Joe Biden will post campaign ads during Donald Trump’s long-awaited interview with Fox News Sunday.
The president sat down with Chris Wallace, one of America’s most respected political interviewers, at the White House on Friday, for his first interview on Sunday in more than a year.
A clip showed Trump claiming that Biden wanted to eliminate the police and had included politics in a pact struck with Bernie Sanders, the Vermont left-wing senator who led the closest former vice president in the Democratic primary.
In the face of the president’s visible anger, Wallace insisted that this was not true.
Now Biden will publish his announcement, titled “Tough,” during the broadcast of the interview in six battlefield states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina.
The realclearpolitics.com survey average puts Biden ahead in all six, with margins ranging from 7.8% in Pennsylvania to 2% in North Carolina.
The move could provoke a president notoriously susceptible to what he sees on television: Anti-Trump groups like the Lincoln Project have thrived by placing brutal ads where the president will see them.
Biden’s announcement is more subtle. Not to mention Trump, his goal is to present his candidate as a leader capable of handling the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m thinking of all of you today,” says Biden, citing “the increase in the number of cases that cause fear and apprehension.”
“This virus is difficult but we can stop the spread. It is up to all of us to do it. “
Biden advises Americans to “wear a mask, wash your hands, stay home if you can, and distance yourself socially when you go out,” public health measures advocated by White House experts, but that Trump and many Republicans in elected office have been reluctant to back strongly.
As cases rise in the U.S. states, with nearly 140,000 dead, as experts warn of a grim fall to come and when Trump is widely accused of a liability abdication, Biden’s implication is clear.
“I will not abandon you,” he says. “We are all in this together. We will fight this together. And together we will come out of this stronger than we were before we started.”
Wallace told Fox News that he discussed the pandemic with Trump during an occasionally irritating interview conducted in the Washington heat.
“If it looked like it was hot in that yard right outside the Oval Office there,” he said, “it was around 100F.” Trump, he added, “kept saying, ‘Whose idea was this?’ Well, of course, it was the president’s idea, but as he said, he wanted to make me sweat. “
“We talk about everything,” Wallace said. “We talk about Covid[-19] and the explosion of cases in this country, mask questions, test questions. “
Trump reportedly said he hopes to organize fewer campaign rallies than in 2016, due to concerns about the coronavirus that focused around an event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June.
“He seems a little concerned about that,” Wallace said.
“We also talk about politics, the polls. We have a new Fox News poll that we discuss with the President that shows what follows. But he seemed completely confident that he will beat Joe Biden in November. We also talked about that revealing book from his niece, Mary Trump. “
Wallace called the exchange on Biden and the surveillance “very interesting.”
When an aide pulled out the Biden document, Wallace said Trump “went through it and found many things he opposed and that Biden accepted, but couldn’t find any indication, because there is none, that Joe Biden has tried to remove and abolish the police. “
Later, Trump insisted that Biden “can use different words, but when you look at his deal with crazy Bernie and other things, that’s what he wants to do.”
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