Tampa – President Donald Trump is taking a Friday swing through Florida, a state critical to his reelection prospects and bracketed by two storms –…
Tampa – President Donald Trump is taking a Friday swing through Florida, a state critical to his reelection prospects and bracketed by two storms – one now bringing daily records on COVID-19 deaths and the other swirling just to the south in the form of Hurricane Isaias.
Trump delivered a campaign speech with Florida sheriffs that continued his ongoing effort to pin a surge in crime in some of the nation’s largest cities on their Democratic mayors as he has threatened to send federal law enforcement to protect what he describes as besieged communities.
Speaking soon after a federal appeals court threw out Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s death sentence for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing because of potential juror bias, Trump attacked Democratic rival Joe Biden for his shifting position on capital punishment. The former vice president, who supported the death penalty through much of his long political career, last year called for eliminating the death penalty on the federal level and incentivizing states to do the same.
“They protect criminals and Biden opposes the death penalty, even for cop killers and child murderers,” Trump told hundreds of supporters who showed up to hear him speak at the sheriff’s event on the Tampa International Airport tarmac. “I see in Boston, where you have the animal that killed so many people during the Boston Marathon, they just sent this conviction for the death penalty back to the lower courts.… It’s ridiculous.”
With the White House and Democrats at loggerheads over a new round of financial relief to bolster a coronavirus battered-economy, Trump is attempting to use a “law-and-order” theme to electrify his base and win over undecided voters unsettled by more than two months of protests centered on police brutality and racial injustice.
