The week ended with judges in several states rejecting President Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the election results and the coronavirus pandemic surging, but Trump himself took to Twitter Sunday for one of his now-familiar rants.
Trump admitted defeat to President-elect Joe Biden in one tweet, falsely claimed the election was rigged in another and retweeted a supporter who called Trump’s opponents “anti-American and anti-Christian” ― all before 10am.
It’s unclear what Trump hoped to gain from the Tweetstorm. Meanwhile, Biden took steps to staff up his incoming administration while the Covid-19 pandemic gripped the nation.
The week saw the highest daily number of new coronavirus cases in the US since the pandemic took off in March. The daily number of US coronavirus-related deaths rose to a record 1,549 last week.
Biden on Monday announced members of his coronavirus advisory board, led by David Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under President Bill Clinton; Marcella Nunez-Smith, a professor of public health at Yale University; and Vivek Murthy, who served as surgeon general under President Barack Obama.
Board members gave interviews about what to expect in coming months and to urge Americans to take health safety precautions. “The next three to four months are going to be, by far, the darkest of the pandemic,” said board member Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota.
As news outlets called more states for Biden, Trump supporters gathered in Washington on Saturday in an event they called the “Million MAGA March.”
Event organisers cribbed the name from the “Million Man March,” a 1995 demonstration in support of Black activism that attracted hundreds of thousands of participants. But the MAGA event drew far fewer people: Only “a few thousand” people showed up, including members of extremist groups linked to white supremacist ideology and violence.
Trump on Saturday morning waved at attendees as his motorcade headed to the golf course. By Saturday night, several Trump supporters clashed violently with counterprotesters, resulting in several arrests.
By Sunday morning, Trump complained that the media failed to cover the “tens of thousands” of people who attended the event, an exaggeration of the actual turnout.