Trump tries to chip ‘blue wall,’ Biden tries to bolster it
President Donald Trump predicted “bedlam” and a lack of clarity about the presidential results until weeks after Election Day as he barnstormed Pennsylvania, while former Vice President Joe Biden made his first joint appearance with former President Barack Obama at an event in Michigan.
The last Saturday before Election Day offered traditional lastminute frantic campaigning in battleground states played against the backdrop of the extraordinary rancor, high stakes and sense of disruption reflecting a pandemic, an economic downturn and recurring protests and unrest at the close of Trump’s first term.
In remarks in Newtown and Reading, Pennsylvania, Trump stoked fears of an election left unsettled after voting closes on Nov. 3 and about the prospects that ballots would not count.
“You’re going to be waiting for weeks” as votes are counted, Trump declared in Newtown.
“Many, many days,” he went on. “So you’re going to be watching on Nov. 3. I think it’s highly likely you’re not going to have a decision, because Pennsylvania’s very big. We’re going to be waiting. Nov. 3 is going to come and
go, and we’re not going to know. And you’re going to have bedlam in our country.”
At his next stop, in Reading, Trump derided a Supreme Court decision rejecting a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to decide whether the state could continue accepting ballots for three days after Nov. 3.
“You see what’s going on, right?” Trump said of Democrats. “Somebody’s going to play games, and they just got an extension. What’s the extension all about? Wouldn’t you like to hear, Nov. 3, we win, we lose? We win, we lose. Whatever.”
The president called the decision “disappointing” and added, “Many, many disappointing opinions from the Supreme Court. They talk about we control the Supreme — well we don’t control the Supreme
Court. That was a terrible decision.”
The question of how long ballots can be accepted in battleground states has been a dominant one as Nov. 3 approaches. So has the question of whether Trump will try to declare victory if he is leading in specific states on Election Day, regardless of whether they have been called in his favor.
Trump barely addressed
the coronavirus pandemic at his first two stops, other than to praise his administration, complain about Biden’s focus on the pandemic and to falsely claim once again that the country was “rounding the turn” as the number of daily new cases nationally has spiked to almost 100,000.
Obama, appearing with Biden in Flint, Michigan, at their first stop of the day, mocked Trump as heartless.
Noting Trump’s baseless claim a day earlier that doctors were profiting from coronavirus deaths, Obama said, “He cannot fathom — he does not understand — the notion that somebody would risk their life to save others without trying to make a buck.”
Trump is continuing to hold crowded rallies as the pandemic rages, and Obama ridiculed him for his fixation on crowd sizes, asking: “Did no one come to his birthday party when he was a kid? Was he traumatized?”
Biden spoke next, praising Obama and ripping Trump over the pandemic as well. He too invoked Trump’s baseless statement made at a rally Friday about doctors and coronavirus-related fatalities.
“What in the hell is wrong with this man?” Biden asked. “Excuse my language, but think about it. It’s perverted. He may believe it because he doesn’t do anything other than for money.”
Where both Trump and Biden campaigned Saturday was as revealing as what both men said.
The two states were part of the so- called Blue Wall — Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which have leaned Democratic in recent national elections but which were crucial to Trump’s victory in 2016 over Hillary Clinton.
Trump has struggled in all three states throughout the 2020 campaign and is pressing to keep at least one of the three as part of his map this year, in an election cycle marked by a coronavirus pandemic and an economic recession. Pennsylvania is seen by Trump’s advisers as the likeliest state among the three for him to win.
In Newtown in Bucks County, Trump delivered a subdued speech, speaking from the teleprompter at first, to several hundred people seated in folding chairs arrayed in a field in front of a stage and a podium.
Trump’s teleprompter appeared to have problems at one point, but for the first 45 minutes of his appearance, the president tried to stick to a speech that appeared designed to present him in a more “presidential” light, avoiding some of the angry and defensive outbursts that have been central to his rallies.
But then he appeared to lose interest in the speech and began to riff about Biden’s son Hunter, about his own news coverage and how unfair he thinks the coverage has been of his administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
At a drive-in car rally in Flint, Obama laid into Trump over his handling of the pandemic, emphasizing a theme that has been a central message for Biden in the closing days of the campaign.
Later, in Detroit, hundreds of people waited in cars to see Obama and Biden on Belle Isle, a state park on an island in the middle of the Detroit River.