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US President Donald Trump gestures during a campaign rally at the Pickaway Agriculture and Event Center in Circleville, Ohio, on October 24, 2020 (Photo by MANDEL NGAN / AFP).
LUMBERTON, United States – An exalted President Donald Trump cast his vote early in Florida on Saturday and was opening three statewide campaign rallies as he sought to close the gap with Joe Biden, with coronavirus cases increasing ten days before Election Day.
“This election is a choice between a super-recovery for Trump and a depression for Biden,” he told supporters under a blazing North Carolina sun, highlighting the promises of a cure for Covid-19 and a rapid economic recovery.
And he shrugged off polls that continue to show his Democratic rival Biden leading the race.
“They want to depress you,” he said about the political and media outlets that report the figures. “These polls are much better than four years ago.”
The president’s optimism came after he cast his own vote in Florida, telling reporters with a smile, “I voted for a guy named Trump.”
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.
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 grim reality gripped by Biden: The United States set a daily record for new Covid-19 cases on Friday, at nearly 80,000, with a further increase expected to as cold weather arrives.
The virus has claimed 224,000 American lives, with no end in sight.
‘Make things better’
“That’s the presidency of Donald Trump,” Biden said Saturday during a drive-in movie, one of two events planned for the day in his native Pennsylvania, a critical critical condition. He spoke from a stage decorated with hay bales and Halloween pumpkins.
“Yesterday (was) the worst day we’ve ever had,” said Biden, who has been more restrained than Trump in his campaign and careful to take precautions against the coronavirus.
“Donald Trump said, and continues to say, we are just around the corner. It goes. We are learning to live with it. “
Biden added: “We are not learning to live with it. You are asking us to learn to die with him and it is wrong. “
The Biden campaign also deployed a key surrogate, former President Barack Obama, who criticized the Trump administration’s Covid-19 response.
“The idea that somehow this White House has done anything but screw this up is bullshit,” Obama told supporters at a rally in Miami, Florida.
“Donald Trump is not going to suddenly protect us all. He can’t even take the basic steps to protect himself, ”Obama added, referring to Trump’s hospitalization for Covid-19 three weeks ago.
Also criticizing the fact that the president has not denounced white supremacy and the many times he has lied in public, among other issues, Obama asked his followers to vote for his former vice president.
“We can make things better … That’s what voting is about, not making things perfect, but making things better,” he said.
“If we vote up and down like never before, we will elect Joe Biden.”
Biden has a firm lead in national polls and a more limited lead in many battle states like Florida, which typically decide the winner of the US presidential election.
But Democrats are not about to forget the astonishing surprise Trump caused in 2016 when he defeated Hillary Clinton.
The president’s current grueling trips aim to repeat that feat.
Uniform?
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.
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