Trump and Biden hit the campaign trail in charged US election week
19 October, 2020
President Donald Trump and rival Joe Biden hit the bottom Sunday (Oct 18) in the swing states which will decide the US election, as the campaign turns increasingly vicious 16 days before voting.
Trump, scrambling to make up lost ground, is on a furious multi-state barnstorming tour, hopping on Sunday from Nevada to California and back again to Nevada for a day of rallies and fundraising, before moving on to Arizona on Monday.
He also plans rallies later in the week in Pennsylvania and NEW YORK.
An infrequent church-goer, he attended services Sunday in a cavernous - however, not totally full - evangelical church in NEVADA. Congregants prayed for him, and when a collection plate was passed, a pool photographer saw Trump toss in a handful of US$20 bills.
Biden, a practicing Catholic, attended Mass along with his wife Jill at their church near Wilmington, Delaware, before walking outside to go to the grave of son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015.
Limiting his own campaign itinerary because of pandemic concerns, the 77-year-old Biden then flew to NEW YORK for a set of events.
In Durham, the mask-wearing former vice president jogged to a stage in a parking lot where persons in a large number of vehicles waited for him.
"We choose hope over fear, we choose unity over division, science over fiction and yes, we choose truth over lies," he told them.
His motorcade also made an unannounced stop to allow him and his granddaughter to order milkshakes, with Biden - keen to play up the stark dissimilarities between his campaign and Trump's - keeping his mask on throughout.
Both men will work to rouse their political bases and appeal to the seemingly few undecided voters within an election that could revolve on voter turnout.
One key opportunity comes this week with the candidates' final nationally televised debate, on Thursday evening in Nashville, Tennessee.
Their first debate descended right into a chaotic blast of interruptions by Trump, head-shaking, and angry rejoinders; the next was replaced by dueling town-hall meetings after Trump refused to debate nearly on the heels of his bout with coronavirus.
The final debate will be face-to-face.
TRUMP TRAILS IN POLLS
If there was any doubt about the 74-year-old president's own recovery from the virus, his packed campaigning schedule seems to belie it, and his message has, if anything, grown more pointed.
On Sunday, Trump again raised a disputed allegation that messages on a laptop computer owned by Biden's son Hunter implicated the former vice president in corrupt links to Ukraine, calling it a "proven fact".
This, he tweeted, made it "impossible" for Biden to "ever assume any office of the President!"
Biden's campaign has repeatedly rejected the allegations, angrily dismissed by the applicant as a "smear campaign".
But Trump hasn't backed down.
On a rally Saturday in Muskegon, Michigan he called Biden "a criminal" and even joined a keen crowd in chants of "Lock him up".
Trump also further stoked a US culture war with outlandish claims, saying the Democrats wished to "erase American history, purge American values and destroy the American way of life".
With the president trailing in polls, some analysts say he should give attention to America's economical prospects, which Trump considers his strong point.
Nearly 220,000 Americans have died from COVID-19, the world's worst total, and the outbreak is now spreading in lots of states at rates unseen in months.
Polls show that a lot of voters disapprove of his erratic handling of the pandemic, and Biden has managed to get a core theme, promising a far more sober leadership.
Ahead of Trump's Nevada events, Biden said the president "needs to answer for his failed response to COVID-19".
He continued: "Donald Trump didn't take necessary precautions to safeguard himself and others. How can we trust him to safeguard Nevada families?"
Trump has dismissed his weak polling data, while Biden's supporters are also wary about over-confidence in an election that could tilt on a close race in one state such as Florida.
IT OFFERS TO STOP
Democrats assailed Trump on Sunday not simply for his attacks on Biden but on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, the recent target of a kidnapping plot by a heavily armed right-wing militia group.
The president is "incentivizing and inciting this sort of domestic terrorism. It really is wrong. It's got to get rid of. It really is dangerous," Whitmer told NBC's Meet up with the Press.
Meanwhile, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, has been negotiating with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin over a stimulus relief bill to ease the economic strains imposed by the pandemic.
She said Sunday on ABC that she remained optimistic of a deal, though many lawmakers say the two sides remain far apart.
A lot more than 25 million Americans have already cast ballots in unprecedented early voting.
Source: www.channelnewsasia.com