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US Presidential Election 2020
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Caroline Rose Giuliani and Kamala Harris pictured on August 12, 2020. Photo: Twitter

Rudy Giuliani’s daughter urges Americans to vote for Joe Biden in US election

  • Caroline Giuliani says supporting the Biden-Harris ticket is the ‘only way to end this nightmare’
  • Her comments came as Trump and Biden squared off in two separate televised town halls in place of a scuttled debate following the president’s Covid-19 diagnosis
When your dad is the lawyer of US President Donald Trump, father definitely does not know best – at least when it comes to politics, Rudy Giuliani’s daughter said on Thursday in a surprise op-ed that urged Americans to vote for US Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on November 3.

In a piece for Vanity Fair, Caroline Rose Giuliani said that despite her father’s close personal and professional ties with the Republican president, “none of us can afford to be silent right now”.

“As a child, I saw first-hand the kind of cruel, selfish politics that Donald Trump has now inflicted on our country,” she wrote.

Trump vs Biden: where they stand on key issues

“It made me want to run as far away from them as possible. But trust me when I tell you: Running away does not solve the problem. We have to stand and fight,” she said. “The only way to end this nightmare is to vote. There is hope on the horizon, but we’ll only grasp it if we elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”

Giuliani’s daughter went on to divulge her tense relationship with her ex-New York City mayor dad, saying they have “butted heads” on everything from gay marriage to welfare programmes to racism since she was a teenager.

“He always found a way to justify his party line, whatever it was at the time,” she wrote. “It felt important to speak my mind, and I’m glad we at least managed to communicate at all. But the chasm was painful nonetheless, and has gotten exponentially more so in Trump’s era of chest-thumping partisan tribalism.”

Giuliani said she publicly voiced her support for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, and started canvassing for congressional candidates after realising she “wasn’t getting anywhere” debating her famous Republican father at home.

“It’s taken persistence and nerve to find my voice in politics, and I’m using it now to ask you to stand with me in the fight to end Donald Trump’s reign of terror,” she said.

“If I, after decades of despair over politics, can engage in our democracy to meet this critical moment, I know you can too,” she added.

Trump lawyer Giuliani tells Lakers to ‘celebrate in Communist China’

Trump and Biden squared off, in a way, on Thursday night, their scuttled second debate replaced by duelling televised town halls several channels apart.

The presidential rivals took questions in different cities on different networks: Trump on NBC from Miami, Biden on ABC from Philadelphia. Trump backed out of plans for the presidential face off originally scheduled for the evening after debate organisers said it would be held virtually following Trump’s Covid-19 diagnosis.

The town halls offered a different format for the two candidates to present themselves to voters, after the pair held a chaotic and combative first debate late last month.

“We’ve got 19 days left and you know he’s going to throw everything but the kitchen sink at me,” Biden said on Thursday. “And it’s going to be an overwhelming torrent of lies and distortions.”

The president also repeatedly delivered pre-emptive attacks on NBC before the town hall, suggesting that he only agreed to the event because “what the hell, we get a free hour of television” and declaring that when the network hosted one for Biden, “they asked him questions that a child could answer”.

The two men are still expected to occupy the same space for a debate for a second and final time next week in Nashville. But the cancellation of Thursday’s debate still reverberated for both campaigns.

As the pace of the campaign speeds up in its final weeks, the two candidates first took care of other electoral necessities Thursday: Trump appeared at his midday rally in battleground North Carolina, and Biden raised campaign cash at his virtual event.

Trump slams NBC for ‘setting him up’ ahead of duelling town halls with Biden

Trump spent much of the rally again downplaying the severity of the pandemic that, despite his efforts to change the subject, has become the defining issue of the campaign.

“It’s going to peter out. It’s going to end,” he said of the pandemic – just as he had last winter – even as cases have continued to increase nationwide in recent weeks.

The president’s appearance in North Carolina underscored the challenge confronting him in the final weeks as multiple polls have shown him trailing Biden nationally and in many swing states. Trump has spent much of the week on defence, campaigning in states he won in 2016, such as North Carolina and Iowa, where he campaigned Wednesday.

But despite the polling, Trump predicted a “big, beautiful red wave” on Election Night, before referencing another one of his major challenges: a cash disadvantage to the Biden campaign, which just announced raising a record-breaking US$383 million in September.

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