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MUSKEGON, Mich. — U.S. President Donald Trump took his re-election push to Michigan on Saturday regardless of rising coronavirus circumstances there, a part of a swing by states he gained in 2016 that polls present are supporting Democratic rival Joe Biden this yr.
Trump held a big outside rally in Muskegon, the place supporters didn’t keep social distance. Some wore masks and a few didn’t.
Michigan added 1,791 new COVID-19 circumstances on Saturday, bringing the state’s seven-day whole to over 10,000 circumstances, a brand new file, in line with the state’s well being division. Later Trump heads to Wisconsin, which reported three,861 new COVID circumstances on Friday, additionally a brand new file. Trump gained each states 4 years in the past.
Biden, a former vice chairman, has hammered Trump for his response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed greater than 219,000 folks in the USA, the very best dying toll on this planet.
Trump sought to show that criticism round on Saturday by saying, falsely, that his rival would impede the restoration from the outbreak.
“Biden will shut down the nation, delay the vaccine and extend the pandemic,” Trump mentioned.
In a press release, Biden mentioned he deliberate to unite the nation to struggle the virus if he wins.
“All President Trump is providing the folks of Michigan is extra lies and distractions — no plan to get the virus below management, no technique for pulling our economic system out of this recession, no imaginative and prescient for uniting the nation,” he mentioned.
Trump’s advisers have lengthy seen Michigan and Wisconsin, in addition to Pennsylvania, as key to his probabilities of re-election. The president can also be enjoying defence in conventional Republican strongholds, together with Arizona, the place he plans to marketing campaign on Monday, and Georgia, the place he campaigned on Friday evening.
At Saturday’s rally, Trump focused Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, a number of occasions, criticizing the state’s guidelines to cease the unfold of coronavirus, calling her “dishonest,” and making mild of a right-wing plot uncovered by the FBI to kidnap her.
“Hopefully you’ll be sending her packing fairly quickly,” Trump mentioned, prompting the group to yell again “Lock her up!” a number of occasions.
Whitmer responded on Twitter to the chants. “That is precisely the rhetoric that has put me, my household, and different authorities officers’ lives at risk whereas we attempt to save the lives of our fellow People,” she wrote.