Elections

Last Sunday this section was turned over to essays making the case against the re-election of Donald Trump. I read all of the pieces, and found more than a few points with which I disagreed. But my commitment to contrarianism only goes so far: Fundamentally I agree with my colleagues that Trump should not be …Heyyyyyy — you aren’t even going to let me make a case here?Excuse me?Oh, you know who I am. You let me slip out during the Covington Catholic controversy, remember, when the media that puts on kid gloves around Hunter Biden decided a random teenager with a smile they didn’t like was the face of white supremacy. Well, I’m back.Ah, sure — you’re my right-wing id. And let me guess — you want to make the case that I should vote for Trump? I figured the coronavirus experience had shamed you into silence.Shame is what you should feel, sellout. Look, I get that you’re a lost cause. But someone needs to tell you that you’re going to miss Trump when he’s gone.Am I indeed? All right, go ahead, make the case.I mean, it’s not particularly complicated. I read your columns about the Republicans, even your long-ago book (and I saw its sales figures, so I know I’m in exclusive company), and all these years you’ve wanted — what? A populist G.O.P. that helps working families, something like that, with a more restrained foreign policy than the Bush era and a pro-life, religious core? Do I have that right?You do.That’s what Donald Trump has given you, you bloody ingrate, to the extent you ever get what you want in politics.Oh, you mean the economic populism of a corporate tax cut and an “infrastructure week” that’s just a running joke.No, I mean that Trump did two big things that no other president would have done together. He actually cut immigration rates and he backed a looser monetary policy.You mean he ran an inhumane family separation policy and he appointed a bunch of hard-money cranks to the Federal Reserve.The inhumane policy was abandoned quickly, and the cranks weren’t actually confirmed. I’m talking about results, not problems with particular appointees or policies. Why do you think the economy ran hot for so long, and low-wage workers did a lot better under Trump than under Obama? Loose money, tight borders. A Democrat might have given you one; Ted Cruz might have given you the other. Only Trump could deliver both.The inhumane policy is still having awful consequences, and Jerome Powell deserves more credit for loose money than Trump’s jawboning.Obama signed off on plenty of inhumane policies — those detention centers went up on his watch, remember, and he had record deportations, too. And, yeah, Powell deserves credit, but who appointed him? The economy under Trump was the best for the working class in two decades. And kicking him out means we go back to mass low-skilled immigration, back to wage stagnation …Most economists think immigration’s effects on wages are pretty minimal.Most economists these days have liberal biases that make them elevate weird case studies over simple common sense. Look, we just ran the policy experiment! Tighter borders, higher wages. You won’t talk me out of this.I thought you were the one talking me out of my …… your anti-Trump pieties, yeah, I am. Because then there’s foreign policy. No new wars! The Islamic State routed! At least the beginning of a withdrawal from Afghanistan! A bunch of Arab-Israeli peace agreements that would have won a normal president the Nobel Peace Prize!No new wars except the ones we almost stumbled into with North Korea and Iran, and the ones percolating in regions where the United States has abdicated its superpower role. A non-withdrawal from Afghanistan because Trump can’t execute on his own positions.“Percolating” is a word people use to describe things that aren’t actually that bad. Trump almost went to war with Iran, yeah, but in the end he left John Bolton at the altar. Put the Democrats back in and we’ll get the kind of “humanitarian” interventions and “fund-the-moderate-jihadists” gambits that ravaged Libya and made the Syrian situation worse.Biden had a decent Obama-era record of opposing unwise escalations.Personnel is policy, man! All the liberal hawks are coming back! You’ll see. And speaking of personnel, there’s nowhere you’re more ungrateful than the Supreme Court, where Trump has given you exactly what you wanted …Neil Gorsuch, culture-war hall monitor?Come on, no Republican president would have done better. Your big complaint was choosing Brett Kavanaugh over Amy Coney Barrett, and you’re getting Barrett, too.And I support her elevation …… but not the president who put her there. Oh, your hands are so clean!Better than wading in corruption and demagogy and mass death, yeah. Can I offer some comebacks?That wasn’t one?I mean, it was a distillation. There are some ways that Trump has been better than I feared, and things he’s done that I wholeheartedly support. But he’s also the most corrupt American president of modern times: The liberals are wrong to see him as a dictator, but that doesn’t make his web of self-enrichment and pardons