Trump: If Biden's elected president, he'll "listen to the scientists" and trigger lockdowns
19 October 2020
The Biden campaign slammed President Trump after he said at a Nevada rally Sunday if his Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden were elected there'd be more coronavirus pandemic lockdowns because "he'll listen to the scientists."
What they're saying: "If I listened totally to the scientists, we would right now have a country that would be in a massive depression," Trump said.
- Biden campaign spokesperson Andrew Bates said in an emailed statement, "Donald Trump tanked the strong economy he inherited from the Obama-Biden Administration by continually discounting and attacking warnings from the scientific and medical experts working around the clock to save lives.
- "Now new coronavirus cases are surging and layoffs are rising."
For the record: The U.S. has the highest number of cases and death toll from COVID-19 in the world.
- The virus has killed more than 219,600 people and infected over 8.1 million in the U.S., per Johns Hopkins.
- Airlines, oil companies, tire manufacturers, book publishers and insurers are among the industries where tens of thousands of layoffs have been announced.
Go deeper: The onset of winter will make the pandemic even worse.
Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times
Section2Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.
Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.
The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.
- The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.
What the transcripts say:
- Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
- The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
- Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."
Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.