By Aaron Miller-
U.S Democratic candidate, Joe Bidden, told supporters that the president saw seniors, who have been more at risk in the pandemic, as “expendable”.
The Democratic candidate spoke to a group of people at a community centre for seniors in southern Florida, with social distancing measures in place.
Mr Biden accused the president of dismissing the threat that coronavirus posed to senior citizens.
“You’re expendable, you’re forgettable, you’re virtually nobody. That’s how he sees seniors. That’s how he sees you,” said Mr Biden.
The “only senior Donald Trump seems to care about” is himself, he added.Mr Biden also criticised the president for holding “super-spreader parties with Republicans hugging each other without concern of the consequences”, while senior citizens couldn’t see their grandchildren. A recent White House event for the Supreme Court nominee led to several attendees testing positive for Covid.
In Pennsylvania, Mr Trump told thousands of supporters he felt like “Superman” after his Covid treatment where he spent three nights in hospital and was cleared by doctors to return to the campaign trail at the weekend, holding his first rally in Florida on Monday. The president told the American public when he first emerged from hospital, not to be afraid of Covid-19, suggesting he might be immune.
Trump’s doctor subsequently told reporters that that the president had tested negative in successive tests since his treatment.
Election Swing
Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who introduced Bidden to the crowd, said it was voters aged 65 or over who would “swing elections in the Sunshine State”.
But Mr Trump has regularly mocked Mr Biden as a senior citizen who lacks energy and is “sleepy”. The president was also been criticised on Tuesday after he tweeted a doctored image of Mr Biden as a wheelchair-user and the words “Biden for Resident”, in reference to a nursing home. At their first debate, Trump delivered a strong jibe at Bidden when he told him not to talk about ‘being smart’, citing that the Democratic nominee graduated ”the lowest” or ”almost the lowest”
Opponents took to social media to say the tweet was disrespecting the elderly. Trump, 72, and Bidden, 74, are the oldest presidential nominees in the history of U.S election history. Trump is trailing Bidden in the national polls, but is nearly neck and neck with Bidden in crucial states like Florida, keeping his dream of winning potentially still alive.
Each state has a set number of electoral college votes based on its number of Congress representatives, so the hugely populous state of California has 55, while Hawaii has four. Florida has 29. In all but two states, the winning candidate gets all the state’s electoral college votes and needs 270 of the 538 to win the presidency.