Biden is “your worst nightmare,” Trump told the crowd in an extraordinarily dark speech in Old Forge, just down the road from Biden’s old hometown of Scranton, in the heart of the key election battleground state.
“He spent the last half century in Washington selling out our country and ripping off our jobs and letting other countries steal our jobs,” Trump said hours before Biden was to address the nation and accept the Democratic nomination for the White House.
Trump used his speech to snatch the limelight on Biden’s big day, blasting the Democrat as someone who would raise taxes, open borders to “let in violent mobs” and abandon American workers.
Indicating the flavor of his reelection campaign in the next two and a half months, Trump claimed that recent crime spikes in big cities and sometimes violent protests against police abuses would engulf the country under Biden.
“If you want a vision of your life under a Biden presidency, think of the smoldering ruins in Minneapolis, the violent anarchy of Portland, the blood-stained sidewalks of Chicago, and imagine the mayhem coming to your town,” he said.
Trump referenced everything from his walling off of part of the Mexican border to military funding and what he claimed was greater international respect for the United States.
Often, his speech veered into less standard territory, describing the Democrats as something like out of dystopian novel.
They “turn your family against you for speaking your mind while they indoctrinate your children with twisted, twisted world views,” he said at one point. “They’re coming to get you,” he said.
“Me, we, we’re the wall between the American dream and total insanity and destruction of the greatest country in the history of the world.”