IN WASHINGTON — Donald Trump is planning to hold a rally in northeast Pennsylvania on Saturday. This will be the Republican’s last rally before his criminal hush money trial starts on Monday. President Joe Biden views this area to be his home turf.
The likely Republican candidate and former president is set to give a speech at the Lehigh County fire hall in Schnecksville. Trump will be in this important swing state three times this year. This is the third time this year that Trump has been there. He also wants to go to a fundraiser in Bucks County, which is close by, before the event.
Pennsylvania is a key battleground in the repeat between Trump and Biden, and both candidates plan to make many trips there until November. In 2016, Trump turned the state red to blue, but Biden beat him four years later. Biden was born in the northeast city of Scranton and has talked a lot about his roots there. Biden is going to give a big speech on tax fairness in Scranton on Tuesday.
Trump is facing four different criminal investigations while running to get back at Biden for losing the election. This is causing a level of legal and political chaos that has never been seen before.
Monday is the start of the jury selection process in his trial in New York. He is accused of trying to hide stories about sexual affairs by setting up hush money payments during his 2016 campaign.
It will be the first time that a past president has been charged with a crime. It will also make Trump less available on the campaign trail, though he is expected to talk to the media a lot after court. He has been campaigning and raising money for months on the criminal charges he faces, saying that his opponents are after them to stop him from winning the White House again.
Trump has said he will lose the 2020 race, but Biden says these lies are harmful to the country. He has said that Trump is a major threat to freedom and U.S. relationships abroad, which Trump has said also applies to Biden.
In the past few weeks, both candidates have tried to get their supporters to vote and split up their opponents’ support groups. This plan will be put to the test over the next few months.
Trump recently said that Democratic voters who support Israel should vote for him instead of Biden because Biden has said bad things about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war against Hamas. On Wednesday, the Republican said, “Any Jewish person who votes for a Democrat or Biden should have their head examined.”
He can also say bad things about Biden’s economic management now that the government announced on Wednesday that inflation rose 0.4% in March to 3.5% yearly.
But Biden has also put Trump on the defensive when it comes to abortion, which is a big problem for the GOP because many voters don’t like the new limits that some states have put on the process after Trump’s Supreme Court picks helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Trump tried to calm things down and win over female votes by saying that the states, not the federal government, should decide the case.
But this week, Arizona’s highest court said the state could apply a law from 1864 that made abortion illegal. This caused Trump to say on Wednesday that the 19th-century law was too strict for his tastes.
Instead, Trump has tried to make immigration the most important topic in the race. The Republican has tried to make Biden look like he doesn’t care about border security, since record numbers of people have crossed the southern border illegally while he was in office. He also said that the president should do more to increase oil pumping, even though production in the United States is at an all-time high.
Under Biden, the area around Lehigh County has seen job growth. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said it has 445,200 jobs, which is more than the 429,900 jobs it had before the pandemic during the Trump administration.
The area’s unemployment rate is a healthy 3.9%, which is a big jump from the 4.6% it was before the coronavirus pandemic during Trump’s term.
Still, the Democrat hasn’t been able to persuade people that he has done a good job of running the economy. A March study by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs found that only 37% of adults in the U.S. are happy with how he is running the economy.
And Biden’s image has always been harmed by inflation. The yearly rate of inflation has been going up since January, and it went up again in March due to higher costs for housing, gas, car insurance, and other things. The rise to 3.5% stopped inflation from falling over the past year. In 2022, it hit its highest level in forty years.
He said that he still thinks the inflation rate will go down and that the Federal Reserve will lower its key interest rates in response.
Wednesday, he said, “We have a plan to deal with it, but my opposition only talks about two things.” “All they want to do is lower taxes for the rich and raise them for everyone else.”
