Mitt Romney says he supports moving forward with Trump’s supreme court pick – live

Trump’s speech was a barnstorming seven minutes, less than half the time he was allotted, and in a tone just short of yelling. It was a speech designed for a virtual campaign rally and that is its destiny, to be played on repeat on Republican social media.

Much of the speech was a ferocious attack on China. He named the country 11 times in all. In the first few seconds he had named Covid-19 the ‘China virus’, and called for Beijing to be held accountable.

Having dismissed the pandemic as affecting ‘virtually nobody’ at a rally yesterday, he called the fight against it as a ‘great global struggle’ comparable to the second world war. And Trump went on to make a series of false claims about what the US government was doing about the pandemic.

The first was the biggest. He said ‘we launched the most aggressive mobilization, since the second world war.’

In fact, the federal government has handed over leadership to the states, and its main impact was to broadcast misleading information, downplaying the threat. Trump was speaking just after the US passed the milestone of 200,000 dead from the pandemic – a statistic he did not mention.

There will be some relief in the UN, where there were fears that the US president would announce the severing of more US funding of the organisation. Instead the hostile fire was directed mostly on China. The brevity of the speech limited the number of targets.