for cronies and Ukrainian abuses a good thing. He’s a bigot and an aggressive liar, he winks at violence, and he’s exacerbated one of his party’s worst tendencies, its obsession with the minor threat of voter fraud and its eagerness to throw up impediments to voting. What he’s given to cultural conservatives with the courts, he’s taken by making us seem like hypocrites and making embarrassments like Jerry Falwell Jr. the face of conservative Christendom. He’s radicalized young people and empowered some truly terrible tendencies on the left that will reshape American institutions deep into Amy Coney Barrett’s old age. And I haven’t even gotten to the coronavirus.We’ll get to it. But you know, because you’ve written about it, that there was self-enrichment in Washington long before Trump. It was just laundered through respectable channels rather than the Trump hotels. I’ll concede that Trump is more naked about it, more impeachable. But sometimes you have to vote for the corrupt candidate when the policy stakes are more important.And the birther candidate.And the — look, Trump says racially offensive stuff, but he’s going to win more minority votes than he did last time, more than Mitt Romney did. You write skeptically about white liberals who have become more “anti-racist” than African-Americans, but you’re doing the same weird thing: If Trump is expanding the G.O.P.’s appeal to minorities, who are you to say he’s too racist?He’s benefiting from larger trends toward class and gender polarization, and he’s emphatically not expanding the G.O.P.’s appeal overall —Right, because wimps like you won’t support him! All this stuff about how he’s “radicalized” people and hurt religious witness — that’s just self-serving intuition, with no hard data behind it. It’s a convenient excuse.No more convenient than you ignoring all the Americans who have died from a pandemic on Trump’s utterly incompetent watch.You yourself have written that Trump can’t be held responsible for all those deaths. You said our response had a lot in common with Europe’s — and look at their case numbers lately. You were right!I also said that we were modestly worse in ways that can be attributed to Trump’s terrible crisis management, which is not improving as we head deeper into the fall. So that “modestly” could add up to 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 dead. That’s the worst excess-death fiasco for an American president since the Vietnam War.And Joe Biden could repeal the Hyde Amendment, fund abortion with public money, and preside over an extra 60,000 abortions every single year.Which is why I want Republicans to hold their position in the Senate and prevent that from happening — and I’m not the one dragging them downward, Trump is!You know, liberals always say that pro-lifers don’t really think that fetuses are human beings, and you’re proving them right. You think pandemic deaths are worse than the possibility of hundreds of thousands more abortions. Your concern for the unborn is fake news.No, I think the pro-life movement isn’t going to win a long-term victory if it becomes a political suicide pact, where any anti-abortion politician, however incompetent or malevolent, merits our support. What if the pandemic had been a little worse? What if it had killed children in large numbers? What if some even greater peril comes along in Trump’s second term? What if there’s a great-power war? 2020 has been a lesson in what it means to have a totally incompetent president in a crisis. We should heed it.I’m sorry to see you revert to fearmongering.And I’m sorry that you can’t look at this situation the way a lot of Trump supporters did in 2016, when they conceded they were gambling, putting an unfit figure in the White House, because the stakes with the Supreme Court were so high. Well, guess what — you won the judicial part of the gamble, and in the pandemic you also got a taste of what can go wrong when you play dice with the presidency. So why not just take your high court winnings and walk away from the table, instead of going double or nothing hoping that the next disaster isn’t worse?And let you be a free-rider on our wager?Is it all about me?I’m in your head, how could it be otherwise?Then you know that it wouldn’t entirely surprise me if, by some miracle, Trump won one more time — if his presidency is part of a bipartisan chastisement, and God isn’t finished with us yet. But if God wants that, He doesn’t need my vote to do it. And the last year, in all its misery and chaos, has vindicated almost all of the reasons I withheld that vote last time.You’re giving yourself —The last word, yes. Talk to you on the other side.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

