Your Daily Roundup for July 20th

What do you think?

Good morning. As the COVID-19 pandemic takes a toll on life in America, our team at Future Majority is tracking the latest updates: 

Congress is back and more relief for Americans is on the table:

After the July 4th recess, lawmakers have descended back on Washington with critical negotiations on COVID-19 relief at play.

At stake are trillions of dollars in potential new relief funds, with the House hoping for an ambitious $3 trillion and the Senate more set on $1 trillion. The backdrop of the negotiations are millions of Americans still out of work, the virus raging around the country, and the expiration of the unemployment bonus at the end of the month.

Fox News’s Chris Wallace grilled President Trump yesterday:

In a sometimes bizarre interview, Chris Wallace had the president on his program for a wide-ranging discussion, complete with assertions of “fake polls” and mental acuity based on the identification of an elephant.

But perhaps most troubling was Trump’s gaslighting of the facts on COVID-19, in which he continued to repeat the false claim that the U.S. had “one of the lowest [death rates] in the world” as a deflection to why the virus is spreading here so rapidly. Even more shockingly, Trump reaffirmed his claim that the virus will just go away: “It is going to disappear. I’ll say it again, it’s going to disappear and I’ll be right.”

New polling shows Trump’s approval slipping:

A new poll from ABC News/Washington Post shows that Trump’s disapproval again is nearing 60%:

  • Approve: 40%
  • Disapprove: 58%

What is driving his approval woes? Trump’s handling of the pandemic. In a March poll, Trump lead Biden on who voters trusted more to handle COVID-19 (45-43%), but today Biden leads on this same question by 20 points:

  • Biden: 54%
  • Trump: 34%