Eric Trump tells Columbus: No family fights harder to win
Says Ohio will help carry dad to victory
Eric Trump told a packed ballroom he’s confident his father, President Donald Trump, will win another four years in the White House and Ohio will be a part of that victory.
“The promise I’m going to make is you will never see a family that fights harder than we will over the next six days,” Trump said.
The first family has made 55 campaign stops in the last 48 hours, and Eric Trump’s evening event at the Boat House restaurant in Columbus was his second stop in Ohio on Wednesday. His sister, Tiffany Trump, announced a “MAGA Meet-up” event on Thursday in Holland, a Toledo suburb in northwest Ohio.
“That’s the kind of work ethic we bring to this,” Eric Trump said.
The president won Ohio by eight points in 2016, but polls show a tighter race this time around. A recent Rasmussen poll shows Biden leading in
Ohio 48% to 47%,while a Fox News poll from the same time frame showed the president up 48% to 45%.
“Ohioans need competent leadership, not more Trump campaign photo ops,” Ohio Democratic Party Chair David Pepper said in a statement. “Even as Ohio surpasses 200,000 (COVID-19) cases and hospitalizations reach an alltime high, the White House has admitted that they’ve given up on controlling the pandemic. We deserve better than a president who’d rather surrender than do his job.”
Eric Trump, who spent time shaking hands and posing for pictures after the event, reminded the crowd of a scathing 2015 report from the Department of Veterans Affairs that said more than 300,000 deceased veterans were listed as having a pending case.
“No one ever talks about this,” Eric Trump said. “They talk about coronavirus all day long.”
Fact checks of this claim, however, have shown that shoddy record-keeping at the VA made it impossible to tell how many of those veterans were actively seeking health care at the time of their deaths.
For example, the report claimed some pending files were people who simply inquired about services.
Trump also got the crowd on its feet when he talked about the criminal justice reform bill his father signed, and his family’s support for police.
“Let me ask you a question: Why couldn’t Biden in 47 years get criminal justice reform done,” Trump asked the crowd. “Why is that we had the lowest unemployment for African Americans in history under my father?”
That’s one of the reasons Rep. Bernadine Kennedy Kent, a Columbus Democrat, endorsed Donald Trump. Kent introduced Eric Trump and told the crowd that “all these people who are trying to hate on us because we love our president, we don’t care.”
It’s unclear yet whether the president or Joe Biden plan to return to Ohio before Election Day. The former vice president is expected to appear with Barak Obama in Michigan on Saturday. Eric Trump said his family is going to keep bouncing from state to state until Tuesday.
“Get out there and vote,” Trump said. “No matter what you do. You have to vote guys, and we are going to have a beautiful day in six days.” astaver@dispatch.com @annastaver