With Florida again looking pivotal in the presidential race, Donald Trump and Joe Biden have found themselves revisiting a decades-old question that could decide a crucial share of votes: What to do about Cuba?It’s a debate that many analysts thought was largely over. When President Barack Obama traveled to Havana in 2016 to “bury the Cold War” between the two countries, the tentative support of many Cuban-Americans surprised even hopeful Democrats. That fall, Hillary Clinton — who had called for ending the United States economic embargo against Cuba “once and for all” — won more Cuban votes in Florida than Mr. Obama had collected in 2012.Four years later, the Cold War is decidedly back. In a sustained barrage of punitive measures, Mr. Trump has restricted travel to the island, blocked investment and withdrawn most American diplomats from Havana. Visas for Cubans to visit or join family in the United States have been cut sharply. The administration has even begun to limit the ways Cuban-Americans can send money to their relatives.But while Cuban-Americans oppose many of those specific policies, according to a survey this summer by Florida International University, two-thirds broadly support Mr. Trump’s confrontational stance toward the island’s Communist government.“Ultimately, most Cuban-Americans view logistical inconveniences as a small price to pay for freedom and accountability of a dictatorship that has oppressed its people for far too long,” said Mercedes Schlapp, a Cuban-American who served in the Trump White House and is a senior adviser to the Trump campaign.Mr. Biden argues that the president’s tough line should be judged by the results, not the rhetoric. “The administration’s approach is not working,” he said on a visit to Miami this month. “Cuba is no closer to democracy than it was four years ago.”Yet if recent polling holds, analysts said, Mr. Trump could win 60 percent of the Cuban-American vote — surpassing the estimated 50 percent to 54 percent he won in the 2016 election. “Trump has gone through the roof with the poll numbers from Hispanics,” the president told a group of Cuban-American supporters at the White House last month. “I guess they didn’t know I love you, but I do.”Even as the race in Florida has tightened, it remains to be seen whether the Cuba issue is still potent enough, almost 62 years after the revolution, to help swing the state and its 29 electoral votes; along with New York, Florida has the third-largest number of electoral votes, after California and Texas. The two-thirds of Cuban-Americans who live in Florida account for only about 5 percent of its roughly 14 million voters. But their shifting views on American policy are again drawing outsize attention in a state that remains closely divided between the two parties.“This clearly is a harder line” toward Cuba, said Guillermo Grenier, a sociologist at Florida International University who has overseen its surveys of Cuban-American opinion for nearly 30 years.To Miami’s old guard, who fled Cuba after the 1959 revolution, Mr. Obama’s attempt to promote change through closer engagement was always dangerously naïve. By not conditioning his opening on human rights improvements, they argued, Mr. Obama threw then-President Raúl Castro an economic lifeline while demanding nothing in return. The regime’s continued repression of political critics thereafter was entirely predictable.Still, Democrats were confident that Cuban-American demographics were shifting their way. Whatever the recalcitrance of Cuban elders, their children and grandchildren appeared less wedded to the coercive approach that had so long failed to bring meaningful change on the island. More recent immigrants — who were generally more skeptical that the government in Cuba could be dislodged and were more connected to relatives there — also supported freer travel and closer economic ties.Election 2020 More

Una vez más, Florida parece ser fundamental para la carrera presidencial estadounidense. Donald Trump y Joe Biden enfrentan una pregunta que se ha extendido durante décadas y que podría decidir una parte crucial de los votos: ¿Qué hacer con Cuba?Es un debate que muchos analistas consideraban ya en el pasado. Cuando Barack Obama, entonces presidente de Estados Unidos, viajó a La Habana en 2016 para “enterrar los vestigios de la Guerra Fría” entre los dos países, el apoyo tentativo de muchos cubanoamericanos sorprendió hasta a los demócratas esperanzados. Ese otoño, Hillary Clinton, que había pedido que se pusiera fin “de una vez por todas” al embargo económico de Estados Unidos contra Cuba, ganó más votos cubanos en Florida que los obtenidos por Obama en 2012.Cuatro años más tarde, sin lugar a duda, la Guerra Fría ha resucitado. En un aluvión de medidas punitivas, Trump restringió los viajes a la isla, bloqueó las inversiones y retiró a la mayoría de los diplomáticos estadounidenses que estaban en La Habana. Se han reducido drásticamente las visas para los cubanos que quieren visitar o unirse a sus familias en Estados Unidos. Su gobierno incluso ha comenzado a limitar las formas en que los cubanoamericanos pueden enviar dinero a sus familiares.Pero aunque los cubanoamericanos se oponen a muchas de esas políticas específicas, según una encuesta realizada este verano por la Universidad Internacional de Florida (FIU), dos tercios apoyan la postura de Trump de confrontación hacia el gobierno comunista de la isla.