Biden, Trump keep up sparring
One stresses virus, other the economy
BULLHEAD CITY, Ariz. — Former Vice President Joe Biden vowed Wednesday not to campaign in the election homestretch “on the false promises of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch.”
President Donald Trump promised that economi c g rowth figures for the summer quarter, due today, will be strong, declaring,
“this election is a choice between a Trump super-recovery and a Biden depression.”
Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, also argued that a Supreme Court conservative majority stretched to 6-3 by newly confirmed Justice Amy Coney Barrett could dismantle
the Obama administration’s signature health care law and leave millions of people without insurance coverage during the pandemic.
He called Trump’s handling of the coronavirus an “insult” to its victims, especially as cases spike dramatically around the country.
“Even if I win, it’s going to take a lot of hard work to end this pandemic,” Biden said during a speech in Wilmington, Del. “I do promise this: We will start on day one doing the right things.”
His comments reflected an attempt to keep the political spotlight on the pandemic.
As Trump spoke at a rally in Bullhead City, Ariz., an Air Force fighter jet thundered nearby and released a flare to get the attention of a nonresponsive private aircraft that was flying in the restricted airspace. North American Aerospace Defense Command said the plane was escorted out by the F-16 “without further incident.”
Trump was at first caught off guard but later cheered the fighter jet, proclaiming, “I love that sound” as it roared overhead.
The president also condemned violence that occurred during some protests in response to the police shooting of Walter Wallace Jr., a Black man, in Philadelphia, saying Biden stands “with the rioters and the vandals.”
But Biden said in Wilmington, “there is no excuse whatsoever for the looting and the violence.”
Bullhead City is just across the border from Nevada, a state Trump is hoping to flip on Election Day next Tuesday. A Trump Nevada rally last month attracted thousands and led to the airport that hosted it being fined more than $5,500 for violating pandemic crowd restrictions.
Rather than curb his crowd, Trump moved just across the border and used his rally Wednesday to scoff at Democratic leaders in states like Nevada for trying to enforce social-distancing rules.
The weather was far milder than during a Tuesday night Trump rally in Omaha, Neb. After Trump left the rally there, hundreds of attendees at Eppley Airfield spent hours waiting in the cold for transportation to cars parked far away. At least seven people were taken to hospitals over concerns about exposure.
“Because of the sheer size of the crowd, we deployed 40 shuttlebuses — double the normal allotment — but local road closures and resulting congestion caused delays,” Trump spokeswoman Samantha Zager said in a statement.
‘ANONYMOUS’ REVEALED
In a campaign sidelight, the president lashed out after news that Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, was revealed as the author of a scathing anti-Trump op-ed and book under the pen name “Anonymous.”
“This guy is a low-level lowlife that I don’t know,” he said. “I have no idea who he is.”
Taylor, said in a tweet six days before Election Day that Trump is “a man without character” and “it’s time for everyone to step out of the shadows.”
Taylor has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s in recent months and had repeatedly denied that he was the author of the column — even to colleagues at CNN, where he has a contributor contract.
Taylor’s behavior leaves questions for CNN. He was asked directly by the network’s Anderson Cooper in August whether he was “Anonymous” and answered: “I wear a mask for two things, Anderson, Halloween and pandemics. So, no.”
Josh Campbell, a national security correspondent for CNN, tweeted that he also had asked Taylor if he was “Anonymous” and was told no.
CNN said Taylor would remain a contributor.
Trump views Nevada favorably, despite it not backing a Republican for president since 2004. Hillary Clinton won it by fewer than 2.5 percentage points in 2016.
And Biden wants to flip Arizona, which hasn’t voted Democratic for president since 1996. His running mate, California U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, was in Arizona on Wednesday, meeting with Hispanic entrepreneurs and Black leaders, as well as holding two drive-in rallies.
“We’re talking to people everywhere,” Harris said. “And there’s no area that’s off limits.”
