(Headline USA) On the campaign trail with President Donald Trump, the pandemic is largely over, the economy is roaring back, and murderous mobs are infiltrating America’s suburbs.
With Democrat Joe Biden, the pandemic is raging, the economy isn’t lifting the working class, and systemic racism threatens black lives across America.
The first week of the fall sprint to Election Day crystallized dizzyingly different versions of reality as the Republican incumbent and his Democratic challenger trekked from Washington and Delaware to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and back.
A new divide erupted Friday over the military.
Trump passionately denied libelous allegations reported late Thursday that in 2018, he described U.S. service members killed in World War I and buried at an American military cemetery in France as “losers” and “suckers.”
The report, sourced anonymously by The Atlantic comes as Trump tries to win support from military members and their families by highlighting a commitment to veterans’ health care and military spending.
“I’ve done more for the military than almost anyone else,” Trump said Friday from the Oval Office, after describing the allegations on social media as “a disgraceful attempt to influence the 2020 Election.”
At roughly the same time at a podium in Delaware, Biden leaned into the damaging reports about his opponent.
“Let me be clear: My son Beau, who volunteered to go to Iraq, was not a sucker,” Biden declared, pounding the podium. “The men and women who served with him are not suckers, and the service men and women he served with, who did not come home, are not losers.”
Trump and his allies have accurately stated that the coronavirus poses an insignificant threat to the vast majority of healthy, young to middle-aged Americans.
Biden on Friday linked the pandemic and Trump’s push to revive the economy: “You can’t have an economic comeback when almost a thousand Americans die a day from COVID.”
Earlier in the day, the government announced that the unemployment rate dropped sharply in August from 10.2% to 8.4%. That means roughly half of the 22 million jobs lost to the coronavirus outbreak have been recovered.
“It’s another great day for American jobs and American workers,” Vice President Mike Pence said on CNBC. “This president’s advanced policies … have laid a foundation for this great American comeback. Joe Biden and the Democrats are advocating policies that would turn us back.”
ABiden drew on the data to paint a dire portrait of the U.S. economy in line with the message he has delivered for much of the last year.
“We’re still down 720,000 manufacturing jobs,” Biden said. “In fact, Trump may well be the only president in modern history to leave office with fewer jobs than when he took office.”
“Talk to a lot of real working people who are being left behind,” he added. “Ask them, do you feel the economy is coming back? They don’t feel it.”
Less than two weeks after a white police officer shot alleged sex offender Jacob Blake, a black man, after he resisted arrest, Trump reaffirmed his support for the police and businesses affected by the violent protests that followed.
Trump did not meet with Blake’s family while in Wisconsin, as Biden did Thursday when he visited the area for the first time.
Instead, the president focused on the threat posed by rioters, telling reporters he does not believe systemic racism is a problem in America’s law enforcement agencies.
Trump described protest-related violence as “domestic terror” and decried “violent mobs” threatening to rape and murder local residents.
Two days later, Biden condemned the violent protests during his own visit to Kenosha, but first he met privately with Blake’s family and later criticized what he described as centuries of systemic racism.
Biden addressed head-on the Democratic frustration with Trump’s final-weeks message.
“He doesn’t want to talk about anything, anything at all about the job he hasn’t done,” Biden said Friday of Trump, suggesting the president is far more eager to exaggerate the threat posed by those protesting police brutality.
“And so it’s a conundrum,” Biden said. “And in a sense, every time I speak about it I feel like I’m playing in his game.”
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press.
