Wilmington and hopping on the occasional Zoom event? Sam Stein, who is a Daily Beast reporter and purportedly not a campaign spokesperson, insisted that Biden must have been prepping for Tuesday's debate against Trump.

‘Oh the hypocrisy!’ cried the Democrats after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would bring President Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee to the floor for confirmation hearings and a vote ahead of the election. The screeching continued as swing vote after swing vote — Sens. Lindsey Graham, Chuck Grassley and Mitt Romney, for example — said they also supported taking a vote. Republicans are indeed treating the vacancy left by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who passed away on Friday night, far differently than they did the one left by Antonin Scalia in 2016. The GOP had control of the Senate then, too, but refused to advance President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, citing the proximity of the presidential election.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away at the age of 87 on Friday due to complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer. Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993 and was the second woman to ever serve on the court after Sandra Day O'Connor. Her work for gender equality, such as launching the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Women's Rights Project, and her sharp dissents earned her the nickname the 'Notorious RBG'. A movie about her life, On the Basis of Sex was released in 2018 and earned over $30 million at the box office. Ginsburg's death will set up an intense political fight, having occurred less than two months out from the 2020 presidential election on November 3.

President Trump announced Wednesday afternoon that he was adding 20 new names to his previous list of potential Supreme Court nominees in the event of a vacancy. The new list included three very familiar political names: Sens. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley. Those names alone indicated that the president is bucking his 2016 method of allowing the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, to dictate his judicial choices. After a string of Supreme Court rulings that went against conservatives, who felt spurned that they could not get the outcomes they wanted even with a stacked court, the President is perhaps signaling to his base that he will nominate an avowed social conservative, rather than just a textualist or originalist.

What does Stephen Miller really want? His immigration obsession has shaped some of the Trump administration’s most aggressive policies, and he has clawed his way from speechwriter to senior policy adviser. But is his dream a restrictionist immigration agenda or, as sources close to the White House tell me, the pursuit of power, not policy? Is he taking Lady Macbeth’s advice and playing ‘the innocent flower’ to mask ‘the serpent under’t’? Miller is a true believer in the Trump agenda: they say he even praises the President in private. That might explain his survival in an administration with a turnover rate higher than that of a cheap motel.

Though Joe Biden has now accepted that violence is occurring in many major American cities and has started blaming Donald Trump for it, many of his supporters haven't gotten the memo. A new trend among some high-profile left-wingers is to gaslight Americans by posting daytime photos of well-to-do areas of cities undamaged by the riots as proof that the riots aren't real. Meanwhile, tear gas and fires engulf entire blocks at nighttime. Josh Campbell, a former FBI agent and CNN contributor, kicked off the trend by tweeting September 1: 'Good morning from wonderful Portland, where the city is not under siege and buildings are not burning to the ground. I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos.

After months of trying to spin the nationwide unrest as 'mostly peaceful' or ignoring it entirely, Democrats have discovered some fresh messaging: the riots are violent and they're Trump's fault. Joe Biden seized on this new storyline during a campaign speech in Pittsburgh on Monday, telling voters that Trump is 'stoking violence in our cities.' 'This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence — because for years he has fomented it,' Biden asserted. This is one of the most dastardly and dishonest schemes the Democrats have ever cooked up.

Over the past week, Washington, DC has turned into a truly dystopian nightmare. Diners at several area restaurants, including the famous Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown, were accosted by a Black Lives Matter mob that bullied them into raising their fists in solidarity with the movement. Restaurant patrons who refused to comply faced further verbal abuse and harassment. The trend continued outside the White House on Thursday night. Attendees of President Trump’s acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention were thrown to the wolves as they left the event, and were chased and screamed at as they made their way back to their hotels. Kentucky senator Rand Paul and his wife Kelley received some of the most aggressive harassment.