On Friday, Harris is to visit Fort Worth, Houston and the U.S.-Mexico border town of McAllen in Texas — a state that hasn’t backed a Democrat for president since 1976 or even elected one to statewide office since 1994. Texas was long so reliably Republican that top national Democrats visited only to hold fundraisers.
“I am really grateful for the attention that they have given Texas because it has been so long since a presidential campaign gave this state a look,” said Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman and onetime presidential hopeful. But he declined to predict that Biden would win the state, saying only “there is a possibility,” contingent on turnout breaking records.
Biden heads later in the week to three more states where Trump won in 2016 — Iowa, Wisconsin and Michigan — where he plans to hold a joint Saturday rally with former President Barack Obama.
VOTES CAST
Biden voted early in Wilmington, Del., on Wednesday and received a virtual briefing from health experts. One, Dr. David Kessler, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, warned, “we are in the midst of the third wave [of the virus], and I don’t think anyone can tell you how high this is going to get.”
Democrats point to a larger number of their party members returning absentee ballots — results that could be decisive since more people are likely to vote by mail during the pandemic.
Trump’s campaign believes that enough of its supporters will vote on Election Day to overwhelm any early Biden advantage.
Americans have already cast more than half the total votes counted in 2016.
With six days left to go until Election Day, more than 71 million early votes have been cast as of Wednesday morning, 51.6% of the total turnout from the 2016 general election, according to the U.S. Elections Project, which tracks early voting. That includes 47.8 million votes cast by mail-in ballots and 23.3 million in-person votes. There were 47.2 million total early votes cast in the 2016 election.
A record number of mailin ballots is expected to be cast for the election after states expanded absentee voting in response to the pandemic, and there is heavy balloting at many early-voting locations with voters seeking to avoid any lines at the polls Tuesday.
Among the states with the highest percentage of their total 2016 vote already cast so far are Texas at 86.9%, Washington at 76.1%, Montana at 75.4% and North Carolina at 71.5%, according to the Elections Project.
Nationwide, voters will not only be sent an unprecedented number of mail ballots, they are returning them sooner than in past elections, said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida professor who runs the Elections Project.
With polls showing that many Republicans plan to vote in person on Election Day after Trump’s concerns about fraud with widespread mail-in voting, registered Democrats have requested 10 million more absentee ballots than Republicans, according to the Elections Project.
WEBSITE DEFACED
Separately, Trump’s campaign website was briefly taken over and defaced by hackers Tuesday.
It lasted less than 30 minutes, but the incident came as both campaigns, as well as law enforcement and intelligence agencies, have been on high alert for digital interference before next week’s election.
In a statement, Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said it was “working with law enforcement authorities to investigate the source of the attack.” He added, “there was no exposure to sensitive data because none of it is actually stored on the site. The website has been restored.”
The FBI did not immediately comment.
It was not clear whether the defacement was the work of foreign hackers or cybercriminals. But in a screed posted to Trump’s website — donaldjtrump.com — the hackers claimed to have compromised “multiple devices” that gave them access to the “most internal and secret conversations” of the president and his relatives, including classified information.
The hackers appeared to be looking to generate cryptocurrency. They invited visitors to donate cryptocurrency to one of two funds — one labeled “Yes, share the data,” the other labeled “No, Do not share the data.” They solicited payments in Monero, a hard-to-trace cryptocurrency.
Though the defacement appeared to be part of a common cryptocurrency scam to get people to irreversibly donate money online, the incident took on added urgency one week before the election.
Cybersecurity experts said it could have been caused by tricking a website administrator into turning over the credentials, in what is known as a phishing attack, or by redirecting the campaign website to the hacker’s own server. Information for this article was contributed by Will Weissert,Aamer Madhani, Alexandra Jaffe, Kevin Freking, Zeke Miller, Margery A. Beck, David Bauder, Michelle Price, Kathleen Ronayne and Zeke Miller of The Associated Press; by Nicole Perlroth of The New York Times; and by Mark Niquette of Bloomberg News.