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President Donald Trump savagely attacked his Democratic opponent Joe Biden on Tuesday at the start of a swing state tour, but appeared to admit that his re-election campaign is running out of donors, forcing him to dip into his own pocket.
“If I have to, I will,” Trump told reporters when asked about spending his own cash. “Whatever it takes. We have to win.”
Trump was in shape at a rally with supporters in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which he visited immediately after a speech in Florida, two of the states on the battlefield that he almost certainly has to win to beat Biden the November 3.
Reminding the cheering crowd with his trademark mix of jokes, insults, and exaggerated bragging, Trump said that Biden would bring “violent mobs” and an “unseen economic depression.”
She reserved especially acid remarks for Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris, a veteran California prosecutor and US senator who now aspires to become the first black vice president, and later the likely Democratic candidate to become the first female president of U.S.
“You know what, people don’t like him. Nobody likes him,” said Trump, who also mispronounced Harris’s name, a common gesture on the right and widely interpreted as a way of showing disrespect.
“She could never be the first female president. That would be an insult to our country,” he said.
On Thursday he heads to another swinging state, Michigan, and on the weekend he goes to Nevada.
On Friday, Trump and Biden will be in Pennsylvania, another electoral battleground, for the September 11 commemorations at the Flight 93 National Monument in Shanksville.
It was unclear whether they could declare a brief truce and appear together at the ceremony remembering the passengers who died after attacking their hijackers on September 11, 2001, sending the doomed plane into a field.
Biden, who was already in Pennsylvania on Labor Day Monday, will also be in Michigan on Wednesday.
But despite his optimistic attitude, the financial difficulties facing the campaign show that Trump has a rocky path to a second term.
Trump has effectively been campaigning for a second term throughout his administration, submitting documentation for an execution on the same day as his 2017 inauguration.
Since the beginning of 2019, his campaign has spent about $ 800 million, more than double that of Biden’s.
But despite that edge and the campaign’s boastful descriptions of itself as a “monster,” Trump’s train is reportedly running into a wall of funding.
Biden, who began his hunt for the White House with a slow, underfunded effort, surprised many by beating Trump in fundraising stakes in August with a loot of $ 365 million, breaking previous monthly records.
Now Trump will find the bills piling up as he accelerates travel, outreach to voters and, most of all, costly television advertising efforts before November 3.
A New York Times article published Monday focused on then-campaign manager Brad Parscale’s wasteful spending, particularly two ads aired during the Super Bowl priced at $ 11 million.
On Twitter, Trump said that any financial problems were the fault of the media, because he had been “forced to spend to counter fake news.”
Throughout his first term, Trump has grown accustomed to dominating the news cycle, but as Election Day approaches, the Republican showman’s control of the script is fading.
Covid-19 has put an end to his favorite platform of big rallies in loud arenas and his seemingly murderous instinct to define opponents with a single catchy nickname is proving ineffective in the case of the man he calls “the dream Joe.”
The past week has seen Trump endure a torrent of negative headlines.
An article in The Atlantic citing anonymous sources accusing Trump of repeatedly disparaging the servicemen killed in the war as “losers” and “fools” continues to irritate the White House, despite his energetic attempts to discredit history.
Those allegations are now joined by lurid claims made by his disgraced former repairman and attorney Michael Cohen, whose book “Disloyal” is the latest in a long line of angry hints from former Trump members.
sms / jh
