Trump, Biden sharpen attacks in final fortnight of White House race

Trump has sought to portray Biden as weak, lacking mental acuity for the job. Biden slammed Trump’s handling of the epidemic.

President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden have begun wrapping up their respective cases for election with sharpening attacks on each other as the 2020 race entered the final fortnight before the close of polling on November 3.

Trump and Biden further sharpened their attacks on each other in rallies in battleground states Nevada and North Carolina on Sunday. (AFP)

Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for vice-president, returned to the campaign trail on Monday after a brief break forced by members of her team testing positive for Covid-19. Harris addressed a drive-in rally in Florida, a key battleground state, to mobilise supporters on the opening day of early voting, which had seen more than 28 million Americans cast their votes already by Sunday evening, according to a South Florida University tracker, an unprecedented turnout for this stage of electioneering.

Trump and Biden further sharpened their attacks on each other in rallies in battleground states Nevada and North Carolina on Sunday as they began wrapping up their pitch to voters building on mostly old but some new emerging themes, especially for the Trump campaign’s attack on Biden - who leads in both national and battleground states polls - over alleged corruption.

The “Biden family is a criminal enterprise,” Trump said to supporters in Carson, Nevada, as the crowd chanted “Lock him up.” Trump is trying to use a dubious news report alleging Biden’s son Hunter Biden profited from selling access to his father when the latter was vice-president.

Trump has sought to portray Biden as weak, lacking mental acuity for the job, a ‘Trojan Horse’ for the Democratic party’s progressive members, and, now, a corrupt politician.

But the president has also sought to blunt Biden’s key criticism of him, for his handling of the Covid-19 epidemic. At the Nevada rally, he mocked Biden’s reliance on scientists and said, “If I listened totally to the scientists, we would right now have a country that would be in a massive depression.”

Biden slammed Trump’s handling of the epidemic, which has been his key argument for voting out the president, at a rally in Durham, North Carolina. He deployed a punching line he first unveiled earlier in the week. “As my grandfather would say - ‘This guy’s gone around the bend if he thinks we’ve turned the corner’,” Biden said, referring to Trump’s frequent claims that the country had turned the corner on the epidemic.

He added, “Things are getting worse, and he continues to lie to us about circumstances.”

The two candidates will clash on October 22 for their second and final debate, a much-anticipated showdown after President Trump pulled out of the second, which was to be held virtually because of his Covid-19 diagnosis. He and Biden had appeared in duelling town hall events instead.