Hours before Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was set to deliver his acceptance speech in Delaware, President Trump was in the state of Biden’s birth, where he blew his election campaign over everything from his policy proposals to the time he lived in Pennsylvania.
Speaking in Old Forge – just miles from Biden’s birthplace in Scranton – Trump touts his administration’s successes, while mocking Biden as a ‘puppet of the radical left movement’ that seeks to destroy production jobs in the state and raise taxes .
“Joe Biden is a puppet of the radical left movement that is trying to destroy the American way of life,” Trump said. “They do not want energy, they do not want guns, they do not want religion.”
Trump added: “The only thing they are not abolishing is taxes.”
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The president has spent the week in war-torn states across the country in an effort to counter the message Democrats are pushing for their convention.
In their convention, Democrats have called for a collective urgency over the dangers of Trump as president. In 2016, they fired and sometimes he trivialized. Now – in speeches by Second Chamber member Nancy Pelosi to former President Barack Obama – they dismiss him as an existential threat to the country.
The tone of the convention signals once again that the fall campaign between Trump and Biden, already expected to be among the most negative of the past half century, will be filled with rancor and dismissal.
While the tradition of presidential candidates lying low during the other party’s conventions has been eroded over the decades, Trump’s trip to Pennsylvania was a special piece of counter-programming designed to rage an opponent.
Trump’s visit to Pennsylvania was literally meant to make Biden feel at home when the president slammed the Democratic candidate for moving Scranton to Delaware earlier in his life. The president also struck Biden on his five decades of working in Washington – as a congressman, senator and vice president.
“He reminds us that he was born in Scranton, but he passed away like 70 years ago,” Trump said. “This Scranton estate, he left, he left Pennsylvania.”
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The Biden campaign used the fact that the candidate was born in Scranton as a way to connect with working-class voters – many of whom voted for Trump in 2016. Biden was born in Scranton in 1942, but his family moved eventually to Delaware when he was 11 after the Pennsylvania manufacturing city began to collapse at difficult times.
Trump continued to try to bind Biden to the unrest that took place across the country after the death of George Floyd while he was a police officer in Minneapolis. Trump shrugged off the unconfirmed theory that Democrats are trying to support the upcoming election through mail-in ballots.
“The only way they will win is through a rigged election,” Trump said.
Biden’s speech will come hours later from his hometown of Delaware and, as the culmination of the four-day convention, she will surely dominate headlines and cable news Chyrons. But Trump has been offering a robust list of competitive activity all week, with several personal events held this week meant to contrast with the largely virtual campaign that Biden conducted during the coronavirus pandemic.
He visited two other field battles – Wisconsin and Arizona – such as Minnesota, one of the few blue states from 2016 that Trump’s team feels like he has a chance to flip this fall.
But Trump’s campaign has warned of his continued fallout in the trio of Rust Belt states that carried him to the presidency in 2016. Trump plans more conventional counter-programming Thursday night with an appearance on Fox News’ show Sean Hannity just before Biden is to deliver his acceptance speech.
Trump did unexpectedly well in 2016 in northeastern Pennsylvania, winning Lucerne County and nearly winning in Lackawanna County, both of which have a solid registration advantage for Democrats. They have the characteristics of Trump country: They are whiter, with lower median incomes and fewer people with colleges, than the rest of Pennsylvania.
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The number of GOP registrations in Pennsylvania has outpaced Democrats this cycle and many political observers believe the state, which has many white, older voters, could become stronger for Republicans. But Trump has stubbornly pursued Biden, whose team aims to bring Pennsylvania back into the blue column, where it was from 1992 to 2016.
The former vice president is particularly fit on the Democratic field to carry Pennsylvania, with his deep ties to Scranton and messages catering to white working class, as well as to Black voters in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Scranton is in Lackawanna County, which went to Clinton in 2016, and Biden’s team hopes to increase attendance there.
The Biden campaign dismissed Trump’s visit as a lame campaign gambit.
Trump “put the health of countless families across the Keystone state in jeopardy and plunged the strong economy he inherited from the Obama-Biden administration into a tailspin,” Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said. “This sideshow is a pathetic attempt to distract from the fact that the Trump presidency stands for nothing but crisis, lies and division.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
