Open Sore: President Trump and the Dr. Anthony Fauci have broken into open warfare. Trump called the revered epidemiologist “a disaster” after Fauci told “60 Minutes” that it came as no surprise the President caught the coronavirus after his incautious Rose Garden reception “turned out to be a superspreader event.”

  “People are tired of listening to Fauci and these idiots,” Trump said in a call with his campaign staff yesterday. 

  Fauci had also objected to being quoted out of context in a campaign ad endorsing Trump’s efforts to fight the virus. “I do not and nor will I ever, publicly endorse any political candidate,” he told “60 Minutes.” “And here I am, they’re sticking me right in the middle of a campaign ad. Which I thought was outrageous.”

  Trump was unapologetic. “And yet we keep him,” the President said in the call from a Las Vegas hotel. “Every day he goes on television, there’s always a bomb, but there’s a bigger bomb if you fire him. But Fauci is a disaster.”

  He’s fighting the virus as a political rather than a medical opponent. Trump said of the public at a rally in Arizona, “They’re getting tired of the pandemic — aren’t we?” He said, “You turn on CNN. That’s all they cover. Covid, covid, pandemic. Covid, covid, covid. They’re trying to talk people out of voting. . . . People aren’t buying it, CNN, you dumb bastards.”

The Vote: Waiting in line sometimes all day, more than 28 million Americans have already cast their vote for president with election day still two weeks away. That’s almost 20% of the more than 136 million ballots cast in the 2016 presidential election, according to CNN’s political unit.

  It’s not yet a record for early voting, but it is an indication that voters are motivated. Among the 17 states that report votes by party affiliation, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one in the early vote.

  Michael McDonald, a Professor at the University of Florida, says, “Four year ago, at a comparable point in time, I was tracking 5.9 million votes.”

   Much of this election may be fought out in court. President Trump lost one yesterday when the Supreme Court ruled that mail ballots received in Pennsylvania within three days of election day must be counted, despite Republican objections.

Viral News: Health authorities have grown alarmed at the Trump administration’s endorsement of “herd immunity” for the coronavirus, allowing people to become infected until post-illness immunity stalls the spread of the disease. 

  The theory is outlined in a document called The Great Barrington Declaration, which sounds like the Tennis Court Oath, created in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The declaration says that, “Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” and “Keeping these measures in place until a vaccine is available will cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.”

  The document says, “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.” 

  This morning, infections in the US are up 34 percent over the past two weeks. In the last 24 hours, the country crossed the line of 220,000 deaths; 220,134 to be exact.

French Connection: French authorities were busy yesterday arresting suspected Islamic militants after the beheading of a school teacher on a public street by a teenager acting in the name of Allah. 

  Fifteen people were arrested in connection with the killing of Samuel Paty, a teacher in a suburb north of Paris last Friday. The 18-year-old who killed him was shot dead by the police and members of his family were among those arrested. As many as 200 people are threatened with expulsion from France.

  Paty was killed because he had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in class. In the Muslim faith, any image of Muhammed is forbidden. But the attack was seen as an assault on both the valued public education system in France, and its tradition of free speech.

New Rules: In next week’s presidential debate, the microphone will be muted on the candidate who doesn’t have the floor during two minute answers. That’s a response to President Trump’s repeated interruptions in the first debate. Both microphones will be open during periods of free give and take. 

Overexposure: Political analyst Jeffrey Toobin, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a fixture on CNNdiscussion panels, has been suspended by the magazine and taken a leave from the network after an incident of overexposure during a Zoom meeting with the publication’s staff and WNYC radio.

  Toobin, who’s written eight books, is a heavyweight at The New Yorker. “I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers,” Toobin said in a statement. “I believed I was not visible on Zoom. I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video.”

  It’s common for people to do Zoom meetings without pants, but it’s customary to remain seated. Vice News reports that Toobin was caught in a moment of personal indulgence. Somewhere out there, a video is struggling to get out of its pants.

-30-