President Trump arrived in Circleville, Ohio, Saturday evening and reminisced about his victory in the bellwether state four years ago.
“We not only won Ohio, we won it by more than eight points,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s happy memories of his 2016 victory raised the question of what has happened since, and why was his campaign bringing him here in the final days of October?
The answer is mostly an erosion of his support in suburbs like this one outside Columbus. While exit polls four years ago showed Mr. Trump winning the suburbs in Ohio by 20 points, a Fox poll earlier this month put him 10 points behind Mr. Biden.
At the rally on Saturday night, Mr. Trump floated a baseless conspiracy theory that former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spied on his 2016 campaign. “Lock them up!” the crowd responded. Mr. Trump did nothing to stop the chant. Instead, he joked, “It’s much better if I say, ‘No, no, no, please.’”
He played down the threat of the coronavirus, pointing to his own family’s experience as an example of why a virus that has killed more than 220,000 Americans is not so bad. “It worked out,” he said of his own hospitalization. “By the way, 99.9 percent is good and then you’re immune.”
Mr. Trump also launched into a series of claims that Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, was corrupt. He brought up a laptop that purportedly belonged to Hunter Biden, which the New York Post reported was seized by the F.B.I. Documents that had been allegedly discovered on the computer were used by the newspaper in an attempt to bolster unsubstantiated claims that the former vice president had helped shape foreign policy in Ukraine to enrich his son.
“This is a laptop that they don’t want to see,” Mr. Trump said at the rally. Looking up at the sky, he smiled and added: “How the hell this laptop got freed up, it’s amazing the way God works.”
Mr. Trump also claimed that electing Mr. Biden would lead to a depression. “It’s a choice between a boom and a lockdown,” he said.
transcript
transcript
Trump’s Behavior Worse Than ‘Florida Man,’ Obama Says in Miami
Former President Barack Obama criticized President Trump’s conduct and history of promoting conspiracy theories and misinformation at a rally in Miami.
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“With Joe and Kamala at the helm, you won’t have to think about them every single day. There might be a whole day where they don’t be on TV.” “You’ll be able to go about your lives knowing that the president’s not going to suggest injecting bleach. Or retweet conspiracy theories about secret cabals running the world. Or claiming that — or retweeting that the claim that Navy SEALs didn’t actually kill bin Laden. We’re not going to have a president that goes out of his way to insult anybody who he doesn’t think is nice enough to him. We won’t have a president who threatens people with jail for just criticizing him. That’s not normal behavior, Florida. You wouldn’t tolerate it from a co-worker, you wouldn’t tolerate it from a high school principal, you wouldn’t tolerate it from a coach, you wouldn’t tolerate it from a family member. ‘Florida Man’ wouldn’t even do this stuff. Why are we accepting it from the president of the United States? It’s not — It’s not normal behavior. And you shake your head and you think ‘Well, you know what, that’s just him,’ but there are consequences to this. There are consequences when a president behaves that way. It emboldens others to be mean and and cruel and divisive and racist. When you have a president who cannot — cannot call out or even criticize white supremacists, that’s a problem!”
For years, President Trump trolled Barack Obama. On Saturday, the former president returned the favor — with an ear-to-ear smile and, at times, raw-nerve rage.
Mr. Obama, popping up in Florida just as Mr. Trump arrived in West Palm Beach to cast his vote, slammed his successor for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, “fumbling” the economy, opening a hidden bank account in China, threatening to sell Puerto Rico, musing about killing the virus with bleach and once floating the idea of blasting hurricanes with nuclear weapons.
“Florida Man wouldn’t even do this stuff! Why do we accept it from the president of the United States?” Mr. Obama asked during a drive-in rally in Miami to support Joseph R….
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