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MUSKEGON, Michigan: President Donald Trump leaned toward scare tactics on Saturday (October 17) when he accused the left of trying to “erase American history, purge American values, and destroy the American way of life” in a speech by late reelection for 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.
The speech comes as Trump faces headwinds not only in national polls, which show Democrat Joe Biden at the helm, 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.
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Supporters of President Donald Trump applaud as he speaks at a campaign rally on October 17, 2020 (Photo: AP / Carlos Osorio).
The president continues to be persecuted for his handling of COVID-19, 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.
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President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on October 17, 2020 (Photo: AP / Carlos Osorio)
“The reality is that this race is much closer than some of the experts we are seeing on Twitter and 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 smears or covert tactics he has at his disposal.”
Trump maintains an aggressive campaign schedule despite his own recent bout with the virus. He has held 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.
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President Donald Trump arrives at a campaign rally on October 17, 2020 in Norton Shores. (Photo: AP / Carlos Osorio)
After building a huge cash advantage, his campaign spent generously, while Biden kept expenses low and benefited from a slew of donations that led to him raising nearly $ 1 billion in the past three months. That gives Biden a huge cash advantage with just over two weeks before the election.
In the hours leading up to his rallies on Saturday, Trump focused on settling scores with a member of his own party, Republican Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska.
Referring to him as “Little Ben Sasse,” Trump tweeted that the senator was a “drag on the Republican Party and an embarrassment to the Great State of Nebraska.”
The series of tweets came after Sasse told voters Wednesday during a city hall phone meeting that Trump has “flirted with white supremacists,” taunts evangelical Christians in private, and “kisses dictators’ butts. “.
Sasse, who is running for re-election this year in the heavily Republican state, continued to criticize the president’s handling of the coronavirus, saying the Trump family has treated the presidency “as a business opportunity.”
Trump’s Twitter criticized Sasse as “the least effective of our 53 Republican senators, and a person who really doesn’t have what it takes to be great.”
Sasse’s spokesman, James Wegmann, tweeted in response that Sasse was focusing on helping Republicans retain their 53-47 majority in the Senate, and “is not going to waste a minute on tweets.”
