Campaign 2020:
Trump, Biden events a study in contrast during pandemic.
LANCASTER, Pa. — As President Trump visited a Wisconsin shipyard to emphasize job growth and reviving an economy hammered by the coronavirus, Joe Biden spent Thursday in Pennsylvania warning “there are no miracles coming” to help the nation beat back the still deadly pandemic.
“Amazingly, he hasn’t grasped the most basic fact of this crisis: To fix the economy we have to get control over the virus,” the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said of Trump while speaking at a community center in Lancaster. “He’s like a child who can’t believe this has happened to him. His whining and selfpity. This pandemic didn’t happen to him. It happened to all of us.”
Much of the nation remaining home for months has largely prevented the two presidential candidates from holding dueling appearances in pivotal battleground states. On Thursday, it gave them an opportunity to show off their contrasting styles on a virus outbreak that has killed more than 120,000 Americans.
Biden has spent weeks arguing that the pandemic remains a clear and present danger that Trump is trying to wish away amid a desire to speed an economic recovery. The president counters that the country doesn’t have to choose between its health and improving the economy.
“There are no miracles coming,” Biden said. “We’re going to have to step up as Americans, all of us, and do the simple things and the hard things to keep our families safe and reopen our economy and to eventually put this pandemic behind us — and without responsible leadership coming out of the White House.”
The former vice president spent much of Thursday defending the Obama administration’s signature health care law and decrying what he said was a White Houseled effort to dismantle it via a court challenge. It was part of a larger Democratic effort to refocus the 2020 election on health care, an issue that helped the party retake the House last cycle and one it hopes will resonate with even more voters amid the pandemic.
Narrow 2016 victories in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania were vital in sending Trump to the White House. That he would build his travel around trying to do that again — and that Biden would respond with trips meant to flip the states back to Democratic — wouldn’t usually be a surprise with the presidential election now less than five months away. But the coronavirus has upended normal travel since March.
After long focusing on staging virtual rallies and other online appearances from his Delaware home, Biden has in recent weeks begun making frequent trips to Pennsylvania, allowing him to target a swing state without venturing far.
Lancaster is about an hour and 15 minutes by car from Biden’s house, and yet it is the farthest he’s traveled lately, aside from a trip to Houston to meet with the family of George Floyd, whose death in police custody sparked protests around the nation.
Trump, by contrast, staged a rally in Tulsa last weekend and spoke at a megachurch in Arizona on Tuesday.