Biden, Trump duel in battleground states 21 days from election
Johnstown, US - 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 only 21 days 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’ during their televised debate and claimed the Democratic frontrunner was the pawn of communists.
“He is handing control to the socialists and Marxists and leftwing extremists,” Trump told the large, raucous crowd in Johnstown. “He can’t stand up to the lunatics running his party.”
Going even further on his longrunning narrative that 77 year old Biden is too frail for the presidency, Trump (74) tweeted a crudely faked picture purporting to show Biden in a wheelchair, surrounded by elderly wheelchair-bound people in a room.
‘Biden for president,’ the caption said, with ‘p’ struck out to change the word to ‘resident’.
The mocking presentation of the infirm elderly was somewhat surprising given the President’s apparently growing problems in retaining the loyalty of seniors, an important electoral force.
In Johnstown, Trump reprised the outsider image that he developed for his surprise 2016 victory, telling the crowd that he was combating a ‘selfish and corrupt political class’ back in Washington.
But even as he delighted the crowd with his greatest rhetorical hits, Trump once more showed that despite his poor poll showing he has no intention of trying to reach across to Democrats in a deeply divided nation.
“This will end up being a large-scale version of Venezuela if they get in,” he said, painting a nightmarish anti-immigrant vision of a country where Democrats give free hospital care to ‘illegal aliens’ while ‘decimating Medicare and destroying your Social Security’.
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 swath of the United States now reporting large increases in infections. “Soon it’s going to be perfecto,” he said.
Hours earlier, Biden was in Florida holding one of the much smaller events typical of his lowkey campaign, zooming in on Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
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.
Biden courted the elderly, telling an event at a retirement center in Pembroke Pines, north of Miami, that Trump has ‘never been focused on you’.