“En última instancia, la mayoría de los cubanoamericanos ven los inconvenientes logísticos como un bajo precio a pagar para conseguir la libertad y la rendición de cuentas de una dictadura que ha oprimido a su pueblo durante demasiado tiempo”, dijo Mercedes Schlapp, una cubanoamericana que trabajó en el gobierno de Trump y es asesora sénior de su campaña presidencial.Por otro lado, Biden sostiene que la mano dura del presidente debe juzgarse por los resultados, no por la retórica. En una visita a Miami este mes, afirmó que la política del gobierno actual no está funcionando: “Cuba no está más cerca de la democracia que hace cuatro años”.No obstante, los analistas han dicho que si las encuestas recientes son confiables, Trump podría ganar el 60 por ciento del voto cubanoamericano, superando el 50-54 por ciento que ganó en las elecciones de 2016. “Trump se ha disparado en las cifras de las encuestas de los hispanos”, dijo el presidente a un grupo de simpatizantes cubanoamericanos en la Casa Blanca el mes pasado. “Supongo que ellos no sabían que a ustedes yo los amo”.Aunque se ha apretado la carrera en Florida, queda por ver si el problema de Cuba sigue siendo lo suficientemente potente, casi 62 años después de la revolución cubana, para que el estado, y sus 29 votos electorales, dé un giro; Florida, junto con Nueva York, tiene el tercer mayor número de votos electorales, después de California y Texas. Los dos tercios de los cubanoamericanos que viven en Florida solo representan alrededor del 5 por ciento de sus aproximadamente 14 millones de votantes. Pero sus opiniones cambiantes sobre la política estadounidense nuevamente llaman mucho la atención en un estado que sigue estrechamente dividido entre el Partido Republicano y el Partido Demócrata.“Claramente esta es una línea más dura” hacia Cuba, dijo Guillermo Grenier, un sociólogo de la Universidad Internacional de Florida que ha supervisado las encuestas sobre las percepciones de los cubanoamericanos durante casi 30 años.Para la vieja guardia de Miami, que huyó de Cuba después de la revolución de 1959, el intento de Obama de incitar el cambio a través de un compromiso más estrecho siempre fue peligrosamente ingenuo. Al no condicionar su apertura a las mejoras en derechos humanos, argumentaron, Obama le lanzó al entonces presidente Raúl Castro un salvavidas económico sin exigir nada a cambio. La continua represión a partir de entonces por parte del gobierno cubano a los que critican al régimen fue completamente predecible.Aun así, los demócratas confiaban en que la demografía cubanoamericana estaba cambiando a su favor. A pesar de la obstinación de los ancianos cubanos, sus hijos y sus nietos parecían estar menos aferrados al enfoque coercitivo que durante tanto tiempo no había logrado un cambio significativo en el país. Los inmigrantes más recientes —que por lo general son más escépticos de que se pueda derrocar el gobierno de Cuba y están más conectados con familiares en la isla— también apoyaron mayor libertad para viajar y vínculos económicos más estrechos.Entonces, después de años de creciente apoyo cubanoamericano al Partido Demócrata, uno de los resultados más llamativos de la encuesta de la FIU fue el 76 por ciento de los inmigrantes cubanos recientes que informaron haberse registrado como republicanos. Solo el 5 por ciento de los encuestados, los que llegaron a Estados Unidos entre 2010 y 2015, afirmaron ser demócratas; el resto se autodescribió como independiente.A pesar de que los demócratas han ganado terreno, el Partido Republicano ha estado más activo y mejor organizado entre los latinos del sur de Florida. Los partidarios de la línea dura hacia Cuba siguen siendo poderosos en los medios de comunicación locales en español. “Para los republicanos, Miami siempre es un partido en casa”, dijo Ana Sofía Peláez, líder del Miami Freedom Project, un grupo cubano progresista enfocado en temas sociales.También han comenzado a surgir partidarios republicanos más jóvenes y contemporáneos. Entre los más destacados se encuentra Alexander Otaola, un personaje estrafalario de YouTube que salió de Cuba en 2003 y ofrece una alternativa cómica y reguetonera a los vitriólicos programas de radio que todavía resuenan en las ondas locales. Otaola se ha convertido en un bullicioso evangélico de Trump, que exhorta a su público a tener cuidado con las tendencias “socialistas” de los demócratas.El mayor influencer ha sido el propio Trump. Sus advertencias de que los demócratas entregarán a Estados Unidos al socialismo, aunque a algunos votantes les parezcan absurdas, se han repetido constantemente en campañas publicitarias y en las redes sociales que apuntan a los refugiados venezolanos y nicaragüenses en Florida, así como a los cubanos. La supuesta amenaza de los autodenominados demócratas socialistas como Bernie Sanders y Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ha sido un tema fundamental de esa campaña, que ha establecido al menos una coherencia nocional entre la política interna de Trump y su postura belicosa hacia los regímenes de izquierda en América Latina.