There has never been an election quite like this.
The queues for Covid tests rival the queues at polling stations – with some 90,000 new cases a day.
This is the backdrop against which the president – himself a Covid survivor – has been campaigning with astonishing, almost frantic energy. He came back to the White House last night at 3am, after a blitz of seven rallies in five states.
His rival Joe Biden has called for an end to a presidency that has “fanned the flames of hate”.
And another first: overnight the White House was surrounded by an unscalable fence in case of unrest, a fitting precaution for a president who ran on the promise of building walls, not tearing them down.