Trump's appalling attack on doctors came on a day when the US marked a new daily record for coronavirus cases and 17 states were seeing record hospitalizations. Instead of addressing those challenges, the President tried to explain the mounting US case count by making the false claim in Michigan that US doctors are inflating coronavirus case numbers because they "get more money if someone dies from Covid."
"Our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say, 'I'm sorry but everybody dies of Covid,' " Trump said at a rally in Waterford Township, Michigan, on Friday. Unearthing conspiracy theories from the bowels of the Internet, the President claimed with no evidence that doctors from other countries list underlying diseases as the cause of death, while US doctors choose coronavirus.
"With us, when in doubt -- choose Covid," Trump said. "Now they'll say 'Oh that's terrible what he said,' but that's true. It's like $2,000 more, so you get more money."
Trump's falsehood about doctors on the front lines of the pandemic angered Biden, who criticized the President for attacking first-responders at his subsequent rallies in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and in Milwaukee.
"The President of the United States is accusing the medical profession of making up Covid deaths so they make more money. Doctors and nurses go to work every day to save lives. They do their jobs. Donald Trump should stop attacking them and do his job," Biden said in Minnesota.
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The clashing messages of the two candidates stood in stark contrast as they both campaigned in Wisconsin and Minnesota on Friday, with each man attempting to broaden his potential path to 270 electoral votes. Trump won Wisconsin by less than a percentage point in 2016 but narrowly lost Minnesota, and he and Biden are now vying for those pivotal blue-collar voters who abandoned Democrats four years ago to choose Trump's outsider message.
Though some of those voters have drifted away from the President because they disapprove of his handling of the virus, he has continued to insist on holding huge rallies — he has more than a dozen planned in seven states before Election Day, including four in Pennsylvania on Saturday alone — which only draws attention to the fact that he is dangerously flouting the safety guidelines of his own experts at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, daring Americans to hold him accountable for it on Election Day.
Biden delivered a closing argument grounded in his desire to unify the country and be a president for all people, pledging to work "as hard for those who don't support me as those who do."
The former vice president told Minnesota voters that Trump has "simply given up" and questioned how many lives could have been saved if Trump had been candid with the American people about the risks the virus posed early this year. The former vice president also pleaded with voters not to give up their sense of optimism, while acknowledging that was a difficult request at a time when nearly 230