“Han sido implacables”, dijo el cubanoamericano José Javier Rodríguez, senador demócrata por Florida, sobre el ataque del “socialismo”. “Tan implacable que ha resultado algo eficaz”.Otro factor importante del éxito de Trump con los votantes cubanoamericanos ha sido su voluntad de hacer presencia. Algunos críticos se burlaron de Trump el mes pasado cuando recordó un “hermoso” premio que dijo haber recibido de los veteranos de la fallida invasión de Bahía de Cochinos. (Se desconoce la existencia de tal premio). Pero tampoco hace falta que demuestre su lealtad a la causa. La primera parada durante la incursión inicial de Trump en la campaña presidencial en 1999 fue el museo y biblioteca de la Asociación de Veteranos de Bahía de Cochinos en la Pequeña Habana de Miami, donde apareció con su entonces novia, Melania Knauss. “Mi política”, dijo entonces, “es que hay que mantener la presión sobre Castro”.Como presidente, Trump ha tratado de incrementar esa presión. Además de bloquear el turismo, las inversiones y el comercio, prácticamente clausuró la embajada de Estados Unidos en La Habana, cuando se registraron ataques misteriosos a diplomáticos. Las visas para que los cubanos visiten Estados Unidos se redujeron a 10.167 el año pasado, desde un máximo de 41.001 en 2014. Su gobierno también suspendió un programa de reunificación familiar que desde 2007 había autorizado a más de 125.000 cubanos a reunirse con familiares en Estados Unidos, y aumentó la deportación de solicitantes de asilo cubanos.La respuesta de los cubanoamericanos a esas medidas ha sido contradictoria. En la encuesta de la FIU, el 71 por ciento de los encuestados afirmó que el duradero embargo económico de Estados Unidos contra Cuba no ha funcionado; sin embargo, el 60 por ciento opinó que debería mantenerse. Muchos de ellos también dijeron que la política de Washington hacia Cuba era menos importante para ellos que otros temas, incluidos la economía, la atención médica, las relaciones raciales e incluso las políticas hacia China.Los demócratas de Florida admitieron que han tenido poco éxito al tratar de centrar la atención en el daño colateral que las políticas de Trump han causado a los cubanos en la isla. Es posible que los demócratas hayan hecho aún menos para defender la política del gobierno de Obama, la idea de que un contacto más cercano con Estados Unidos es la mejor manera de impulsar al gobierno cubano hacia una mayor libertad política y económica para la isla.“Creo que muchos demócratas han llegado a la conclusión de que, si bien existen sólidos argumentos intelectuales para esas iniciativas, políticamente no dan resultados”, dijo Carlos Curbelo, excongresista republicano de Miami.Tim Golden, quien fue escritor sénior de The New York Times, es el editor general de ProPublica. Este ensayo fue traducido del inglés por Erin Goodman. More

WASHINGTON — During the Barack Obama comet streak in 2008, a lot of Americans were electrified by the idea of leaping into modernity with a brainy, young, Black cool cat.Now a lot of Americans seem resigned yet relieved to step back in time with a sentimental old-school Irish pol who was born the year Bing Crosby topped the charts with “White Christmas.”Back to a time when the president did not rubbish people like an insult comic. Back to a time when the president did not peddle his own lethal reality. Back to a time when the president cared about the whole country, not just the part that voted for him. Back to a time when the president didn’t dismiss science, treat the Justice Department like his personal legal defense firm, besmirch the intelligence community, and denigrate the F.B.I. for not doing his bidding. Back to a time when the president behaved like an adult, not a delinquent.You can only let King Kong, as Don McGahn, Trump’s first White House counsel, dubbed his former boss, smash up the metropolis for so long.Donald Trump does have a gift for symmetry, though, you must admit.He began his presidency with an epic tantrum about pictures showing that his Inaugural crowd could not compare with Obama’s.And now he could be ending his presidency with another epic tantrum about crowd size. After Lesley Stahl trolled him during a “60 Minutes” taping, saying, “You used to have bigger rallies,” you could almost see steam pouring out of the president’s ears. He stormed out of the interview a short while later.He may be finishing right where he started, focused on himself.Whatever Joe Biden’s shortcomings, he is genuine when he says he will make his presidency about helping others.As the former vice president vowed in a speech in Wilmington, Del., on Friday, “I’ll listen to the American people, no matter what their politics.”Biden’s appeal comes from his own struggles. He was a working-class kid who stuttered. He was an adult who suffered terrible losses. He was not coddled by a rich father who was always there to bail him out of a jam. Biden is an empath, Trump a sociopath.Somehow Trump grew aggrieved buoyed by family money in a Fifth Avenue penthouse, while Biden remained optimistic despite the fates throwing down one lightning bolt after another.