Donald Trump’s offensive in battleground state: ‘If Biden wins, China wins’
- Trump holds rally in Pennsylvania, arguably the most important state on the electoral map, and unleashes fierce attacks on Biden’s fitness for office
- Biden courts seniors in Florida, looking to deliver a knockout blow in a state Trump needs to win
US President Donald Trump told a Pennsylvania crowd on Tuesday that he’s fighting “Marxists” and “lunatics” while his Democratic challenger Joe Biden accused him in Florida, another key electoral state, of having treated Americans as “expendable” during the Covid-19 pandemic.
With three weeks until the November 3 election and badly down in the polls, Trump fired every lurid exaggeration about the Democrats and insult about Biden’s mental state that he has in his arsenal.
He said Biden was “choking like a dog” during their recent televised debate, called him mentally “shot”, and claimed the Democratic front-runner was the pawn of communists.
“He is handing control to the socialists and Marxists and left-wing extremists,” Trump told the large, raucous crowd in Johnstown. “He can’t stand up to the lunatics running his party.”
Thousands of people lined up outside the John Murtha Johnstown-Cambria County Airport hours before the president’s arrival. Almost all wore masks on the way into the event, but many took them off once reaching their seats, which were arranged without social distancing.
“This election is a simple choice,” Trump the crowd. “If Biden wins, China wins. All these other countries win. We get ripped off by everybody. If we win, you win, Pennsylvania wins, and America wins. Very simple.”
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Arguably even more important on election day than Pennsylvania, Florida is a battleground state that Trump won in 2016 but where polls currently show Biden ahead.
The coronavirus, which has claimed more than 215,000 lives in America, was largely an afterthought, even if Trump himself was hospitalised for three nights after testing positive at the start of October.
“We’re going to crush the virus very quickly. It’s happening already,” Trump said, despite a swathe of the United States now reporting large increases in infections.
“Soon it’s going to be perfecto,” he said.
Speaking to about 50 people at a community centre in Broward County in South Florida, Biden said Trump had recklessly dismissed the threat that the virus had posed to their at-risk population.
“To Donald Trump, you’re expendable. You’re forgettable. You’re virtually nobody. That’s how he sees seniors. That’s how he sees you,” Biden said.
Biden recalled that Trump once remarked that the virus – which has taken a particularly brutal toll among the elderly – “infects virtually nobody”.
“You are expendable, you are forgettable, you are virtually nobody. That’s how he sees this,” said Biden, who, unlike Trump, wore a face mask throughout his remarks.
Biden’s campaign believes it can win the White House without Florida’s 29 electoral votes, but it wants to lock up the state to pad a margin of victory over Trump, who has questioned the legitimacy of an election where many people will cast mail-in ballots during the pandemic. Biden has vowed to win Pennsylvania, but if he falls short, his path to victory narrows substantially.
Iowa and Georgia were two states which Trump won handily in 2016 but polls show tight races in both three weeks ahead of the November 3 election.
“Joe Biden continues to be competing better for senior voters than Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and that could be the difference in Florida,” said Kevin Wagner, a political-science professor at Florida Atlantic University (FAU).
Forty-four per cent of those polled said Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis was good or excellent while 50 per cent said it was poor or terrible.
Trump has brushed aside the polls, calling them “fake”.
Texas, meanwhile, became the latest state to start early voting, which has been taking place at a record pace so far in the states that allow it, according to Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who tracks early voting.
According to McDonald’s US Elections Project, voters have cast 11.86 million ballots so far in the states that report early voting.
Agence France-Presse, Tribune News Service, Associated Press and Reuters
