Trump mocks Biden’s Scranton roots ahead of convention speech: ‘He abandoned Pennsylvania’



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Hours before Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden gave his acceptance speech in Delaware, President Trump was in Biden’s birth state, where he lambasted his electoral rival over everything from his policy proposals to his time living in Pennsylvania.

Speaking at Old Forge – a few miles from Biden’s birthplace in Scranton – Trump touted his administration’s successes while mocking Biden as a “puppet of the radical left movement” who wants to destroy jobs manufacturers in the state and raise taxes.

“Joe Biden is a puppet of the radical left movement seeking to destroy the American way of life,” Trump said. “They don’t want energy, they don’t want guns, they don’t want religion.”

Trump added, “The only thing they don’t abolish is taxes.”

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The president has spent the week scouring battlefield states across the country in a bid to counter the message Democrats are sending out at their convention.

Throughout their convention, Democrats have called a collective emergency on Trump’s dangers as president. In 2016, they fired it and sometimes trivialized it. Now – in speeches by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to former President Barack Obama – they present him as an existential threat to the country.

The tone of the convention signals once again that the fall campaign between Trump and Biden, which is already expected to be among the most negative of the past half-century, will be filled with resentment and recriminations.

As the tradition of presidential candidates that was low during the other party’s conventions has eroded over decades, Trump’s trip to Pennsylvania was a particularly unimaginable counter-program designed to shake an opponent.

Trump’s visit to Pennsylvania was meant to literally hit Biden in his home as the president slammed the Democratic candidate for moving from Scranton to Delaware earlier in his life. The president also hit Biden for his five decades of working in Washington – as a congressman, senator and vice president.

“He will remind us that he was born in Scranton, but left 70 years ago,” Trump said. “That Scranton thing, he’s gone, he’s 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 eventually moved out. in Delaware when he was 11 after the manufacturing city of Pennsylvania began to fall into hard times.

Trump continued to try to tie Biden to the unrest that arose across the country after the death of George Floyd while in custody in Minneapolis. Trump has pushed the unconfirmed theory that Democrats are trying to rig the next election through mail-in ballots.

“The only way for them to win is to have 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, will surely dominate the headlines and chyrons of cable news. But Trump throughout the week offered a strong roster of competing activities, hosting several in-person events this week in an attempt to contrast the largely virtual campaign Biden waged during the coronavirus pandemic.

He visited two other battlefields – Wisconsin and Arizona – as well as Minnesota, one of the few blue states in 2016 that Trump’s team thinks he might have a chance to topple this fall.

But Trump’s campaign has watched with suspicion his position weaken in the trio of Rust Belt states that brought him to the presidency in 2016. Trump plans to further counter-schedule the convention Thursday night with an appearance in the Fox News’ Sean Hannity show just before Biden delivered. his acceptance speech.

Trump unexpectedly did well in 2016 in northeastern Pennsylvania, winning Alfalfa County and nearly winning in Lackawanna County, both of which have a solid registration advantage for Democrats. They bear the hallmarks of Trump country: They are whiter, with lower median incomes, and fewer college graduates than the rest of Pennsylvania.

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Pennsylvania’s GOP registration has outpaced Democrats this cycle, and many political observers believe the state, which has many white and older voters, may get stronger for Republicans. But Trump has stubbornly followed Biden, whose team aims to bring Pennsylvania back to the Blue Column, where it was from 1992 to 2016.

The former vice president is uniquely suited in the Democratic realm for carrying Pennsylvania, with his deep ties to Scranton and his messages to the white working class as well as black voters in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Scranton is in Lackawanna County, which picked Clinton in 2016, and Biden’s team are hoping to increase turnout there.

The Biden campaign has dismissed Trump’s visit as a lame campaign ploy.

Trump “has put the health of countless families across Keystone State at risk and plunged the strong economy he inherited from the Obama-Biden administration into a free fall,” the spokesperson said by Biden, Andrew Bates. “This side show is a pathetic attempt to distract from the fact that Trump’s presidency is all about crises, lies and divisions.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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