In Midwest, Trump Promises ‘Back to Normal’ While Biden Offers Lockdowns & Masks

(Headline USA) President Donald Trump said the nation should get “back to normal” on Friday as he looked to campaign past the media-sensationalized virus.

Democratic rival Joe Biden, on the other hand, pledged to continue unscientific, unconstitutional, and tyrannical mask mandates and lockdowns.

Trump and Biden both spent Friday crisscrossing the Midwest.

Trump was in Michigan and Biden in Iowa before they both held events in Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Trump, following the science that shows the coronavirus to be a minor threat, says the nation has “turned the corner.”

He speaks hopefully of coming treatments and potential vaccines.

Biden said Trump can only prolong the virus, and pledges a nationwide focus on reinstituting measures meant to slow the spread of the disease.

“He said a long dark winter,” Trump said Friday at a rally in Michigan. “Oh that’s great, that’s wonderful. Just what our country needs is a long dark winter and a leader who talks about it.”

Trump’s rallies, which draw thousands of supporters, have served as representations of the sort of “reopening” he has been preaching.

Trump and his aides speak openly about seeking the backing of those “fed up” by state restrictions, and he has encouraged chants among his supporters calling for the imprisonment of local officials who have instituted them.

The president believes they represent part of a “silent majority” that will help him pull off another come-from-behind victory on Tuesday.

Biden, for his part, referenced Trump’s comments last summer that the virus “is what it is.”

He told supporters in Des Moines, Iowa, that “it is what it is because he is who he is! These guys are something else, man.”

Biden, who also campaigned in Milwaukee and St. Paul, Minnesota, on Friday, has seized on comments by Trump’s chief of staff that the virus can’t be controlled and that the administration is focused instead on vaccines and therapeutics.

By contrast, Biden is promising to step up the fight to contain the spread, including a mask mandate on federal property and pressure on governors to apply it in their states, and pledging to follow the advice of public health bureaucrats on potentially strict safety rules.

“I’m not going to shut down the country. I’m not going to shut down the economy,” Biden tweeted Friday, responding directly to Trump’s attack lines. “I’m going to shut down the virus.”

Biden told about two dozen supporters at a Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport, “The fact is, we’re now in a situation where this president is in a position that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

Trump’s closing appeal to “Make America Great Again, Again” paints a bright image of the nation ‘s condition during pre-coronavirus times that contrasts with Biden’s charge to “Build Back Better.”

Trump’s closing sprint includes four stops in Pennsylvania on Saturday and nearly a dozen events in the final 48 hours across states he carried in 2016.

Biden will hit Michigan on Saturday, where he’ll hold two joint rallies with former President Barack Obama.

Biden will close out his campaign Monday in a familiar battleground: Pennsylvania, the state where he was born and the one he’s visited more than any other in his campaign.

The Biden team announced the candidate, his wife, Jill, running mate Sen. Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, plan to “fan out across all four corners of the state.”

After stopping in Green Bay on Friday, Trump will be back in Wisconsin on Monday for a visit to Kenosha.

Attendance at the president’s final campaign stop in Rochester, Minnesota, was capped at 250 people at the insistence of state and local officials.

Trump spoke briefly to hundreds who gathered outside the venue, Rochester International Airport, before giving quick remarks on the tarmac to supporters who were allowed onsite.

The president, whose campaign rally speeches are typically fiery and at least an hour long, was unusually subdued. He did, however, lash out at the state’s Democratic Gov. Tim Walz and its attorney general.

“Your far left Democrat Attorney General Keith Ellison and your Democrat governor tried to shut down our rally, silence the people of Minnesota, and take away your freedom and your rights,” Trump said.

Biden aims to hold his election night event in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.

Trump, who had been scheduled to hold a party at his Washington, D.C., hotel, appeared to be rethinking his plans as a result of the city’s COVID-19 restrictions.

“So we have a hotel, I don’t know if you’re allowed to use it or not, but I know the mayor has shut down Washington D.C.,” Trump said as he headed out from the White House. “And if that’s the case, we’ll probably stay here or pick another location.”

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.