“Biden feels others’ pain,’’ said the Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio. “Trump doesn’t even feel his own.”D’Antonio pointed out that Trump’s more modulated debate performance was disturbing, in that it proved “that being horrible has been a choice all along.”“He had the capacity to be normal,” D’Antonio said. “He just prefers being the bad boy, the out-of-control deviant member of society who says the things that no one else will say. He’s just performing. He needs the adoration of the mob more than he needs the acceptance of normal people.’’Trump would rather be bitchy than boring. He loves being a gaper’s delight. That’s why that long-yearned-for pivot never came.Biden’s debate performance wasn’t scintillating. He let some balls get past him. He did not word his comment about transitioning from oil dependence artfully. But he checked the boxes he needed to check and he successfully presented himself as the anti-venom to Trump’s venomous attempts to divide the country for personal gain.Trump calls Biden gloomy but he’s the one threatening the apocalypse if he loses — low-income hordes overrunning pristine suburbs, scary immigrants streaming north, a stock market crash and a cadaverous New York City.“Wave bye-bye to your 401(k), cause it’s going down the tubes,’’ he said at a rally Friday in The Villages in Florida, warning that Biden’s climate aims might somehow deprive Floridians of air-conditioning.Isolated in his shrink-wrap, Fox-speak bubble in the debate, he ignored the fact that he has already turned America into a sort of dystopia by bungling and dissimulating on the virus.He didn’t even seem to know how he sounded when he bragged that undocumented immigrant children separated from their parents and held in cages are being “so well taken care of.”When asked about families living under the polluted clouds of oil refineries and chemical plants — made worse by his administration’s incessant rollback of regulations — the president intoned that, actually, all that smog is a small price to pay because the families “are employed heavily and they are making a lot of money.”Trump began the pandemic blowing off masks and, even as we enter a new fall surge and even after the president and his family contracted the virus, he was still mocking a White House reporter’s mask on Friday. It’s unfathomable that the president of the United States would turn himself into a public health menace. But he has.Trump’s problem is that he keeps wowing the same people. And that base just isn’t large enough.“Republicans were relieved that he was eating with a knife and fork,’’ David Axelrod cracked about the debate. “But it was still the same meal.’’Trump is clearly stunted. His father encouraged his opportunism and cynicism: Do what you need to do to grab whatever you want. And never do anything that is not in your own self-interest. That’s only for suckers and losers.“Normal life, that’s all we want,” Trump said at the Florida rally.But his only normal is chaos.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

President Trump traveled to West Palm Beach, Fla., on Saturday morning to cast his ballot in the 2020 election early and in person after spending months making unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud during an election in which polls have shown him to be trailing Joe Biden.Mr. Trump cast his ballot at the West Palm Beach Main Library, roughly a year after he changed his primary residence to Palm Beach, Fla., from Manhattan. Early voting centers opened in the critical battleground state on Saturday, but millions of Floridians have already cast their ballots by mail.“I voted for a guy named Trump,” the president said, according to a pool report. Mr. Trump also noted that his experience had been “perfect” and that “it was a very secure vote.”JUST VOTED. A great honor!— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2020
Mr. Trump wore a mask during the morning stop, the pool report also said. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, told the pool reporter that there was no one else inside the library voting at the same time as Mr. Trump and that he had cast a paper ballot.Mr. Trump cast a ballot by mail in August during Florida’s primary, despite having repeatedly argued, without evidence, that mail voting invites fraud. More broadly, Mr. Trump has asserted that the 2020 election will be “the most corrupt election in the history of our country.”In fact, there have been numerous independent studies and government reviews finding that voter fraud is extremely rare in all forms, including mail-in voting.On Saturday morning, the president’s motorcade departed Mar-a-Lago at 9:43 a.m. and arrived at the library roughly 10 minutes later. Mr. Trump’s supporters were waiting at the site and cheered his arrival, according to the pool report. The motorcade departed around 10:20 a.m. and was proceeding toward the Palm Beach airport.The president is expected to appear later on Saturday in Lumberton, N.C., and then head to Ohio and Wisconsin, a trifecta of crucial swing states. More