US elections: Trump leans toward fear and nationalism in bid to win Midwestern states

President Donald Trump leaned toward scare tactics on Saturday (US time) when he accused the left of trying to “erase American history, purge American values, and destroy the American way of life” in a belated re-election speech to voters in Michigan.

“The Democratic Party he once knew doesn’t exist,” Trump told voters in Muskegon, Michigan, before a rally in Wisconsin, two states in the Upper Midwest that were pivotal to his 2016 victory but may now be slipping away. out of reach.

While trying to prevent more voters from turning against him, Trump tried to paint Democrats as “anti-American radicals” in a “crusade against American history.” He told moderate voters that they had a “moral duty” to join the Republican Party.

He also reviewed his months-long feud with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Whitmer, a Democrat, was the focus of a kidnapping plot by anti-government extremists who were angered by the lockdown measures she put in place as a result of the coronavirus. Thirteen men have been charged in connection with the plan, which included plans to storm the state Capitol and hold some sort of trial for the governor.

It’s a subject that Trump leaned in on, as the crowd chanted “Lock her up.”

“You have to get your governor to open your state and your schools to open. Schools have to be open, right?” said Trump, who also took credit for the role of federal law enforcement in thwarting the plot.

A Whitmer aide responded to Trump’s attacks in a tweet.

“Every time the president does this at a rally, the violent rhetoric towards her immediately increases on social media,” tweeted Whitmer digital director Tori Saylor. “It has to stop. It just has to.”

Trump’s re-election speech comes as he faces headwinds not only in national polls, which show Democrat Joe Biden in the lead, but also in key polls on the battlefield. And it comes after the campaign largely pulled out of television advertising in the Midwest, shifting much of its money to Sun Belt states like Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, and Georgia, as well as Pennsylvania.

The president continues to be persecuted for his handling of the coronavirus, which hospitalized him for several days earlier this month.

Wisconsin broke the record for new positive coronavirus cases on Friday, the third time it has occurred in a week. The state also hit record levels of daily deaths and hospitalizations last week.

But there was little evidence of concern from the crowd at the rally at Trump’s airport, where thousands of supporters stood together in the cold. The vast majority avoided masks.

Biden had no public events planned for Saturday. But in a memo to supporters, campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon warned of complacency.

“The reality is that this race is much closer than some of the experts we are seeing on Twitter and on television would suggest,” he wrote in the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press.

“If we learned anything from 2016, it is that we cannot underestimate Donald Trump or his ability to fight his way back into the fray in the final days of a campaign, through whatever smear or clandestine tactic he has at his disposal.”

Trump maintains an aggressive campaign schedule despite his own recent bout with the virus. He holds rallies Sunday in Nevada and Monday in Arizona before returning to Pennsylvania on Tuesday.

The difficulty of securing a second term was evident Friday when Trump campaigned in Georgia. No Republican presidential contender has lost status since 1992, but polls show Trump and Biden in a close contest. Trump has also had to court voters in Iowa, which gained nearly 10 percentage points four years ago.

The latest campaign fundraising figures from Trump’s team suggest he is likely the first sitting president in the modern era to face a financial disadvantage. After building a huge cash advantage, his campaign spent lavishly, while Biden kept expenses low and benefited from a slew of donations that led him to raise nearly $ 1 billion in the past three months. That gives Biden a huge cash advantage with just over two weeks before the election.