Seeking his re-election, US President Donald Trump on Wednesday told Americans that he will deliver optimism, opportunity and hope while his Democratic rival Joe Biden will bring in ”pessimism, poverty and decline”. With less than a fortnight left for the November 3 presidential elections, Trump described it as a vote on ”47 years of Biden versus his 47 months as the US President”.

”For the last 47 years, Joe Biden has been outsourcing your job, opening your borders,” he alleged. ”I will deliver optimism, opportunity, and hope. Biden will deliver pessimism, poverty, and decline,” Trump told thousands of his supporters in Gastonia city of the battleground state of North Carolina.

”Normal life will fully resume and next year will be the greatest economic year in the history of our country. That’s where we are headed. This election is a choice between a Trump super recovery or a Biden steep depression and that’s what you’re going to have,” said the President who is under fire from the Opposition for his alleged mismanagement of the pandemic.

”It’s between a Trump boom or a Biden lockdown. He wants to lock you down,” he said. ”Biden will delay therapies, postpone the vaccine, prolong pandemic, close your schools and shut down our country and that is what he will do,” he alleged.

Biden, he said, will massively raise taxes; ”bury” regulations, ”dismantle” police departments, dissolve borders, and confiscate guns. ”Biden has made a corrupt bargain; in exchange for his party’s nomination which he should have never gotten if Pocahontas got out two days earlier instead of what she did to Crazy Bernie was unbelievable because they split up the crazy vote,” he added.

”Sleepy Joe Biden has handed control of his party over to socialist communist Marxist and Left-wing extremists. And they are filled with hatred, venom, and rage. The first thing Washington Democrats will do if Sleepy Joe is elected is go to sleep I guess,” he said.

If Biden wins, the ”flag-burning demonstrators” on the streets will be running the federal government, the President alleged. But he quickly exuded confidence that this will never happen. ”Don’t worry, it’s not going to happen. It can’t happen. You know my statement. Our country will never be a socialist country. Never. Ever. Never,” he said.

Trump reiterated that China has been responsible for the coronavirus pandemic. ”This is the China plague with the China virus. That’s where it came from. We have to be accurate. And we were really doing well against China,” he said.

”The ink hadn’t even dried on our trade deal with China, wonderful deal, and this happened. This should have been stopped in China. They should have been able to stop it. They stopped it from going into the rest of China. But they didn’t stop it from going into Europe, the US, and the rest of the world, right? We’re going to find out why, too,” he said.

First Published:Oct 22, 2020 9:29 AM IST