His goal, in keeping with the President’s relentless drive to reopen the US economy regardless of human cost, is to get Americans to focus on anything other than the raging virus while distracting themselves from the imperfect effort of the administration to control it earlier this year, A fun tactic that hasn’t worked so far.
After aggressive racial harassment earlier this summer, the Trump team is turning more attention to the longtime Republican tactic of trying to paint its Democratic opponent as weak and ill-equipped to protect and defend the United States.
Pence on the stump
Distilling the argument from the Trump campaign in Ripon, Wisconsin, on Friday, Pence described Biden as something akin to a zombie candidate who had been chosen by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and the radical left, and falsely claimed that Biden is now aligned with far-left activists who want to remove the police.
Although he hardly mentions the human cost of Coronavirus, Pence accused Biden and Sanders of adopting an agenda based on government control that would be defined by “an avalanche of regulations”, “open borders” and hostility towards the police.
With that comment, Pence said Biden had “capitulated to the radical left-wing mafia.”
“Joe Biden would weaken the thin blue line that separates order from chaos,” Pence said, noting that the Trump administration would never vanish the police. “We will defend the police every day … The hard truth is: you will not be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”
Trump echoed those comments in a tweet on Friday night: “Corrupt Joe Biden wants to fade our police. He can use different words, but when you look at his deal with Crazy Bernie and whatnot, that’s what he wants to do. It would destroy America! “
Repeating an unproven argument
Employing tired racial tropes that were used in the previous century, and which appear to be far out of step with the opinion of most Americans today, Trump claimed that by rule, households “will drop in value and rates crime rates will increase rapidly. ” .. Suburbia will no longer be as we know it. “
But there is little evidence that Trump’s fear and racial division tactics are working. This week brought in another poll showing Biden leading Trump by double digits, as his coronavirus performance still appears to be a major factor in his approval ratings.
In an average of recent ABC News / Ipsos and Quinnipiac polls, Trump’s approval rating of the coronavirus among whites without a college degree was about 50%, and the numbers were similar among rural voters, Enten said.
And as much as Trump and Pence would like to steer the conversation away from the coronavirus, it’s still a priority for Americans, as the United States broke another record Thursday with more than 77,000 new cases of Covid-19.
The confidence gap for the president when it comes to Covid-19 is evident: An astonishing 64% said they trust “not much” or none of what Trump says about the pandemic.
Lack of leadership
The administration’s steps to suppress public information about the Covid-19 spread will certainly not help rebuild voter confidence. The Trump administration’s decision to order hospitals to bypass the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and to submit their data directly to the Department of Health and Human Services met with backlash of public health experts this week.
“No one is taking away access or data from CDC,” said Redfield.
Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for Pence and the task force, said the report showed “encouraging signs” amid the pandemic, because a few weeks ago Pence reported that “16 states met the criteria for increasing cases and increasing the positivity rate. ” In the unpublished report, he noted that only 10 states meet that criteria. “This is just a data point for many encouraging signs that we are seeing across the country as we continue to respond to the coronavirus pandemic,” O’Malley said in a statement to CNN.
But as many times as Trump and Pence try to claim that the United States is passing the virus and that everything is fine, the data continues to tell another story.
“Do people say it’s a second wave? No. We’re still on the first wave,” Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in “The Situation Room” on Friday the night.
“It never completely disappeared,” after the major outbreaks in March and April, Collins said, “and now it is returning on a steep incline, which is, of course, a source of great concern to anyone, especially those in difficult conditions. “Impact areas”.
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