President Donald Trump cast his vote on Saturday in Florida ahead of another day of punishment with three campaign rallies as he works to close the gap with Joe Biden and achieve an unexpected 2016-style victory on November 3.
“I voted for a guy named Trump,” he said, smiling after removing his black mask as he left a polling station in warm West Palm Beach, not far from the Mar-a-Lago complex where he officially made his home. last year. .
Thus, he became one of nearly 55 million Americans who cast their early votes in a year in which the coronavirus has made voting in person problematic.
“It was a very safe vote. Much safer than when you cast a ballot, I can tell you that,” said Trump, who insists without giving evidence that voting by mail leads to fraud.
Continuing his hectic pace, the president was sipping whiskey later that day from North Carolina to Ohio and then to Wisconsin, returning to the White House just minutes before midnight, as he furiously works to make up lost ground.
But the president’s efforts have been inevitably overshadowed by a stark reality that Biden gripped: The United States set a daily record for new Covid-19 cases on Friday, at nearly 83,000, and a further increase is expected to as cold weather arrives.
“President Trump knew the severity of this virus and did not tell the truth to the American people,” the former vice president said in a statement Saturday. He said Trump “was unwilling and unable to do the hard work to get it under control.”
Biden, who has been more restrained and aware of the pandemic in his campaign, planned two drive-in events in Pennsylvania, another key state.
The Biden campaign was also fielding a key replacement, former President and former Biden boss Barack Obama, to speak later that day in Miami.
With nearly 55 million people already casting their early votes, Biden has a firm lead in national polls and a narrower lead in many battle states like Florida that typically decide the winner of the U.S. presidential election.
The drama of the last televised Trump-Biden debate on Thursday was not thought to move the needle significantly.
But Democrats are not about to forget the surprising surprise Trump had in 2016 when he defeated the favorite Hillary Clinton.
The president’s current grueling trips aim to repeat that feat.
On Friday, Trump took aim at the vote of the politically powerful seniors in Florida, telling a crowd in the retirement community The Villages that all Biden talks about is “Covid, Covid, Covid” to “scare people.” .
“We are going to quickly end this pandemic, this horrible plague,” he said.
In fact, the virus has claimed more than 224,000 American lives, with no end in sight.
Referring to Biden’s warning of a “dark winter” ahead, Trump insisted the country is “approaching the light at the end of the tunnel.”
He then turned to his own scare tactics, claiming that Biden would let in hordes of illegal immigrants, including “criminals and rapists and even murderers.”
Lack of leadership
While Biden has waged a low-key campaign, even the 77-year-old Democrat is increasing activity down the stretch.
In his home state of Delaware on Friday, he delivered a speech on economic recovery from the pandemic, criticizing Trump’s record and promising, as Trump has, that he would provide a safe coronavirus vaccine to all who want it.
“We have been in crisis for more than eight months and the president still doesn’t have a plan,” Biden said. “He has given up. He gave up you, your family, the United States.
Spin too late?
Trump’s campaign has been disrupted by the coronavirus crisis, which most voters say it has mishandled.
In addition to the national disaster, Trump’s re-election has been hampered at all times by his own erratic and often short-tempered behavior.
In the last televised debate Thursday in Nashville, the president leaned toward the more level-headed leader that attendees had long hoped Americans would see.
But whether this change from the usually painful diet of insults, grievances, and conspiracy theories will suffice at this point is an open question.
Trump took advantage during the debate on Biden’s vote to “transition” away from the highly polluting oil industry, a potentially damaging admission in oil-producing states like Pennsylvania and Texas.
But Biden himself scored points by raising questions about Trump’s holding of a bank account in China and his failure to publish his tax returns.
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